Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Yo! ATV Maps | 3.4 Ep. 1

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:09

   [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of on the verse I'm Sean Tracy and I'm Eric Kon Davis in today's update we'll call some fully Mayhem with the audio team check in on the new flight model as well as build a map and some structures but first let's see what the community has been up to some players rang in the new year with a PVE event that ended up becoming a massive PVP battle M snipers engaged the enemy turning a standard attack Mission into an emergency Evac situation yes Fighters and Evac Vehicles work side by side to get the group to

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   safety But ultimately it well didn't work out for them spoilers spoilers sorry so moving on to development the audio team have been up to their fully Shenanigans again a recent recording session in Austin captured practical sound effects for a variety of in-game uses sounds were captured that will be used for physical eyes interactive props bullet impacts and things like that they also recorded various metal objects colliding with each other to emulate the sound of metal debris for scenarios like ship parts being broken or destroyed yeah and metal objects under stress and strain to be used for vibrational sound components for when

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   ship holes are under strain from damage or atmosphere that'll be cool when there's pressure in the cre that's cool so impact and mechanical sounds were recorded in a hanger size space with microphones placed at close medium and far distances from The Source yeah this recording process is used to add a sense of depth and Ambience to the environments like lorville additionally they used large impacts on the steel plate to create sounds that will be used when ships land slide or make contact with other objects devs have been digging into various aspects in features with a recent focus on combat landing and takeoff heat management and Atmospheric flight they've also been tweaking the

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   controls based on feedback from players who got to try out the new flight model experience at citizen con dialing in the throttle logic and control among other aspects so stay tuned to Future updates for the continuing development of the system and as we build out stand and the entire universe we continue to improve and refine the procedural tools that allow us to create the massive environments for Star Citizen massive under understatement yeah say it any bigger with more massive yeah for a look at how procedural layout tools are helping to build stations Habs and other large structures let's go to Scott Fitzgerald We Wan and Patrick aaro reason we developed the procedur

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   layout to is that we need a lot of locations plenty of variation throughout the entire universe of Star Citizen and to do that we couldn't do it manually so we needed a smart procedural tool to achieve this goal and do the work the key requirements for this procedural tool was to ensure that the art team didn't have to learn a new set of rules and change drastically their workflow we wanted to be able to control prop placement tinting brand we wanted to be able to say make adjustments to an existing area how much effort is involved in doing that so user experience is key and from that we should be able to create a larger variety of environments with minimal effort and therefore populate our

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   universe quicker the core of the tool relies in this building blocks that we call Elements they represent for example rooms of a space station and just pieces of whatever the location needs to be built off these building blocks are then connected to each other through specific attachment points that the artists or designers can Define and all of this is governed by a graph the graph is usually used by designers because they want to control the logical flow of the location and make sure that the game play is suitable for the player and this feeds information to the elements via tags cuz they control which element comes in and which doesn't in the specific location from this core things we develop additional features for example an intelligent smarter way to generate

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   routes between these elements for example corridors and also some verticality control so that we can build larger locations and larger space stations like larger truck STS and refineries that will come later in the game the design requirements for the procedural tours to allow us to have more control over how we distribute the rooms so this in tail would bring towards a much larger rest stop the idea here is we can now start blending into separate floors of one sort of stair stairwell node that we run from here so with using the selection of rooms that we've configured through the LTA set running some uh seed variations off of this node

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   graph we can start to make some very very large rest stops taking everything from the truck stop learning from all that refining the development of the pipeline as we went along we can now roll that out to looking at Habs for the Habs at the moment we can theme them so it it tailors to the occupant so if we have a weight lifter we can actually have weights there you can have protein shakes and so on and those will spawn in appropriately we can theme the apartments to do that if he's a scientist perhaps he has a little hobby on the side a military guy security and so on but if it's a civilian well who knows we could have any number of props

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   that they they have an interest in so yes it's really powerful to be able to generate a large number of apartments and Habs just by clicking a button didn't you uh show something like that at a previous citizen con busted yes you're right so yes we did and uh we showed basically the first iteration of the procedural layout tool with the uh

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    uh procedural Planet tools at the same time so I like to call it procedural assistance rather than procedurally generating because it definitely helps the designers along U so Scott way and Patrick uh led by Marco been working on this for a little while the the big job though uh that they had finished is one tons of usability improvements but generally moving the whole tool from a python uh uh Tool uh into C++ so properly embedding it in the engine and the editor and everything not just a python layer on top so it's faster uh a little bit easier to maintain that's very cool what tools that are we we're working on right now that you're really excited about that we can talk about that's a fantas question um oh man I mean it's going to sound like not a very interesting tool I think to people but uh it's a huge huge deal it's the um basic asset referencing database I would say is the one I'm most excited about

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    because what that's going to give us the ability to do and none of the community really sees this our inclusions inclusion exclusions thing the way our streams are allows us to decouple our data from uh pu and Squadron 42 properly um so that there's no cross talk really me between them yes Squadron can include some pu stuff but pu stuff shouldn't be including Squadron stuff so aset referencing database makes us ship only what we use and only what we need rather than us kind of having to just take care of it manually um it'll be nice automated that's great well that's going to be exciting we've also just started working on a new 3D map feature that will make traversal easier here is Simon bery with more so the area we're working on right now is called uh the the local area map so we have the star map in the game so this is the equivalent for when you're walking around on foot at the moment we're at the end of the prev

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    visualization phase the the first thing was is it going to be 2D or 3D everybody wanted to do 3D so we did a test out and it looked looked pretty good there's also things like do we want to be able to see the enemy characters on there so we did a little test for that um also it was interesting how we work out how the player moves between floors looking at the map so how they look at the next floor up next floor down that kind of thing it's a case of working how to make that in the game in a functional way so UI team itself is is fairly small and there's all these big systems in the game that this links in with so um we have to deal with the other teams for example that we have to work out how we get that the map information from the level where do we store the locations of all the items all that kind of thing so there's there's lots of things to talk about with the rest of the studio to get this done and also it also needs a

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    certain level of call so you know what out it looks good and makes it a bit different to to other games at the moment it doesn't have that quite that level of visual polish that we want so we want it to look want it to be as good as what you'd see in a Sci-Fi movie for example so just now it's it's functional and it's fine um but we don't want fine we want it to look really good as the game's got bigger obviously there's more places to get lost now so that having a map is has become more important with a feature like that uh he says that it's you know just coming to the end of the prev stage but how complicated is to take a feature like that you know all the way into the game you know you be dictating this direct feature itself but you know what's the normal lifespan of a feature like that and how what it's going to take to e in the game sure and I mean it really of course depends on the feature and I like that we're talking about 3D maps because it's something that I've been very very very keen to have actually the first time I sort of traes around the outside of the

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    the one of the ships trying to get in looking for a particular door and I didn't know where it was now a lot of people go yes learning immersion I totally understand that but sometimes I just want to know where to go so I I think taking a feature you know from from from just idea all the way to in game already is a pretty decent Chu of time right but the most important thing you've just got to get that that unified objective or that intent what's the intent of the feature the intent of the feature is not make a 3D map right it's a I I I want the player to know where he is I want the player to understand how to get to the next position or something like this where it's um you know to use a production term like a user story basically is some sort of unified objective to the feature so once you get there you get some level of previs done um and as they were talking about they wanted higher and higher visual Fidelity

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    with this and to make it look different from the other games because yes other games have done 3D maps like this before you've got you know Zelda breath of the wild these kind of games um that have done them before so how do we differentiate or how do we take some great version great uh features out of thatp and and add some more to it so basically he'll get it from this concept get the unified objective get the nice visuals to it and now get an in-game prototype going and at that point you're going to really work on your functionality so that's where all the iteration will come in right um and that will usually take the vast majority of that feature time so usually to get a feature just online and you're working with it and playing with it is really fast most of the time it's it's it's maintenance and bugs uh after the fact that are going to come up so that bit of iteration that goes on um also some things can add or remove complexities one of the one of the big pieces that he talked about was enemies okay so those enemies on the map and and not being

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    directly related to the feature you know I'm going to ask my own questions uh are those enemies players or those AI because actually that might change how that that that feature being developed and it might take a little bit longer if that's actually going to be showing players as enemies how do they know the players are enemies doesn't it have to check the reputation system doesn't it have to check the crime stats doesn't have to check all of those sort of things just to show a little red blip on the radar right so um yeah I think there's a lot of pieces that can go into that feature but uh generally to take those features all the way through you got that concept phase you've got you know unified objective kind of user story kind of phase iteration on the feature you've got a bit of polish at the end some feedback maybe a little more polish and then a shipping there you go that's cool and what what would be the difference on say something like that in a multiplayer environment like Star Citizen versus a single player environment like Squad 42 it's a good question it changes a lot between

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    different features right like if you have a weapon and and you're firing the weapon in multiplayer versus single player very very different things so it depends on what that map's going to have to do but yeah multiplayer featur is definitely harder yeah very cool aome that does it for us uh this week a big thanks to all the subscribers who sponsored these shows yes and of course thanks to every backer for making the development of our games possible wrap in and get ready for a wild and fun 2949 49 2019 but more yep and until next time we'll see you around the verse thanks for watching for the latest

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    and greatest in Star C in a squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www. robertsspaceindustries.com thank you very much for watching