Star Citizen Live: Outer Space Interface

5 November 202101:01:281,748 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hello everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live outer space interface because i'm a sucker for the rhyming titles i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before well it's a about it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and we chat with some of our many developers we discuss their work uh their efforts on the project uh sometimes we take questions from you the star citizen community other times we watch them work as they develop something live in front of everybody on this week's show we have two members of our steamed ui team let's meet them now let's see which button is that there there we go uh we have got ui director mr simon burzy
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hello nice to meet you jared and we've and and we've got a principal ui a programmer mr david bonegill hello jared how you doing i'm doing well now we say you've heard me say bone several times because throughout the conference throughout the hour we're probably we're gonna end up slipping and referring to david as bone because that's his nickname and every time we have david on the sh on a show which is not often but every time we have them it's always it lends to some confusion so for all those people who aren't here at the beginning like they're going to jump in in five minutes 10 minutes or the people who jump in 30 minutes into the show it's like what's bone what are they talking about you all in chat you all help us out you'll help us out here and tell people who the heck we're talking about here so they don't think there's just this third person
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missing on the camera now before we get started on this week's show uh as we want to do let's let's take a few minutes and uh find out who you are and what you do because uh the way ui works and it's developed in this project is perhaps maybe a little bit different that comes from our uh building blocks thing it democratizes the process and we'll get into that uh but just so folks understand the kind of scope of work and stuff sign actually david why don't we start with you uh what is your role in star citizen and its ui development oh okay well i my role is i'm primarily a programmer but i'm like a i think people call it systems architect which is like a fancy name for
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uh developing systems and i've been developing the system for the ui for for our game um we had like the system that in place but it wasn't really very um star citizeny um it didn't really meet chris's standards or it didn't meet a lot of the goals that we're trying to do um for this um big project so about three years ago chris was like right can you make us something that will get us to this position where we can make ui for all these different you um all these different systems in the game and make it easier for the designers to make ui make it easier for the programmers like the gameplay
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programmers to present their stuff so we can make uis for them things like that and also bring in all these different like new rendering techniques as well because what we had before was kind of a very what people would call a traditional ui like hey here's the game we just render something over the top you know is a number of lives or something in how many bullets you've got but our game's quite a lot different from that and obviously it's uh online a lot of the ui is in the world so we're all looking at the same screens in the world and stuff like that so my job was to develop technology that would help help us solve a lot of those problems along the way um a lot of new problems that you don't really see in a lot of games and some of them are just like
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big performance problems are big um there's just a lot of stuff in our game so like trying to make it so good tools so we can make things as quickly as possible um well it's right as quickly as possible i think so right yeah you said i i made this you used the past tense a few times but yeah this is these are still tasks that are ongoing i mean oh absolutely yes it's it's i i i think it'll that this will come up as a common thread throughout the show and it's always important to remember that star citizen is still in alpha uh it it it it the ui the user interface all the aspects of this are still in development and you know and still a work in progress so so always keep that in your mind as we
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discuss these things simon you are the ui director what is the ui director what what's your day-to-day like uh well i kind of wear many hats which i guess is a phrase in here sometimes um i suppose the actual bit that ties the most to the title is is my job to make sure that the the ui in star citizen it's all kind of pulling in the same direction so we kind of have consistency between the different areas because it's a really big game we've got lots of different teams working on ui or bits of the ui so we we have to make sure that it feels like the same game essentially so there's a certain amount of rules for how stuff should work associated with that and also there's the visual side of things so um got to make sure that i know say what the active feature team is working on is
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similar to what ui feature team is working on so on across the company so there's a there's a quite a lot of that that's that's the main part of the job um i also help to run the ui feature team so i do a little bit of team lead stuff there just kind of doing the day-to-day making sure people are happy and everything's planned out that kind of thing very rarely one thing i like to do is do a bit of hands-on so i like to get in there and do a bit of kind of technical stuff build some ui make it work but a lot of the time it's it's talking to other people and organizing things and giving people feedback now you said something interesting we're going to jump into that with our next question here uh working with other teams like the actor feature team to make sure their uh the things that they've created are in line with other things um unlike uh i'm not gonna speak for every single
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game and development but unlike many other games out there uh the ui team does not build all of the ui in star citizen uh we have created a system that democratizes that process and puts the power in the hands of system designers on the actor feature team system designers on the eupu feature team you know yes systems designers on the systemic services team uh stuff like that we've put the power into the hands of designers and all these other teams to create much or most of their ui and then the ui team kind of comes in and and you know shapes adjusts you know conforms it to the to fit the uh the greater star citizen experience and that's all through building blocks
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uh how has the building blocks technology developed in the last year i mean we haven't really dove deep into it since we had zayn on i think that i think it was still atv back then uh you know talking about so how has it developed in the last year and where would you like to see it go in the future so i'll start there's plenty of things that bone could say on this um but i think the important thing for my side is that we've we've kind of we've rolled it out from something that the ui you that this kind of the core ui team used to use and and we were kind of working out how to use it as well it's got to a point now where it's good enough for the rest of the team to use so we kind of rolled it out to game designers across the company some of the artists that kind of thing um so it kind of makes our jobs easier i
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suppose because there's you know it's not just six people trying to get the ui done for the whole company now those particular teams can take control and they can make their own kind of demos and functional versions of stuff so that's that's a really big thing that it's brought to us um bones i'm sure bro could go a lot a lot into the technical things that have changed over the past year as over well past year um i think the thing well the thing the major thing that we've been working on like at the core tech level um would be adding 3d which it's a big feature and it's as soon as you jump from you know drawing some texts and some images to hey i want to be able to draw models i
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want to be able to draw characters vehicles and all these kind of things as part of the ui scene that's that things get pretty complicated about so we've been working on that um that's part of the year um that involves um lighting for those models how the materials look do you do holograms um how do they appear in the ui do they appear in a screen do they appear over a screen do they appear without a screen just sort of like you know if you can have hologram uis of floating letters and ships and stuff like that so there's all kinds of like exciting rendering tech that we've been involved in with that um uh we've seen
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that develop the i think the first thing we've seen it in is the inventory which we should be seeing um and that was really really quite complicated we have we show like 50 models at a time and each of those individual models has its own scene its own camera it has three lights um so there's just thousands and thousands of little objects we have to um manage all the time so that's that's what we've been doing over the past year so as a core technology group we develop that stuff ready for the gameplay teams to use so maybe i'm hoping that we're in a space that they start using it and then they they'll develop their uis and hopefully the players will get to see that in a couple of releases time after that
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because we're like right at the start of that change so now is into a state that the gameplay teams start to use it and then they come back to me and say hey it's not quite working correctly yet and then i fix a few things and then then they can start developing their features with those kind of things yeah as well as the 3d actually there's put a lot more time into some reusable pieces as well so when maybe when bone did his talk before i know zayn showed some restylable stuff which is really cool but the actual process to to do that was was pretty complicated so if you wanted a button he had to make it from a like a square object and put some text on and all that kind of thing and we've we've got a system now which which means we can sort of package those things up so if somebody wants a button instead of having to build it from all the pieces they can just drag a button into their scene and change the name on it so we've added quite a few bits like
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that so it doesn't make a massive difference to what people see at the end of the process but for less technical people game designers and artists it's a lot easier for them to just kind of build a screen out of pieces and also all those pieces are restylable as well so for example at the moment we've we've just added a crusader style to the game so if someone's already set up a screen we can just turn it to crusader and it will change colors and some of the graphics will change and so on which is it's kind of cool you use the phrase less technical i it's it it always amuses me because i think there's a perception out there that exists you know in the world of game developers that that all game developers are also master technicians yeah you know they've all got degrees in computer science or
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they all underst you know they all understand the inner workings of of of everything and the reality is that many of these you know people you know artists or whatever they come from very specialized fields and so you know building a tool set that uh is user friendly for them is is is essential in this um that takes me to my next question you mentioned that building blocks has made it easier for you because because many of the uh basic fundamental ui elements are actually created by our system designers on these other teams and not the ui team and then you and then you mentioned having to support them like when they say oh this isn't working or or this feature isn't working quite doing what i wanted to do whereas it makes it easier
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for the creation has that has that workload switched to support are you now just as busy supporting everybody how how often do you have to clean up after the mess of of uh of other teams you know creating ui that just doesn't work well go on then bone well i i think clean cleanup um is probably a bit overdoing it but uh we definitely i definitely get a lot of um calls during like the release phase of saying hey i've made all this and it's not working quite how i expect it to now is that because they've implemented it wrong or is it because maybe my stuff's wrong or our you know the core tech
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is wrong trying to help them debug what what what's going on and find out what the problem is i think that that's grown um but that's a really good thing i can only see that as like a really positive step because we get lots and lots of people contributing now and being a support role is a lot easier than what we used to do which was having a really compressed role at the end of the release cycle which is all the gameplay teams have finished their feature and just go it just needs ui now can you just make the ui for it and it just needs ui now uh yeah that yeah that was really tricky because you had to really get get involved in lots
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of other people's work and understand what they want then design it and write the tech and the ui for it and and these will all be completely individual systems you'll be working on vehicles one week and then you'll be working on the mobi glass next week and they'll be working on the front end and that was really difficult you'd get these jack of all trades master of none because who like diving in and out but they were all equally very important at the same time but now that that's spread out and offering support is a lot easier because i'm supporting them in a role where i know the tech and i can i can give advice about the stuff that's going on and also can hopefully write tools to help them debug their own stuff as well yeah well one thing that's interesting is it like
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with ui and games with ai on games you get this thing called emergent behavior where the game starts doing stuff that you didn't expect we almost have a similar thing with the the ui tool where it's not it's not ai that's doing it but we'll we'll make it decided to do a particular thing then we hand it over to people to actually use and they come up with all these crazy ways of using it that we never expected they usually doing really cool stuff but sometimes i suppose there's two sides to it sometimes we'll get something that works really well and then we'll look at the the file that's been made to construct it and it's like spaghetti there's just connections everywhere so we sometimes go in and kind of tidy that up a bit and let them know here's another way you could do it that's going to be a bit more efficient that kind of thing and other times it's like there is no better way to do this so bone for example might go away and write a new a new system
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that does that thing that they want to do or do it in a better way so there's that's that's where a lot of the support lies as well emergent designers yeah no we won't name any names here but uh i think another thing that we can demystify is the idea that emergent behavior only comes from our players uh it's very it's i'm often i often say that uh development is not construction it is exploration it it it is a search for ideas and a search for solutions and often times in game development through the course of trying to create one thing you inadvertently create another thing and go oh that's interesting maybe we should do that on purpose and that often that happens quite a lot in game development we won't tell you which
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ones are which uh well we don't keep a list uh now we're going to get into our uh the question and answer period from the from the backers here in a minute uh for those of you who are wondering why we spent this time you know talking about building blocks and and and bringing everybody up to speed here uh it's because i want to preface this before we get into some of these answers the ui folks the ui team at star citizen because we have this building blocks because we've democratized the process and and and allowed the system designers for all these various teams to create their core functionalities a lot of the questions about core functionality don't actually apply to the ui team whereas that you otherwise might think they do like you can't can this button control all this stuff and stuff that's actually something for the system
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designers and those individual teams that you're asking so uh we did put the call out and and grab some answers from some of the other teams so we're not going to ignore all the all the very specific drill down questions but i just want you to keep in mind that when we talk about some of these more granular details these are actually the work of the eup feature team or the vehicle feature team and stuff like that and and the ui team sits above them helping and assisting and you know conforming and all that stuff like this starting with the the number one question like we we knew it this the second i said hey you want to be on the show and he said yeah and i said i'll tell you what the number one question is going to be and we were right uh any updates whatsoever that you can give us on the updated in-game star map
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okay so it's progressing um it's it's really big system so what we want to do with it and what we've designed in the background which we're not showing anybody yet is this really big system that kind of combines the radar the star map um potentially some other ar markers and also the interior map we think really that should be one thing essentially so like chris roberts has always had this idea that he wants to be able to start from the radar and zoom out from that and you can see the star map and you can zoom out and see the i know the galactic view essentially so we've we've been writing around that idea um so we've got this really massive design that ties all those all those systems together um which is pretty cool we started writing code systems to
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support that so we've we've got i mean one thing that's tricky with it there's all this data from all over the game so we've got we've got all the planets and stuff we've got the radar data we've got even things like missiles we've got to somehow tie that together in a way that we can put into one place so we spent quite a lot of time working on the the tracking system for all that stuff so that's all it's all good now and and we're kind of at the stage where we we want to start building the building the real thing so uh i mean the challenge is spending the time to fit all that stuff together so that's that's something that we we've been kind of ticking along in the background but we're going to start ramping up on that very soon i think couldn't give you a release date but uh we don't we're really keen to get it going and uh it's it's moving um well we are working i i literally was
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working on it this morning so you really called me up jared but yeah there's three things you did this morning i'm just i'm just messing with you uh so the the the star map we run into this with many features uh they're they're they're inheritors of of things from other systems the the star map is not something we can build in isolation all by itself and then put out there and be like this is your star map that's not the thing we want to make the thing that the thing that we're envisioning the thing that you just described is this thing that can inherit all kinds of data from radar from scanning from from from you know personal markers like like the service beacons and stuff like that it's got to inherit all be able to
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inherit all this data from those other systems and while those other systems are still being worked on are still being developed folks who watch our public roadmap uh notice a change to the uh fps uh scanning and radar uh intended to come online in 316. while those things are still changing it's hard to build this thing that's going to inherit all these things and they're like oh we changed how it works i'm like but i just hooked into it i just looked into how it used to be and you went and changed it so it's it's definitely this obviously work that can still be done you're doing it right now but as far as uh expectations of when and stuff like this it is it is directly dependent not just on your own workload but on the continued progress of all these other systems that it has to inherit
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information from another follow-up question to the star map from the chat uh will the design of this new star map be similar to the arc star map that folks have on the website right now uh scl q and a's we don't aren't usually the visual shows we don't usually have things to show so uh i guess describe what should we be expecting paint us a picture in our heads i guess okay so i think anyone who's seen the arc star map will have a good idea of i suppose the general idea of where we want to take it because we we do all like that it's uh i don't know it's easy to interact with it's quite clear you can you know you can navigate between different pieces of it easily a lot more easily than what's in game at the moment so that's definitely an inspiration for us um so
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visually you'll be i definitely wanted to try want to try and push it a bit further than that so try and get a bit more a bit more of that sci-fi movie feel to it um and in terms of functionality uh because it's kind of your window on the world i think what we need to do as well is have a bit more of a sort of google maps apple map style navigation thing going on so for example if you want to find a planet on the other side of the solar system being able to search for it maybe just uh quite easily navigate to it from this central interface i think all that sort of stuff is going to make it feel nice and so we're looking to take inspiration from the best maps out there overall i hear uh to answer uh a snakehawks question how about not implementing the 100th
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update on mining uh because these are ui guys they're not building the mining the the team who is doing the mining can continue to work on mining while these guys work on their other stuff it's not a either or a proposition that all the teams don't just work on all the features yeah that's true i mean the main the main way that we support other teams at the moment we're kind of just the start and the end of the process so like bones team makes the initial bits for people to make their feature from i guess and then ui team will sometimes lend support on the visual side as well so like at the moment we're working on some uh refueling stuff so you are euphu been working on that and they've made this system that works really well they've done ui that is okay
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it doesn't look great um but they they're not a team full of like ui designers and artists so what we'll do is pass some of the stuff over to our our visual guys to kind of upgrade it and make it look cool and star citizen and then the end product is really good but uh yeah in general it's the code side that that's involved with things like the mo the the star map so it's yeah and and i i will say it it's it's working those who have been following the project for a while that uh you know uh going back to 2014 2015 2016 days might remember a familiar refrain which i'm sure i hope it doesn't give you ptsd but you know we're waiting it's like this feature is waiting on ui this feature is waiting on ui this feature is waiting on ui that
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was such a common refrain back in those days because of what david just said uh earlier about how it's like you get to the end of the feature then it's like okay slap a ui on it it's like it was very clear that ui being downstream of everything was not the solution for a project as broad as star citizen so uh uh not to keep harping on the success of building blocks but you know building blocks is having these these new you know refinements to process that you guys have made and the new tools that you've provided have definitely sped up uh the process that said like any team on star citizen any team working on any feature there are only so many things we can work on at any given time you have to prioritize and stuff like that so not everything can be worked on all at once
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so next question sorry i just just to uh i was at the sort of um point of that uh when when everyone was waiting for ui and this is why chris correctly so sort of pivoted at the team at that point so it's like this this this isn't going to work we can't develop because we want to grow how many features we're going to develop and that's just unless we just magic out of thin air another 20 ui guys it's just not going to grow it just turns into this great big bottleneck so that is why around 2017 i think it was we did change the mechanism that we wanted to develop the ui and go wide and like spread it across a lot of these teams so
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we can i want to say put the owners back on them because because it's also like when all when all any trouble comes in it's not just developing it it's like at release time inevitably there's a you know there's a few problems with any given feature but if you if if you have 10 features and each of them have a few ui bugs in then and they all have to be done by one ui team becomes a real bottleneck so it's really good to go go wide across the company and each of each of those guys then get the ownership of their particular feature from start to finish and not just go it's done just need to uh we're just waiting on the ui guys it's like you are the ui guys now right right you know some um we did nice fancy graphics and
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animations from the uh the art design departments we deputized a bunch of people on a bunch of different teams throughout the company congratulations from the live chat here moving on to another topic that's close to a lot of people's uh performance heart uh where was it mock driver 22 says how far are we from declaring star citizen completely flash free seven we have seven to go are we seven along how does that work what scale are you using bone oh i'm not giving you the scale i'm just giving you a number quite far i'd say i um i don't want to i can't give her like a an accurate number we're definitely past
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halfway we've got that we definitely got the process down like we know exactly how we're going to do it and we've got designs for a lot of the things we want to change over but a lot of it is balancing new features i suppose with going back to the old stuff and kind of porting it over because we one thing that we like to do i think chris roberts likes to do this as well is when we touch an old feature we don't want to just take what was there and just put it in exactly the same we will tend to work out what the problems were redesign little bits maybe make it visually better as well so it's quite a quite an involved process to comfort convert things over overall i think i think it's a really good opportunity to revisit because these are inevitably some of the older features across the game so it gives you an opportunity to
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revisit them and say um what's not great about these things what would improve it you know would it would it look miles better with some 3d models and stuff or you know better animations or i mean things like inventory on the moby glass was just completely redesigned because um it wasn't a favorite feature of ours at the time so like we looked at it and went right actually if we're going to redo this let's let's rethink it in in a in a more appropriate way but certain other things are if it ain't broke you know let's just make a neater version of this that we can manage and maintain a lot easier um maintaining the old stuff has become quite difficult now
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um like the knowledge base is reducing of people that want to work on this stuff yeah and also also flash isn't really supported anymore by adobe so the the longer we go from i know the further we get through time the harder it is to to fix the flash stuff so so we definitely want to get that ported over and we can do i think the major the major features that we want to do is um there's a star map which we're working on obviously bobo gas is a big thing um the mfd is on ships and also the the visor so the the lens advisor that the player looks through um we want to update that and bring that into the modern day i guess we said moby glass i said mobile glass uh our our biggest our biggest flash el wapo
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uh for those who have seen three amigos what what progress can you give us on the mobi glass rework um at the moment i mean we've been focusing mainly on other things so star map or the design and so on and the the back end of the star map has been taking a lot of the focus aside from just little bits and pieces pieces of features here and there um we're starting to ramp up a little bit on the mobi glass now so we're looking into some visual prototyping work what chris roberts wants to see he wants to know taking the new tech that we've got all this 3d stuff and so on what can we do make this make the mobi glass feel cool but still be usable so the first stage of that is we're going to do some in-game prototyping and work out i don't know what could what can we
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do there how how cool can we make it look yet to still be usable so there's a bit of investigation to do there and that's it's going to take some iteration between ourselves and also chris roberts the game directors and so on until they're happy with i know this is what we want the moby bust to be and then when that's signed off then it's then we can actually start to to make the thing i think i don't know how difficult it's going to be to be honest because essentially we're like it's like we're making a new operating system almost we once we've got that that core in place we know how it looks how it works in 3d and so on then in theory it's just the case supporting all the old apps across so like take the mission manager and update it update that visually and so on so i think it's one of those things that once we've got over the initial hurdles it'll start to speed up but i'm not
00:32:14
giving you any dates no we don't we don't do dates here uh this is a good time to reiterate something you you you dropped kind of casually early on we don't just want to do conversions of these things from flash to you know building blocks and what it's not just just make the same thing like if you're gonna spend if you're gonna spend seven weeks i'm just pulling numbers out of the air guys if i you're gonna spend seven weeks converting this thing from flash to building blocks and it's the exact same thing why not take nine weeks and actually redesign it you know make it better improve upon it you know look at some of these features that backers have been asking for for so long some of these features that we've been asking for for so long uh and and take that effort to redo it and make it better the time so it does mean it takes a little
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bit longer than just converting it over but uh you know ultimately it's worth it in the end or we hope it will be yeah what we're aiming for is like this is the version of the moment that's the final version of the moby glass so once it's done then i know maybe we'll polish it a little bit in future but essentially it's good uh will you consider adding a version of snake to play on the moby glass that's a good question i think the chat a few people have uh mentioned having games on there so we don't have it in the plans at the moment but it would be a cool idea i'm not i'm not against doing that one day there are plenty of other things to do in the game i would say like plenty of other parts of game to get right before we consider mini games legal's actually in the other room toast
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does somebody own snake he's not responding um we'll i'll check in with i'll check with him and see what we can see if it's even legally uh allowed um let's move on to some other features one of the most uh requested things it's been popping up in chat a couple questions did you hear him he just said it's a complicated question he just yelled she thought it was a gag he was really there i thought yeah that's usually my answer to any question that simon gives me it's like can we do this and i just go it's complicated we'll just call it caterpillar we'll be all right um all right so um
00:34:41
night vision nope cat alert hold on hi sorry hi cat okay we took our cat moment uh night vision a night vision is a is is a big one obviously in space it's always some version of that i suppose but you know as planets become a bigger uh feature of star citizens more gameplay moves down to them uh the ability to see where you're going and not crash into a mountain becomes super important we recently uh revamped ping and gave it this brand new shader that this is really cool and kind of draws everything this um have there been any discussions uh in in any in any thoughts about implementing
00:35:29
some version of night vision beyond just forcing people to put the ping on auto fire and just constantly i don't know to be honest i need to see where they're going it's definitely that we need to improve in some way but uh there's not been already been any discussions on the ui side for what we can change there i think it's probably it's probably more the kind of thing that the vehicle team and the axe feature team would look into to be honest because they once you can let people see in the dark it's obviously got a load of gameplay implications like you know people can not hide anymore or maybe we need to put ranges on things and that kind of thing so there's loads of gameplay implications to figure out but um yeah so i don't know where that is up to i wouldn't be surprised if there's if somebody's thinking about it right now but uh it's not really a ui team thing just now
00:36:17
fair enough uh let's see um you guys couldn't see it but the cat was absolutely assaulting david during uh simon's answer there what one of the one of the one of the it was actually a halloween last year when we first showed off uh the aegis uh manufacturer specific you know style guide uh for the ship huds and since then we haven't seen a lot of forward-facing information about it what can you tell us about maybe not just the aegis one but any manufacturer based ship heads how's that going so um we've kind of one thing we decided to do was do a little bit of a halfway house because initially we had this we got this cool thing with that we've
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been building i mean we've been trying to get it really good for squadron 42 so that was the initial focus for the aegis hud and we felt that the amount of improvements that were going on there the pu was missing out so we've done this kind of intermediate version at the moment which is what you can see i think that's since the previous release um it doesn't look it doesn't look final it's not intended to look final it looks kind of cool but it's not not where we want to end up um we've got that version that has all the features in it we can do simple things like change the colors and fonts if you want to but in terms of rolling out the the proper final huds um the way we want to do it is essentially get that initial gladius hood internally get that 100 how we want it so all the features on there so we have missile mode how we
00:37:53
want it bombs how we want it all the different lock-ons and that kind of thing and we're getting pretty close now um but chris roberts basically wants to wait till wait till that's just right and then we're going to decide how we're going to roll that out to the rest of the game while we've been developing that it's it's not so difficult for us to do artwork as well so we've we've started visual development on the drake hud as well as rsi so those are ticking along in the background um but when they'll get rolled out to everybody i'm not totally sure yet okay yeah we we we've shown folks some of the uh early concepts for the drake hud we haven't shown anything for the rsi hud just yet but yeah one thing that way every week it'll come yep one thing we we started to do is it's not the ship huds um but we started
00:38:42
to roll out some manufacturer styles for the other screens in the ships so um for crusader ships for example i think in 315 you'll you'll see on some of those we've got some new door panels and we've got a star that we can apply to the elevators and so on so um that work is starting to creep in there even if it's not in the huds that you see right now he even showed up on some ships that weren't crusader in the ptu it's work in progress um always fun are there any plans to bring back custom qt waypoints oh that is a good question we had to ask the uh question really what did they say hang on where is that david what's the cat's name
00:39:31
that one's called ronnie that's one that um has been confused by the uh chain of the clock the time changes and she thinks it's an hour later than it is so it's definitely tea time now according to her all right i found the cutie waypoint stuff so i spoke to uh john crew and he said that vt they do have plans for quantum in future that it might not involve custom qt waypoints but it should give the same end result so they're the prototyping some ideas at the moment but uh there's not a lot more they can tell right now uh will the targeting ui get smarter than just red and white targets such as color codes for team members org members faction members uh etc uh this would
00:40:21
really help during something like nine tails yeah that's that's uh that's something that we're looking into right now we've we've we have had feedback of expanding that system because obviously just having i know good bad and in between is quite you know simplistic so um we've been looking at some ex potentially adding some extra colors in there some extra icons and so on so you can you know split out a lot more information from that so it's we've been having those conversations this week actually so the system will come online at some point and we have got plans for it um it's kind of that phase now where we as a designer designers we kind of know what we want to do with it we need to get final sign-off from all the like directors and so on and then fairly soon that should start to make its way into the game i think
00:41:11
mfds uh what technology blockers are preventing my ship from saving mfd status such as which screens i choose to place on each mfd per ship i'm going to guess that's probably just waiting for the new mfd system to be finished right yeah uh this is this is more amount of priority so there's no technical blockers it's it once it's possible right now it's just not you wouldn't write it with the current system because we would want to it would just be like wasted work um so we're in the process of upgrading the way that the ui works on mfds and part of that upgrade will include much better customization and the much better customization will inevitably
00:42:00
lead to wanting to be able to persist that customization from session session or in different vehicles and stuff so um yeah that's part of that block of work that they're doing pretty much yeah is inbuilt into that task so technically no blocker but the blocker is a priority issue or more than anything else the chat here um can we please have the old landing hood back yes um yes at some point yeah so um we we have got plans to bring this back at some point yeah um it ties in a little bit with what we want to do the radar because um you know you've got that spherical radar
00:42:47
thing at the bottom so it some of the functionality relates relates to that so it's part of that design to a degree and we yeah it's definitely planned okay um this is a big one for a lot obviously star citizens are maybe not the normal uh a batch they're not all running 16 by nine you know 1920 by 1080 screens by any means are there any plans to improve the ui so it better fits non-standard aspect ratios like ultra ultra ultra wide screens yeah i can see bone hey how you doing what do you think about this bone yes so there's a one word answer to this
00:43:35
which is yes and then i could go all night about what we're doing to improve this give it give us the 10 cent version right so aspect ratios are the thing that gives most ui designers ui engineers like the absolute fear um it's just bane of our lives um but i totally appreciate that especially on pc games as well that my people have some cool setups of 30 to like nine and 48 by nine but also some strange people have four by three aspect ratio screens and things like this or at least you can run it in a window that is four three and all these kind of things so yes we have to build in a lot of tech to deal with this um
00:44:24
so we have stuff that's kind of like when you resize your window on a web browser or something and you see you know the text jiggles around and it aligns itself properly or being well if it's designed correctly so it's all flexible like that so the system is designed to be flexible the coordinate system can change for the aspect ratio so you know you don't see stretch things and things like that so that like a core level yes it's inbuilt but then um there's a design level that all the assets have to be designed in a way that can be flexible that's pretty tricky because you have to make lots of choices about you know well if it gets all squished up do all these things go along the bottom or or do they
00:45:13
get clipped off at the end or do they shrink down and all these kind of decisions that have to be made by each for each individual design and then we've got individual like responses for things so things like the front end we've just pretty much gone with a 16 by nine aspect ratio and we just black bar the wider screens and uh or black bar the top and bottom if you're on a on a square screen um and that that's it's a bit of a cop out for that screen but it's nice because you you just you can design a nice looking 16x9 layout for the whole front end where it gets a bit more tricky is things like the lens and visor because that's that's obviously a lot more emergent and then we still have to make
00:46:01
a lot of decisions about this where i mean the tech supports this but it's just about making design decisions let's say you've got like um different icons in the top left and top right hand corner if you have three monitors do you want those into the top left and right corners of those three monitors because that's not really in your eye line you're going oh how where's my map or how many bullets do i have or whatever it is and you sort of having three monitors is a bit more about having a lot of peripheral vision it's not about like moving all the way up or the ui the way up all the way out um so there's a lot of design decisions that go along the lines of that so yes we're working on that also and finally um one of the bigger problems of
00:46:48
one of the bigger challenges sorry of a star citizen is it's diegetic so uh that means like all this ui is actually in world on physical objects so we've got um maybe a 16 point benign panel or even the mobi glass is actually a 16 minute panel that you're holding in front of you like this so that comes with challenges of saying well if i've got a very square monitor and i'm trying to look at this wider aspect ratio screen where'd you position your camera i mean because only so far you can move your arm back and head back to try and see see this uh oblong thing in a square square hole um same goes for using the kiosks um do you just get a lot more peripheral vision do you have to move the camera
00:47:35
back does the guy have to stand further away we're having to make decisions to make it be logically correct and fit in to the universe properly not like just um we don't we don't cheat in any point for these things but it becomes really tricky um we are really designing the visor too because currently the visor is it's actually physically a physical piece of geometry a piece of glass with ui on it and it sort of sits in front of the camera like this as you move the camera around it goes with the camera but that inherently has problems of well it's it's it's a piece of glass at 69 aspect ratio so what what you want to do if you want to draw things outside of that piece of glass it was sort of restricted so we're redesigning that and coming up
00:48:24
with different solutions to that to make that work properly but on the whole yes we're working on it but it makes me cry on quite a regular basis the desire for a diegetic world in a reality of differing aspect ratios i mean i mean i i i when i move the game over to my vertical monitor on the right here i mean it's just garbage there's no support for my vertical alignment at all just put that out there just raises a ticket with that yeah we'll put it on the backlog oh will we at some point be able to change the color of our huds a light blue hud over a snowy white planet and moon can be kind
00:49:12
of hard to make out this is it's kind of two bits to this i suppose there's the there's a legibility thing like how easy is it how easy is it to read and then there's the customization thing so in terms of legibility we're we're always looking into better ways to do that so we have a thing at the moment where it it automatically makes the screen a bit brighter and and increases the drop shadow on bright backgrounds so that's that's a little step in the right direction but we're always looking to waste we can improve that so ideally we want to get to a point where players wouldn't need to change the colors to be able to see the stuff we're getting there and then in terms of customization the direction at the moment is we want to we want to kind of make each manufacturer feel unique so especially
00:50:01
starting with the ships we want people to be able to say okay my drake ship looks like this with these particular colors and my rsi ship looks this way so we're definitely heading more towards that direction at the moment um technology wise it is it would be possible for us to allow things to be customized but i think that's something we'd look at look at after we've got the i know the vision the ideal vision in place first go ahead no just to reiterate what simon's saying ideally we wouldn't it wouldn't be an issue that you'd want to change the colors if if the legibility was uh perfect across all these different environments again it's the same uh story with uh it being diegetic that
00:50:52
the visor and the lens and the her head up displays are actually in world so the the same effects are applied to them that uh applied to real pieces of glass in world so you know the exposure is different and what's behind them we can't really control we can't control if they're looking at the sun or the blackness of space so there's automatic exposure control to change a bit like you get on a on a smartphone it brightens up in in bright environment darkens down it's obviously more complex because it's translucent so in an ideal world we would fix all the problems so people wouldn't have to or feel like it was a like a requirement that would i don't think it would work
00:51:41
long term anyway because like you're you're flying on somewhere that's snowy for instance and you decide to pick colors that would look good against the snow and then you suddenly fly into space and then it doesn't look good it's it's not really a solution you have to keep configuring your colors to to be able to read the ui really the ui should be adapting to the environment properly and hopefully we'll solve that or at least get it dialed in a lot better i i wonder i wonder if if if if maybe i mean you can look uh which i think had a says i wonder if maybe even just a single button light dark mode toggle might just help folks you know you know if it's just you know put it in their
00:52:29
control like you know it's light mode when they're flying everywhere else and then when they happen to be facing the sun or they happen or they go down to the surface of microtech they can hit one button and just switch it to to a nightmare which is which is a darker you know themes i wonder if something like that might just resolve a lot of these issues in the meantime but well we've definitely talked about it for visually impaired people as well anyway um to because certain uh colors are not as easy to um uh decipher so the will we have talked quite a lot about how we can customize this and make it a lot more approachable for different different people to use let's see we've only got we've only got
00:53:19
a couple minutes left um let's see one of the big features coming along in alpha 316 is refueling uh we're going to talk about refueling on isc in a couple weeks but uh as far as the ui the interface and stuff like that uh what what's your guys involvement been in refueling up to this point okay well refueling is a good one actually it's going really well so um when we started out there was we began with the game there was a game design dock that uh euphu made which was pretty cool and then initially we had some i had some conversations with those guys we just roughed out some really basic ideas for the ui so like i would just draw some boxes and put text on so they they had an idea of
00:54:06
a very vague direction where i would take it and then you kind of left it with them for a bit and they've been implementing the actual system then using the building block stuff they put in this kind of placeholder ui so it's all working and it's good it just looks a bit rough around the edges and then i think i mentioned it before we've now kind of we haven't taken it off them we're working really closely with them to kind of take that and make it good so processors we've got uh one of the guy one of the guys is it's kind of a mixture between a graphic designer and a ui designer so he's basically he's taking those initial screens and rejigged the layout a little bit and resize things and also applied this nice color scheme and little graphical elements on there so he's going to make visual versions that are 2d they're just kind of
00:54:53
in photoshop or whatever and then on the other hand we've got one of our technical ui designers who's taking those concepts and kind of marrying them up with the stuff that you put created so kind of actually implementing it in building blocks so that's kind of that's the ideal process and it seems to be working really well just now so i'm pretty happy with that and i guess everyone will get to see it quite soon yeah folks will get their first look at refueling in a couple weeks sometime after iae uh and when we do show it remember like all things it'll be still be work in progress when you see it uh just important to remember that everything you see on isc is work in progress we put it down in the corner but sometimes folks still like what does it look like it's working progress just look at the
00:55:40
bombs remember how the bombs looked in in in isc and like oh the bombs are a little overwhelming and then you get into pt and it's like oh wow you're like you can see them from miles away it's work in progress we waited to the last show of the season we waited as long as we could to get those great bomb visuals in and sometimes you just it's just not ready in time so it's work in progress remember it's always working progress i would tattoo that somewhere if i could chat here's another big one will in-game chat uh get a overhaul for display that will allow us to display multiple chat tabs with different colors maybe all in the same feed chat customization yeah it's a good question is chat is one of those things that we need to port over at some point soon um we've not
00:56:28
really looked into what we want to change design-wise i'm sure there'll be things like that that we want to sort of polish up um but uh yeah it's all right it's an hour to do this basically so when we when we get to it we'll check out what's there we'll see what the competition is doing like there's a lot of other games out there that do a good job of chat and we'll work out you know what actually we want to put into it and then hopefully what you get out of the other end is is great but uh we haven't quite got to the point where we're working on that yet and maybe for some of us the option to just defaulted to turned off another big uh another big question that comes up quite often this is probably something along with like the star map work um overall what's involved in the creation
00:57:19
of a coordinate system uh obviously we have service beacons and stuff now but it can be very difficult to determine where you are on a planet or in space and easily tell other people where you are it's like this um what what what what what's involved in that kind of work is this something that we're ever going to have is something that we can't have is something that's in progress what can you tell us so well um i guess the way that games are made in 3d graphics as well you generally have this like xyz coordinate system which is fine like if you want to see where this pen is in my room i can say it's like three i know three across and two up whatever which is fine but then when you're in space oh actually imagine you're on a moon that's hot it's rotating that's orbiting around a planet
00:58:06
which is orbiting around the sun so those xyz coordinates aren't going to work so what we think we need to do is have like a system that relates to what you are on if i'm on that moon i want to know i know what's my angle relative to the center of the moon and how far out am i from that so we probably go with something along those lines in terms of putting into the game it's going to tie in quite closely with the new star map radar so we definitely do want to have that in there when we release a new version of those so minimum will display where you are so people can say oh but this is this relative to stanton system for example um what we would like to do ideally is have some way of sharing those those details so maybe you can right click and send the location to one of your friends all
00:58:53
that kind of thing we still need to work out the details on that but we definitely want to improve that that whole area overall folks you've done it your hour is done did it go by faster than i said like i said it would it was pretty quick yeah yeah there's always like oh can i fill up a whole hour then at the end they're like i went by really fast uh thank you guys for taking the time to show up on the show this week we don't get to have you on very often simply because the ui team is probably the one team in the entire company that touches every single aspect of star citizen's development there is no aspect of star citizen that doesn't involve ui in one way shape or form so
00:59:41
these folks usually have their hands pretty full so thank you for taking the time to join us here at the end of this week uh that's it for star citizen live outer space interface uh come back next week next week on isc we have a show entirely dedicated to the future of space combat with the vehicle experience team uh they got a whole nice little presentation about uh the current work they're the work of their immediate future and then some look at some long-term stuff it's a great lead in before ie starts the next week before and then uh next friday when we come back here uh we're going to have a a super a rare guest let me have to tune in and find out it's somebody who's made a lot of spaceships
01:00:29
for us and somebody who's made more spaceships than anybody in the history of our game it's mr gavin rothery uh concept artist extraordinaire and film director and all kinds of stuff so we're gonna have him on the show and talk a bit about his uh career and and and life and work on star citizen so check that out next week uh four star citizen live i'm jared that was simon that was david bonegill i think we made it through without calling you bone a bunch of times uh take care everybody we'll see you next week cheers bye see i told you that'd be easy it's easy when you know what you're talking about [Laughter] you

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.