Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Secondary Viewports

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:16

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse our weekly look at star citizens ongoing development I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm Chris Roberts on today's show we take a look at the systems we'll be using to render Holograms and Fs in real time yeah it's pretty cool so can't wait to show you guys but first as many of you know the team is very focused on completing our 30 update for the persistent Universe uh so 30 is a giant link forward from what's currently available in game and thanks to the dev team's hard work the majority of 30's new features are almost complete and we've shifted into the final phase of the production process that focuses on feature and content integration optimization and Bug fixing now we're also expecting many new players or people who have been busy playing something else to come back in and log in and play 30 so we wanted to make sure

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   the user experience is really good so we've decided to spend more time polishing and optimizing than we have in recent releases uh in addition we're also aiming to introduce our new Delta Patcher so you will only need to download just the files that have changed for each subsequent patch which means no more 30 gigabyte downloads uh but of course this will require some fine-tuning and a lot of testing to make sure it works as intended now we know that 30 is a big release and you're all eager to play uh and we're excited for you to play too and we can't wait to get it done uh but we want to make sure that it's ready so uh if you've read the list of carots we gave when we first started sharing our internal unpadded schedules our very first point was quality would always Trump schedule and the second and third points about task estimates you know being unpredictable due to the

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   nature of developing something that hasn't been done before and the difficulty of estimating bug fixing and polish time are also important to remember as we go for forward uh with our schedules on uh finishing 30 so that's why we've seen the constant changes to production schedule over the past few weeks as new issues or advancements cross our paths we've worked hard to communicate those to you no matter how good or bad the news may be uh by its very nature game development can be an exhilarating and frustrating and unpredictable process uh so if our three Z schedule wasn't that then you wouldn't be getting the true development experience oh you wouldn't for our new backers you may not know with each of our major releases we've done different things to help you track our progress for the point8 Patcher that launched Arena commander and the 20 patch which introduced the Pu we had our

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   weekly development updates that listed current blockers and resolved bugs and for the march to 30 we've been tracking the major tasks we're doing with our weekly production schedule reports so now that we've reached this latest stage in the process we're planning to adjust the format of ATV to highlight exactly what we're working on to get 30 out the door now as all studios are working hard to get 30 out we have decided to suspend the studio update portion of the show so as to not distract developers with providing footage of their work for the Sho updates and instead starting next week we'll be launching a new segment called burndown uh with this segment you'll be able to be a fly on thewall for some of our production meetings and hear directly from the developers and QA testers about the week's biggest bugs blockers and challenges that we've been battling it will be another great way for you to follow 30's progress the

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   weekly production report on the website will also be adjusting its focus to match alongside the new burndown segment ATV will bring you a weekly Deep dive into a feature we're working on for the game that way you'll still be getting the same great detail about what we have planned alongside the most current information on exactly where we are on the path to releasing 30 yep and then once 30 is out we'll resume the normal ATV Cadence with the weekly Studio reports uh and all that lovely eye candy that you guys like to see every week now let's shift gears to focus on two systems we've recently got working together the secondary viewport and render to text your system when combined these systems can do a wide variety of things from dynamically creating com calls from other locations to rendering Holograms in real time yeah and I'm

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   pretty excited about the potential of this technology as it's going to allow us to do some really cool things in Squadron 42 and Star Citizen um which we're going to you'll see maybe a little hint of to come let's take a look we've been working with the graphics engineering team in the UK to develop and make use of their new secondary fport Tech which in itself makes use of the new render to texture system it allows us to do some really cool things for our in Universe narrative in both Squadron 42 and the Pu so far we have used it for com skulls and holographic volume rendering and we' have been sying very closely with the engineers that write all the new rendering code to make this happen and we're slowly homing in on a final feature set first of which is secondary view ports which allows us to get a second view onto the world or many

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   different views onto the world this is built on top of some uh new tech we have called the render DET texture system prior to the render DET texure system if you wanted to render some uh user interfaces or screens or visors we would have to render them directly into the game World um and this happened after all of the rest of the scene had been rendered what that meant is that the UI would always look on top of the game world it would never truly fit in and therefore it would never correctly be obscured by things like glass or fog or bloom in the same way as everything else in the scene and this is always bored our UI artists so the new system the idea is we render all of this content into textures first and then we use that them Textures in the actual main rendering pass of the scene and composite them in with uh whatever effects we need like whether we need them to look holographic or like they're

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   on glass or whatever it might be and it lets them to bed themselves in the game World much better and have a much better better uh lighting and sorting with the rest of the scene we also get a few other benefits from this we get better anti-aliasing better sorting we get uh better performance actually with the fact that we can reuse the same screen on many different displays in the game world uh just by rendering it once and we can even use the same screen uh on the next frame of the games to be able to avoid rendering cost if for example you've got a a screen which doesn't need to animate or doesn't animate very quickly these new pieces of tech we've been using in many different systems so we've got all of our UI screens and our visors all of our Holograms and video comment calls and there'll be several other uses we're hoping to fit in further down the line like things like mirrors things that are typically really difficult to achieve in games the render

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   detex system starts uh at the engine level when we're Gathering all the objects really at this point all we really need to know is that the objects are going to be streamed so the streaming system needs to be informed and we also need the Max and Min screen space size we use the maxim screen space size along with the UV texal density to be able to calculate how much screen resolution is required for that texture the minimum screen space size is required cuz that texture may be used on multiple different objects uh as it's used on multiple different objects we then need to get the largest size and use mid mapping down to the smallest size when you have a screen within a screen we need to know the ordering of the rtts so as one RT uh is rendered before another it can then be used as a texture within the second one we also

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    need to know that an R T within an RT within the main pass if the first rtt is half res of its parent RT and that rtt is half res of the main pass the first rtt must be a quarter of the res at rendering size the rendering system has a fixed memory budget to do this we we allocate one large texture ahead of time this texture is called the texture pool uh or in this case the render texture pool it's very similar to a standard Shadow pool system we recently rewrote our shadow pool packing system uh to be a power of two quadry allocator we use the same Power of Two quadry allocator for the render the texture system we render the textures as pair of two so IE 128 256 512 1K we use the light or the smallest size for that the texture needs uh that we can fit in so

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    if if you need a a rendered texture object at 800 by 800 we'd use a 1024x 1024 and as you move closer and further away from the object it will require a lower or higher resol solution and we progressively move up and down one of the benefits of rendered texture is we can reuse those textures for multiple objects so if you have a scene with many different Billboards in them let's say 12 Billboards we would render that texture for the billboard once and then reuse that texture over 12 different Billboards um the original system the UI system for instance uh wouldn't do that it would render the UI or that billboard 12 times because the uh rendered texture system is now a texture and it's not uh you know flat just rendered into the world it means we can render any any Curve screen anything like that the only downside to that was we had to implement

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    a new system to to manage the mouse pointer interactivity uh that we already had we had to make some modifications um to bring in a mouse pointer system which which takes screen space size and remap remaps that into uh object UV coordinates and then we can then pass that object UV coordinates to the UI system the UI system is able to to work out where on the object that Mouse pointer is and then in reference to where on the flash that is and then therefore you can then start selecting things with the character animation it normally goes through the camera system to decide whether it's needs to be animated whether any of the facial animations need to be run and as we were running this through the rendered texture it wasn't in view of the main camera what would happen is it just wouldn't render when it was in the rendered texture system we resolved this by having the the usual camera calling system and the facial animation system

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    stuff like that communicating with the render texture manager that Tex manager will allow it to go through all the different cameras and work out exactly how big it is on screen or how big it is with inside or Rend texture manager and it will allow it to decide on the level of detail of the facial animations and level of detail in the character animations if you do pre-rendered coms you can't really acknowledge characters changing costumes or ships or locations so real-time rendering for us makes a big difference for immersion coms calls reflect what's going on in the worse and for the persistent Universe it opens up customized player avatars calling each other all rendered life another possibility are for example CCTV or other room view style puzzles or life recording of views to be featured somewhere else in the verse there are some remarkable consequences of these advances in the tech our Capital ships feature big holographic volumes on

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    Bridges or in briefing rooms and that means the player can walk around them freely for those we wanted to not just render a second viewport using 2D display screens but actual 3D Holograms and you can f them from all angles secondary viewport camera is updated

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    dynamically to match the relative viewing angle from the main player's um camera to the projection volume and then as you move around the secondary viewport camera moves and therefore you can essentially move around the holographic projection using the existing rendering pipeline means that we can render essentially any object into the holographic projection where there's no need for material duplicates or any duplicating of material setup it just basically works with these existing shaders so as well as the existing shaders we also have uh developed dedicated shaders for various things for example like abstract user interface objects or if in a mission briefing you wanted to go to a waypoint the Waypoint could be displayed as holographic and it'll be using the one of the dedicated shaders that we

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    developed and the cool thing about this is that we can automatically fade the objects that are in the source volume uh as they get closer to the boundary of the volume we can automa fade them out so it doesn't clip as it goes through the boundary we also exposed two new artistic features where we basically allow the objects to dissolve and tint independent of the material set up being able to light these 2D and Hollow rtt presences in real time at a source location and then seeing the results in the corresponding 2D display screen or in the 3D Target area immediately felt exciting to me with this new tech we can have a character calling another ship or location and the call appears on either a 2d display screen or inside a 3D Volume with the calling partner essentially being telepresence then what's really cool about the holocom or

17. 00:13:14

    telepresence is we can arbitrarily scale The Source volume up or down and easily create Larger than Life representations of characters without having to resort to cheats like scaling up or anything of the scene and this makes it possible to have something like a grand Admiral appearing in as a looming figure inside the bangal carrier Hol Globe versus him just being a small life-size presence we also added the ability to tint or dissolve any object in our scenes at will which helps staging something like Mission briefings where way points would need to flash green or enemy presence is marked as red so this text progressed really really fast and we got some really great results but there's more we want to do with it next thing for us is to optimize it further we really want to make sure that there was no performance impact when you have these secondary renders or these Holograms and such in the scene we're doing a bunch of exciting things to try and combat the performance issues such as if you're

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    going to video call someone and you can only see like a SL slight part of the background behind them we'll use what we call the Environ probe which is normally used for reflections of the scene we're going to render that directly behind the player to avoid having to render the entire background scene and in most situations you won't be able to actually tell the difference so that's one of the examples of the optimizations we're going to be making but there'll be many more to make sure that we can really use this Tech in as many situations as possible so that you get to see the fun gameplay that will result from it so now that we the basics of our holotech in place we want to stabilize it more and spend more time finalizing the look of these Holograms that means all the good post effects goodies you can think of interlacing lines I want to have flickering when there's poor signal quality or when the holographic display is damaged yeah we can't wait to show you more of this when it comes to life later in the PE and of course in our squ 42 narrative thanks for

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    watching pretty awesome he uh and for the Eagle Eye amongst you you will have spotted the first appearance of Ben Mendelson's character in Squadron 4 42 and Liam onion night Cunningham in the work in progress Hollow briefing test scene that we've been doing uh our Graphics team have really created something I haven't seen any other engine and allows us to actually do proper holographic telepresence uh none of it pre-rendered or Faked it's all live and the possibilities for longer term gameplay are pretty exciting and that's all for today's episode as always thanks to all of our subscribers for making it possible for us to produce all of our video content we've just announced that August ship of the month is the apua carall so that means subscribers can test out this Jean ship all month long just log into to the game to take it out first spin yeah and thanks to all our

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    backers who have supported the game over the years opening up the development process to you all has been both challenging and extremely rewarding and I would say the emphasis would be mostly on rewarding so I can't thank you enough for making all possible finally if you want to know what all of our offices did over the past month then check out the July monthly report which goes live to tomorrow so until next week we'll see you around the verse [Music] thank you for watching so if you want to

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    keep up with the latest and greatest and staff citizen of Squadron 42's development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon