Star Citizen: Bugsmashers - Episode 33

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:06

   [Music] hey everyone it's early in the morning we're here to crack some bugs down on good old citizen con going do some bug fix fix you know for your fixing needs got to fix all those bugs let's get going box bashes hey everyone we're here in my super secret test level with the Gladius and invisible ship um so we got a bug here about all the enter animations being offset uh this happened after all the animators switched uh the enter

2. 00:00:54

   animations to this new Fast entering animation so you could quickly get into your Shi and it doesn't take forever uh so let's uh turn on our AI physics and I have my little pilot guy here our ship's going to dance around and we're going to tell him to enter and I'm going to actually scale it down and you can see oh kind of missed it there let's try it again but you'll be able to see as this plops down uh he's supposed to grab onto the bars and Propel himself inside the ship um but he doesn't quite do that so as you can see ah he kind of missed the bar there it's kind of penetrating and as he gets in the seat

3. 00:01:43

   he has a little offset and then he snaps and this is happening across all the ships there's like a slight little offset so let's watch that again oh he just decided to float into the air to real time uh he'll grab on and he'll up that time he fully missed on the right hand so he like grabs right before and then he propels himself up and then when he gets in he like has like a small little gap between his thigh and the seat so there's a global issue that's affects all of the enters and it's just a slight offset and it's not inside the actual animation um so all the animators were going nuts going

4. 00:02:30

   they set up everything they synced everything they even placed down these things called anim objects that lined up correctly and they're like all right we got to send this off to an engineer cuz there's obviously some problem that there's a weird offset and unfortunately there was um so um what our setup let's go back into here what we're what the um what I'm doing actually is when a player um gets into this enter animation what we do is on the the ship there's a position um roughly where our character is and what we do is we attach our player to that position and then we have um the player move relative to that attachment point and um that gives the illusion that you're still in he's

5. 00:03:21

   actually in that um little hter position we're moving him and then when he sits down we um teleport the attachment to where he's sitting so it gives the illusion that you're sitting um when you move and all that fun stuff and you just move relative to attachment which is it works out pretty nice but when you have this weird offset issue you get this bad snapping so when you finally sit down and when it teleports to the actual sit thing you get this teleport and it just looks unnatural uh so what's happening well here is our animated character or what our player does to figure figure out where he's going to move next um this desired animation movement um block of code what it does is it looks at the uh

6. 00:04:10

   basically the skeleton to see roughly what movement we're going to do so as we're here every frame we have a little bit of movement movement movement movement movement until we get to our seat and that's what basically this calculate U relative movement does and this block of code I ideally you just want to do a current frame to get the current movement so you could work your way up but unfortunately uh this block of code actually gets used for the regular standard player movement and they have to use this prediction block where it samples the current frame and the next frame um the reason why is um if you're not on a seat and attachment you're just standardly moving around it actually

7. 00:04:57

   figures out where you need to go and sends this information to physics and physics runs here and our main thread where this animated runs here and they run parallel in between each other so they're not quite in sync so we have to get some future information so we could send it to it so it can run even if it runs ahead or behind the main thread uh so we need an extra sample and unfortunately that breaks when we're on attachment cuz we're not going through the physics side we're going through the attachment side to figure out where we need to move the player so we don't need this extra bit of um prediction and that's actually where our offset's happening because we're not just sampling here we're sampling ahead double so we're we're going places where

8. 00:05:46

   we shouldn't be going uh so what we have to do is do something sniffy like should use movement uh prediction and by default we want to use it if we have our carar but we also don't want to use it if we have if we're stuck to an attachment so if the movement crar for prediction is enabled and we do not have an attachment then we do this movement prediction otherwise we just sample the current frame so let's do some recode all right recode's

9. 00:06:37

   done and let's see how it looks when we only sample one the current frame instead of the future frame recode broke so unfortunately recode sometimes breaks the game so I have to restart the editor all right so recode had some issues so I had to restart the editor um let's try this again uh let me turn on the sear Wham all right I got into position let's have the pilot enter and see what happens slow motion bam oh he grab the ladder yeah he

10. 00:07:32

    hops in grabs the side correctly sits in the seat in the correct position woo everything worked better A lot better there is a kind of a still snap between the end of the enter and the idol that's something that the animat will have to work out but the whole offset between the entering and getting inside is there is I should say is gone so job done just slight little programming and Bam we got good results all right hope you guys enjoyed this uh little small fun bug uh there was a global issue with seats entering uh they switched over to the new combat animations and things were just not lining up uh the animators were going bonkers and then they decided

11. 00:08:22

    to shift the bug over to um engineering I took a quick look at it some slight issues with the movement prediction turns out we don't even need that prediction when we're attached so disabled it when we're attached and problem went away you're able to get in grab onto the ladder animation's all lined up good to go animators could take a side of relief and all the animations look great hope you guys enjoyed till next time bug smashing thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest and Star Citizen and Squadron 42's development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon see you