Star Citizen: Around the Verse - A Show of Character

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse i'm sandi gardiner I'm Dave haddock good to have you back again Dave in today's episode we'll see the process that brought the character customizer to fruition and we'll take a look at the road map to get an update on early progress toward alpha 3.2 yeah as some of the devs continue to add polish and improve stability to 3 1 through smaller patches most of the teams have shifted their focus to the next quarterly release yes they have and things do move quickly on this schedule and work is already underway on various features and content plan 4 3 2 as you can see if you check out the road map yeah you can always follow along for yourself on the RSI website but for a bit more insight into what the devs have been working on let's go to Rikki gently in the UK take it away Ricky thanks guys let's kick things off at the top of the

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   roadmap with characters work continues on revisions to several legacy armor sets with the light medium and heavy versions of the marine and outlaw sets coming along and the port olisar costume set also scheduled to be released in three two is being worked on as well gameplay is getting a lot of attention this quarter as we are trying to focus on quality of life improvements and upgrades to current in game systems and features were prioritizing development goals based on the feedback we received through last month's backer survey and the need to make the current version of that game as fun and fulfilling as possible improvements to the shopping experience currently being worked on including balancing and augmenting the in-game economy adding improved shopping kiosks and an expanded variety of items

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   available to purchase we've also been upgrading ships and their components so that the way you configure weapons shield generators and allocation of power all factor into your ship performance and affect gameplay in significant ways you'll also see weapons overheat misfire and suffer system failures based on configuration as well factors like wear and tear damage and the quality of the component itself the VMA in PMA moba Glossop's continue to receive polish - visual presentation as well as tweaks to functionality some of which we saw on around the verse a couple of weeks ago from our community feedback some of the improvements who are most excited about relate to forming groups and interacting with fellow players to that end we have teams working on enhancements that will make

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   it much easier to play with friends assist and communicate with other players things like quantum linking new and expanded service speak and contract types like escort will go a long way towards improving the cooperative star sir is an experience all you prospective prospects is out there will be glad to hear that the mining mechanics are coming along nicely with a full loop of mining coded we can see the mining laser breaking large rocks into smaller pieces the extraction tools harvesting resources from the fragments and storing them in a ship storage containers we can even sell the contents back in Civilization for in-game currency work is also being done on the mining HUD and the audiovisual aspects of the mechanics the idea is to make the gameplay

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   intuitive using sound and graphics cues minimizing a player's need to refer to the UI especially as they become more familiar with the process in the coming weeks

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   these visual prototypes and audio work will be integrated with the code to create a cohesive experience that will continue to be tweaked and improved before making it into alpha 3.2 moving on to the AI combat behavior and wild lines are being worked on in relation to pu bounty-hunting missions interdiction and dogfighting with pirates ship designers have been working on aspects of the origin 600 i and reworked aegis avenger variants as seen in last week shipshape installment and they continue to work on other vessels like the Vandal blade and their anvil hurricane meanwhile new weapons and props are in various stages of development and set to

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   be in leashed in the pu our location teams are turning out some very impressive visual prototyping for Hurston its moons and its landing zone level those teams are also making exciting progress on the procedure layouts and visual detail work like lighting for the rest stop stations that's all for now we'll see you next time with more on the PU thanks Ricky it's cool to see these the early stages of the mining mechanic I mean even in a pretty bra state you can see all the components working together and it's going to be pretty exciting to see the audios and visuals coupled with the system in the coming months yes it will be and with a lot of improvements to existing features alpha 3 2 is going to open up gameplay in a lot of fun ways but now we're going to take a closer look at a feature that was just

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   introduced in 3 1 the character customizer even though it's only the first iteration of a system that will eventually have many more options the ability for players to tweak their character's appearance has already added a welcome bit of visual diversity to star citizen in this week's feature we're going to learn more about the inspiration and process behind the character customizer so in three point one you'll be able to customize your character this is the first time we've really been able to introduce this to the players so we're super excited about bringing this to you guys you'll be able to select from your head shape your eye color your hair style your hair color and your skin tone it is a relatively simple character customizer in it again is kind of just the first iteration of that but we wanted to get that in front of you guys

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   first least because we've heard obviously and we've been talking about this for a long time wanted to get customization get it out for the players let you guys play around with it second off is we have to the experience and go through a lot of tech setup issues so how are we gonna deal with items how we're gonna deal with persistency because every time you customize your character we want everybody else to be able to see that in the same way we want to see you want to see your friends just like you've customized yourself you want to see what they've made it - there's a lot of things that came in with persistency a lot of teams things that came in with how we're creating and generating and choosing our items but this is the first time that players will be able to customize anything our characters are made up of items the same way everything else in the game is made up of items so those categories of your head and your hair are items that have that geometry that load in together and

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    make up the cobble together character that you end up with they're a couple of unique items in that set the color in particular is not actually geometry the way that we handle the color switching on skin tone and hair color is that when it attaches to an item it'll actually alter the properties of the the thing it's attached to swap out the materials that it's using right and then like the the character team though working on each of the elements were able to provide us with each of those parts that we could piece together to form your custom character but the the modifications that case was talking about we're a special case right yeah we had to make those so that they could

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    inject tags back into the the parent entity we needed to be able to control which items would be allowed to go with which other items and for this the first round of assets that we've actually created we've been able to accommodate all combinations but the system we built in such a way that if we made a particular hairstyle that was going to have some special color or wouldn't support certain colors because we didn't have the art ready or maybe if it didn't fit the design of what was desired for that art they would correctly populate the list of here the the hair colors that you can pick here are the styles that you can pick so we had it so that it would correctly identify which things

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    you had access to so that we wouldn't have asset issues where they tried to combine things that would conflict and so you did that via the the tag system right yeah we had tags to define which things were allowed we had tags to define which things were ready to be in the customizer at all and we had tags to alter things about which color would be used and then also we had issues where we hadn't foreseen skin tone was applied to the head was a friendly new system and slightly different than what the character team was using in the past in that we found that the body tone that was made to match the skin tone they applied to the head which again wasn't a thing in the past was something that we

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    had to implement specifically for the character customizing about that well because there are all separate items they actually had to be addressed separately as well so when you put a skin tone on your character it's attaching to the head and also injecting that tag into the body so it has to be able to traverse the whole skeleton the whole hierarchy right and then by applying that that tag to each of the body parts that were associated with the one they specifically modified it automatically allowed that particular tone to be applied to that tag that now cascaded down from that that hierarchical implementation it made the data propagate correctly right and because of that it's great because it now allows once we implement a system it allows the character team themselves to create new assets and it's this is all

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    data driven so they make a new head and new skin tone because they applied their their tags in the system that we've implemented for them once they create yeah that acid and put it into the build it automatically populates into the menu as a selectable item and all of the different cascading properties that are applied just like any other head can can happen simply by creating the asset and then once they get it set up we'll take over the implementation and I'll work with the art team to actually get their work in the game properly it's complicated and it never really works the way it's expected so the the artist will sometimes have something else in mind or there there isn't always like a perfect communication going on there which is pretty normal just because things always develop in their own way

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    and also just the way the engine will handle the art it doesn't always go as expected so the artist will make you know their piece and it'll it'll look perfect when when they make it but then the engine may interpret in a different way so then a tech artists job can be getting what they actually made into the engine in the way they desired it to this can go wrong with just texture maps normals geometry all kinds of things really one of the things for the character creator is that you have to have a UI it's a pretty obvious thing but everything everything that interacts together is going to have tack-on effects and so for instance we when you made the the scene of the of where you're seeing your character standing

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    and we initially had problems because our whole front end is unified so when you move from screen to screen you're in the same level and so we had issues where the geometry would start it would still be visible from other screens you'd go to arena commander and you wouldn't be able to see your ship and because it was behind a wall now so we had to had a couple of surprises there and similarly for how we're handling the actual layout of the UI to switch from just the generic list of items to having the preview icons having the preview of the character happening on rollover so that you'd be able to have really really fast and responsive previewing of the thing that you're going to choose

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    obviously we want to make that experience of being able to see what you're going to do to your character has Pleasant and as appealing as possible and because of this even though calyx is a designer he was tasked to learn ActionScript specifically for our the the flash side of things to make the menus work so he quickly learned that and was actually the the primary implementer of all of the front-end that you see in the character customizer itself so getting all those the grids to come in correctly and and to keep track of which items are which and there's a lot of moving parts and even something as simple as the character creator so for this first iteration we wanted to make sure that it was reliable and stable and that it performed as expected

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    and having the previews they're having the icons although we're having an issue now where the icons are suddenly not working in clients only and so looking into that now trying to find out what's happening incorrectly about maybe it's a pathing issue or inclusions but yeah there's always there are very interesting problems with the character creator the character creator could be described as basically the players version of our loadout editor our load of editor is the way we've assembled all the characters in the game so far so basically like all of our you know a list actors - just our random NPC we do those in this editor called balota editor which works within our lumberyard space engine and essentially it's just picking from a massive lists of assets that we have

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    that we've gotten from character art implemented into the game and there's some billing together as a whole character and and really just the character crater that we've created now for the player is just a much much nicer version of that of course the implementation to simplify it that way is where things can go wrong that's why this process was a little more complicated because of course you want to make it you know more user friendly whereas on the developer side things can become very own user friendly just in the process of you know moving forward we have a texture we put on this skin like you put a face on this care model and then for the player to do it it seems like it'd be the same thing but there's a lot that changes in terms of markup and limitations because on our end we can do a lot wrong whereas for the player you don't want them to be able to do anything wrong you want to remove any chance of error for the player and that's essentially what like the the peak of the character

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    customizer is give them as much flexibility as possible in the most stable environment just like a level or any type of logical system calyx had to set up the menu itself so that it had a logic tree so selecting this particular category but up the sub menu that showed that populated that that item list by the number of items that were exposed to the the the character customizer itself then laid out all the icons in a in a nice easy format hovering over them did preview those honest for you so that you didn't have to commit to them before you did that once you hit accept then all the other windows disappear and then the confirmation when it comes up and give me a clear view of your character but you can see making those all those

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    buttons do the correct things so that by saving or cancelling it goes to the right place and saves out that particular loadout for your character was all the hooks were that were done through the front end of the menu once we had the character up and ready to preview it felt kind of lifeless just sort of standing there and just he was hopping things out was very clinical and weird so we brought in the animations to try to give it some life and we found quickly that a lot of our animations were not we're not suited for standing around and being stared at for extremely long periods of time so you've started getting a lot of repetition a lot of patterns that you wouldn't normally

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    notice just wandering around with our animations as it would was very a pair of parent when it's right on the screen in front of you for five minutes so we started putting in the fidgets that we have to be able to randomly choose between different expressions and just just the idle state so we actually had to make some new tech for that because the way that we handle manikin relies on code to to trigger everything because we never want you to be beholden to animation we always want to be how to make sure that the game is in charge of what you're doing right and that's the way to make the the character feel a little bit more alive and we want to again represent what you'd see in the game as someone that's you know moving around and doing all your actions what's

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    in the game so once once we had that we had to make manikin able to actually loop which animation it would choose because it's capable of choosing the the from a variety of fidgets but all the loop tech that we had would lock you into a single animation and so you would keep doing the same thing which just puts it back at the same problem so we had to make a modification to that animation code in order to be able to make it choose the mannequin fragment each time it completes and so we have a new kind of loop that's sort of a metal loop since we're talking about technical aspects of the character customizer um some of the basis of the character customizer came from the same method in which you customize the likea armor on your and your your clothing in the game which is through the PMA and so we definitely needed to disconnect some of

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    those ties that were directly accessing those bits of code specifically because the character customizer required a little bit of different methodology as far as handling the different bits of the items that actually made up your character and so that was one of the first tasks that we embarked on was to see which which parts of the PMA that we needed to keep and see which ones we needed to have a different path for to make the character customizer work fully that was a bit of a growing pain situation but as we started integrating and finding bugs in the system we were quickly able to identify what needed to be changed and what was perfectly good even something as simple as the order that items appear in the list the character customizer has just has different goals than the personal

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    manager does so when you're when you're dealing with your inventory you you're not expecting to see your hair colors all on the roads move from a lighter color to a darker color and makes sense as opposed to kind of a random order or based on just their name even something as simple as just getting the sequence of these items into a familiar logical order would often run into problems with the way that we needed to handle it elsewhere in the game using the same item methodology so we had to add in a different like sorting method all right so some of the assumptions we made about the PMA thinking that it had the infrastructure in order to allow us to identify what

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    the order was found that that was in the case so we as we wanted to present the information or at least your choices in a in a nice format we found that that's something that we needed to inject into the character customizer itself once you hit accept and then go into the game you are able to return to the main screen and then we customize a character if you find that you don't you don't particularly like you choices you made or just want to experiment with the other possibilities believe in the future we're going to make that a function in which you need to go to say a specialist shop or some kind of cosmetic surgeon area yeah there would actually be body modification vendors that you would seek out in the universe

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    and maybe some would have a different selection of the kinds of things that you can change about your character so it would be more of an immersive thing that if you see somebody with particular features that means they've done in particular things to get that right so there'll be physical locations in which you actually go to and make these make these changes occur rather than just being a menu at the beginning of the game so for the character team the biggest challenge is for the character customizer were getting all the assets ready so making sure that the skin tones were blending between the bodies and the heads those are technically separate assets so it's a little bit of work to make sure that they all line up well additionally just kind of creating different assets we've shown some of this before or about different hairstyles different hair colors different eye colors and just making sure that they all really

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    work together the biggest challenge was actually the hair so whenever you start including hair especially in our game where you're able to wear lots of different outfits it creates problems for example some bugs that we experienced were let's say I'm put on a hairstyle and it's a longer hairstyle so maybe it's the mohawk or something like that as soon as you put on a helmet now that Mohawk sticks through the helmet and that's a problem so we have to set up a bunch of tags which basically say am i wearing a helmet yes if so do something so for longer hairstyles when you're inside of a helmet it will automatically swap your hair to be a Snoopy cap or like a skull cap that you wear if your hair's short enough to go underneath the helmet and not go through the glass you actually keep your hair other things were hats so let's say you customize your hairstyle there's nine

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    hairstyles available in the customizer and you put on any hat now before whenever you would put this on the hair would just go away and you'd be bald which is a problem so we had to create hat hair for every hairstyle we have to create a custom variant or a custom mesh that fits all the hats so that when you put on the Hat it coals out or deletes the geometry above the hat line and just the things that are below the Hat line so your character is involved so there's a lot of make just making sure that whatever is being chosen is also being maintained and kept up and keeps that kind of visual look thanks everyone I can't wait to see how this feature grows over time you can already pull together some pretty wild looks and the options are only going to allow for more and more diversity that's right and with

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    more armor and clothing choices being added with each release which we saw earlier in the update you'll also be able to personalize your characters gear and wardrobe Britta's and con is coming up this weekend in Manchester and tickets to that are still available at Britton cons at UK and we'll have details about our very own citizencon event in an upcoming commlink so stay tuned for that remember those large scale replicas of starters and props and furniture we saw it last year at citizencon I do and you can purchase some officially licensed star citizen items designed by the same team that produces very proper check the video description for a link and more details you're definitely gonna want to check them out you can also check out our latest concept ship the innovative origin 100 series on the RSI website now there's lots of information about the ships themselves and their cutting edge fuel system in the comlinks section and for those of you who still

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    haven't had a chance to get into the game we have discounted starter packages available in the pledge store for a limited time that's all for this week remember to check out tomorrow's episode of reverse the verse live at 9:00 a.m. PDT tomorrow on Twitch where Jared chats with Lee Bane iord and Phillip piers Smallwood from the audio team it should be quite the listen and make sure to check out the new episode of calling all devs that aired earlier this week for answers to backer questions about persistence nub craft and more a big thanks to our subscribers for sponsoring all of our shows and of course thank you to all of our backers your support lets us continue to make star citizen and squadron 42 the best they can be until next week we will see you around the verse [Music] thanks for watching for the latest and

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    greatest in star citizen 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.uvu.edu/library