Inside Star Citizen: Wear and Tear Affair | Spring 2022

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:05

   hey all greetings from sunny united kingdom it's a time of change at the moment as i relocate from los angeles and our wimslow and frankfurt offices prepare their move into the new digs over the next coming months that means that this quarter of isc may be a little different a little more run and gun than usual recording from wherever we can week to week whether that's our old wimslow office you're already familiar with sticking our heads into the currently under construction new offices here in manchester or even my new flat that's currently filled with half constructed ikea furniture yes it's an exciting time for isc and for cloud and parent games as a whole as we continue to grow so please uh pardon our desk this quarter as we continue our look inside of star citizen's continuing

2. 00:00:52

   development and we're going to start things off this new quarter and this new year of the show with a brief look at a presentation given recently by our own forest stefan to directors detailing an evolution of our wear and biome systems we want to put forward into development later this year greetings all forrest here some of you may know this i love playing star citizen i play it on fridays and i was running around microtech when i realized there was a bit of a problem there were some major inconsistencies between the characters the weapons and

3. 00:01:41

   the environment in regards to the biome accumulation so i try to come up with a solution and then i put together a presentation because before we decide to work on a feature of any kind it is important to make certain we're all on the same page so today i'm going to share with you some of those ideas from the presentation i recently gave to cr and other directors before any of the work it started now disclaimer jared said you'd find it interesting so if it's not blame him so for those of you who don't know biome is weather and accumulation is the effect that that weather has on the materials

4. 00:02:32

   so if a character walks into a biome that character's shader will reflect the weather [Music] simply put if you walk out in the rain you're gonna get wet right now when you play the game there's only a single texture handling all accumulation effects per asset so my pitch to chris was let's make it procedural how we did this was we used substance designer to automate any textures needed for any biome required this alleviated all labor off the artists so look when you have a bunch of people

5. 00:03:23

   creating the same thing you're going to have different results because we all see things differently doing this procedurally solves the visual inconsistencies of biome and of course with graphic support it's going to be even better all in all the reason this is so important to me is it gives us that immersive planetside experience while playing the game on my friday nights wear and biome accumulation are essential elements in creating a universe that feels simultaneously alive and lived in with its expected and anticipated effects on players buildings

6. 00:04:12

   and vehicles alike and up next the teams have been busy while we were away so let's check in with the ai and eu sandbox teams in this week's sprint report to get things started this week let's jump into the world of ai with some sprint updates from a variety of tasks the team is tackling for both star citizen and squadron 42. up first is the collision resolver now currently in the claustrophobic corridors of a ship or station npcs will often have no collision so that they can get to where they're going relatively unimpeded but nobody wants characters just walking through other characters so the collision resolver is a new system currently in development that will temporarily shrink the physics bubble of ai and change to the relevant animations

7. 00:05:01

   allowing them to pass through many situations they currently cannot in addition missions that require ai to come down from orbit and either deliver or pick up the player or goods often follow the terrain just a little too precisely bouncing needlessly up and down over obstacles far far below it making it look well just janky as heck so the ai flight path system is getting new features that allow for both local and look ahead searches to determine not just safe altitudes that they can reach their destinations with but also fly a more smooth and natural motion than ever before this system can also potentially be used to allow npcs to determine their own landing spots using many of the same

8. 00:05:50

   size and shape and availability judgments the players themselves have to use and that's pretty cool the team is also working to improve down state reactions as you can see here where a group of actors discovers a fallen body in this case they might just rush over investigate and then fan out as seen here or perhaps they'll slowly approach with one person investigating while another stays behind to provide cover and for anyone that's ever done the underground facility mission improved response times for when their investigation of a fallen comrade is interrupted by an uncautious player the ai content folks have also recently

9. 00:06:39

   completed a sprint on a variety of usables such as these vending machines where ai will ponder their selections use their moby glass to complete the purchase and even get frustrated when it doesn't work out and then you can see here the entire carbonated refreshment flow behavior where we get our drink return to our table consume our drink and then dispose of it in the receptacle where it can be properly despawned to preserve server performance and before we move on let's go back to that failed reaction from before and see if we can really get inside the head of

10. 00:07:27

    our ai in this exact moment all right let's see think i'll go for a peach flavor today make my payment boy what gives hello mr machine man oy bruv give me my peaches and prawn delight well that ain't right hey make you wakey i ain't got time for this well maybe just a few minutes more hello boy this thing is really uh really fastened in there doesn't move an inch you know back in my day we used to move these things all over the stand system you're lucky you're not physicalized

11. 00:08:15

    bruv all right moving along let's check in with the eu sandbox team and their continuing work fleshing out the derelict outposts to be found on the surface of pyro's planets and moons what you're seeing here is a white box traversal test the kind of work often done by level designers to flesh out aspects of the intended gameplay experience before artists come in and finish it out visually and as you can see here these derelict outposts are intended to be canvases to a variety of mission types and emergent opportunities storytelling possibilities and given that it's pyro maybe even some unavoidable pvp firefight eventualities and in addition to working on the

12. 00:09:05

    colonialism outposts the eu sandbox 01 team are also exploring new gameplay opportunities out in the farthest reaches of the upcoming pyro system what you're seeing here is some early pre-production work on larger scale points of interest to be explored throughout the system utilizing debris from capital ships or in this case defunct damaged or destroyed space stations from days gone past the upcoming pyro system is intended to be rich with a history more violent and conflicted than the stanton system you're already familiar with and without the efforts of mega corporations like arccorp hurston microtech and crusader keeping things relatively nice and tidy that means a variety of husks relics and

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    otherwise aging locations to discover from the nearly 500 years of space travel and exploration that have occurred in this lawless frontier this also includes variations with pre-existing pathing solutions intended to guide players safely to their destination through a damaging or otherwise dangerous array of obstacles not unlike the famous coil from squadron 42. yeah they may be lawless out here but nobody wants to die unnecessarily speeding through an array of microasteroids or by losing hull integrity to corrosive agents and the like when making their way from one outpost to another they're outlaws but nobody likes a bad road trip and beyond just being a cool place to explore visually it's important these

14. 00:10:47

    points of interest provide gameplay opportunities to players within as the mission system spawns its myriad of mission types to explore collect attack rescue salvage repair and more we also want to create environments that provide compelling reasons to leave your larger ships at the outskirts safe from the dangers within where a smaller craft would be perhaps a more tactically sound solution and if you're asking yourself what the heck is this place we're gonna talk more about what you're seeing here later in the year so what we learned this week well we got a glimpse at the earliest stages of feature iteration with a look at the exact same kinds of presentations given internally to directors to scope out work for the months ahead

15. 00:11:34

    that the ai team continues to push the everyday behaviors of npcs and naturalistic ways in their continuing efforts to create an immersive experience for all players and that traveling through space looks to get just a little more involved and potentially a lot more dangerous as we continue along with our path to pyro that does it for us this week for inside star citizen i'm jared huckaby we'll see you all next week you