Star Citizen: Subscriber's Town Hall LIVE - Technical Content

1 February 201800:53:551,607 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[sighs] Welcome everybody. Welcome to uh our the our subscriber town hall, our very our first subscriber town hall of uh 2018. Uh I'm your host uh content manager for global video production Jared Huckabe and with us on today's subscriber town hall is a panel of technology experts for for Star Citizen. Basically we're talk we're going to talk about uh all the technology uh that we're developing for Star Citizen that we have developed for Star Citizen that we are continuing to develop for Star Citizen that will make the game everything that we want it to be. Uh, immediately to my right is a man that probably needs no introduction, but we're going to do it anyway because there's always somebody new in every one of these. Who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? Oh, I got really confused there. Like stage right or your right or he's on your left.
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I'm on your left, but right. Do Okay. Has anybody ever looked at me and said, "That guy knows the difference between left and right." No. Nobody ever looks at me and says, "He knows what's left and right." In military, they always used to say, "You're civilian, right?" [laughter] Like, "Oh, what?" That's fair. Uh, uh, yes. Uh Sean Tracy for those that don't know me. I'm the technical director of content. So actually yes, we develop technology as well, but uh really with me today is is is uh some guys from my team that are we we we all call ourselves tech artists or technical animators um that uh that work on in the layer between the artists and the engineers. Um, so they do a little bit of both is kind of the point, but it's an important piece of any feature um that you have a tech artist working on there cuz whether it's working on tools to make a process better, whether it's
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to make performance a little bit better, uh, generally you're going to want to have a tech artist involved. And definitely on like a character side, it's really really heavy on the tech art work as well as the ships too. But uh, yeah, so that's that's that's me and you guys. into you're not right. Am I not right? Is that gauge? No. See, not right. You're not on my right. Right would be that. See, we all know what the difference. I'm my own center. Uh my name is Forest Stefen, uh computer graphic graphics supervisor, and I basically do anything that Sean Tracy needs that's extremely art heavy. Mhm. That Chris [snorts] really wants done. Yep. And usually if we if we want to if we want to get something that we know Chris is going to like right away, uh we put Forest on that because Forest has
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worked with him for so long. Um and uh you know whether it was they were always sharing tastes and that that was the thing. He's just gotten really good at understanding um some of the things that Chris was looking for uh within Captur's cinematics. In some ways, you're a lot on that side of the building. You're a lot like I am on this side of the building. It's just it's what whenever something's needed and there's not somebody specifically, you know, in that role, it's like, well, they can probably do it. It's like that. So, you tend to make much better looking things than I do, though. Well, arguable. I don't know. I look like this. He looks like that. All right. And now to my actual right. Real right. Uh, Gage Hullman, tech artist. Um, I work under Sean, specialize mostly in characters, character tech, all the back end for item setup, things like that. Mhm. Yeah.
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And I know you you've been part of the project since the beginning. Uh when did you come on Sean? You were there. That's quite quite quite a story. You you were part of things. Yes. Yes. Well, it was funny actually. Somebody sent an an email to my old Krytek address and they're like, "Why didn't you get my email?" I'm like, "Oh, you probably had the old Krytek address that's still in the the thing." Um so yeah when the the engine was initially licensed and and evaluated I was involved uh with Chris and Forest and uh a group of outsourcers of course uh that were all connected to it and then eventually uh ended up transferring for well transferring uh ended up leaving uh uh Krytek and then coming over to CI when it was in Austin and then that's right you started. Yeah. Uh but that was about three years ago when I was made the transition. Oh wow. Yeah. All right. And then you of
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course came on board with the next great starship competition, right? Always a fun story. Yeah. Yeah. We were going to make that ship. Oh, you mean the drop ship that we made? All right. So, uh if this is your first uh subscribers town hall, uh it's a roundt question and answer format. Basically, we're going to take your questions live from the chat. Uh because this is the subscribers town hall, questions come exclusively from Star Citizens development subscribers. Uh that means you do have to be a subscriber to submit your questions and the way we filter that out is with Spectrum. Now Spectrum is our custom communications platform available on robertspace industries.com. You can go to robertspaceindustries.com. Click on the spectrum link. It's in the upper right hand corner on the newly uh redefined um redefined website and check your mic. Sean,
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is it muted? Yep, it is muted. Your mic is muted. Oh no. The best conversation. What is mine on? Nope. Here it says he just flipped a switch. Try that now, Mike. I flipped a switch or Yes, I did. Sabotage [clears throat] and uh click on Spectrum and then go to the subscribers chat. Uh the subscribers chat up on Spectrum are exclusively uh where we're taking questions from today. We also have a thread up in the subscribers den which is the forum section of uh of our subscribers of Spectrum where we have been collecting questions all week. Uh so we have we have been collecting questions from there and we'll just use those to get get us started here. Uh the first question from there says so the last so so in the last year you built a lot of the foundational tools such as subsumption UI solid etc. Can we assume that we now have them all in a working
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state? Are are tools done? Are we done making tools? Totally done. Everybody's happy with the tools. They never need any more work. We never have to rework them. It's perfect on the first delivery. So next question. Tools go through stages of course, right? you you initially implement the tool um and you do it as a as a way that it that it works, right? It it it can get the task done and then once it's in there, you have to re-evaluate a little bit and say, does this get the task done as quickly as we would like? Is the uh user uh the way that you interact with a tool as friendly as we like? Um because usually when it first gets implemented our tools are very complicated which means using the tools very complicated and you want to simplify it as much as possible because
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that elimmits uh limits mistakes and also speeds up your workflow. So usually it goes through a couple passes. So I think probably the answer to that question is while they're implemented and somewhat working. Yeah. um they still need uh a lot of work and tools take you know we use software that were on version 11 14 you know like all these Adobe Autodesk all these programs are never quite finished right because they could always be better so and maybe you know to to uh to use a term from from Eric to pontificate on the minutiae a little bit uh to to kind of get into this um use that word is there's a lot of uh and I you know I hate to over complicate this but there's a lot of layers and a lot of tools that that are involved olved in I mean you can call uh you know a script that that somebody writes for an artist within 3ds Max that's a tool. Um so you could call
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uh the the sandbox editor uh that we're that we use a tool. Um you could call our uh copy build patcher setup a tool. So there's a lot of different sort of layers of these tools. One of the things that we're working on even this month is uh kind of structuring those tools teams a little more accurately to be fit for the purpose that we need them to be to be set up for. So a good example is we have a general tools team within the UK that's led by Martin senior. Um and general tools are pretty much defined as anything that's outside of the the editor. Um then we have a sandbox tools team that's led by Sasha Hoba in uh the Frankfurt and that's all the tools that happen within our editor kind of interface like planet like planet editor um uh like track view uh like a lot of other things people
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have seen on on various ATVs. Then we have another layer of this and that's the art and animation tools. So these are tools that we write on top of those dcc apps. So 3ds Max, Maya, Motion Builder, and that's what uh a tech artist really usually spends a lot of his time on is that sort of tool structure. So [snorts] what we're always trying to do is make either an environment artist's workflow faster, better, um things are less um prone to bugs or or anything like this, trying to automate it. Um then the same thing goes for the animation tools. And you know, so everyone's aware, we've got a pretty big uh we call them the technical animation team, but we've got a pretty big team and that's led by Rob House out of Derby. So now I've I've just talked about three different studios completely and you can imagine that there's there's
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a lot of communication back and forth. Um it there's a lot of really early morning meetings to kind of discuss this kind of stuff. So that gives you an idea of what that team looks like. Now what what where are we at in terms of of tools? So, uh, just like you've seen with a lot of the gameplay systems, as that gameplay system comes online, you need to then either at the same time or shortly thereafter develop the tools related to said feature so you can implement and do the feature. Um, so we put a huge onus uh and and a big priority in the last year or two years of Forest and I specifically focused on this on the content creation tools that we had because we knew um if when we were talking 2 years ago that the scale of this game is so immense that the amount of content we need to
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generate is is to a degree that those tools need to be very powerful um for the artist because again we can't just do it in a in a standard AAA kind of setting where you make one character very specific. That is your hero character. Okay, cool. We're going to make 12 more of those and that's it. We're talking thousands of character assets already created. And and a character asset is like a shirt or a pant or whatever. Um then you've got the same then you've got the same complexity if not more on the environment side. U then you've got more complexity within the ships. Um, so we've got all those tools in shape. We've got our pipelines. We can we can do all this. Now, where's our bottlenecks? Where are all where is all the time going? Because the only thing that a that a tech artist will think
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about after that pipeline works is how can I make that better? And every day that's all we're thinking about is how can we make that better for the developers? How can we make that easier for the developers? But because we put such a huge focus on the content creation tools, um I say this all the time, our ability to create content has far exceeded our ability to implement said content. So that's true. And there's it's a it's kind of it's um it's it's not a good thing necessarily uh because what it can do is okay, so we develop a lot of content and and like again the players aren't seeing a lot of the Squadron 42 kind of content yet. Um and that that stuff has progressed very well. But because we've made so much stuff um it kind of sits there unused for I mean a month, two months, 3 months and then what happens and this is the
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really really rough part is a system will change under the hood and it might change in a feature team in the UK. So I had no idea about it. Gage had no idea about it. Force might not have known about it and you know we're getting way better in terms of that communications uh structure. Uh but what happens is is and I call it asset rot. So basically a thing has sat there for so long that it starts to rot. Basically there's bugs that get created after the fact and that's just based on underlying changes. So kind of the focus is is moving towards let's let's make sure that our tools for implementation uh and for all the designers match our rate and our ability to create this this particular content. And what you're talking about here is a struggle that happens daily.
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Daily. And not just for us. I mean, this is this is a standard game development thing, you know. Not even game development. I think I think this happens, you know, across anything that uses digital assets in some some way. Some team will go faster than another team. Sure. Sure. You're always struggle of of okay, these this team is now this efficient. Now, we need to move make this team this efficient. And then, of course, these guys, you need to come up and stuff like that. It's this interdependency thing. And and yeah, like the the times that people get real angry is when they've made a super nice asset like uh you know, James Quue will finish off just gorgeous character and it'll sit there for about a month and then he'll come back to it or or or what's worse is somebody else grabs it um puts it in game and says, "Oh, what is this?" You know, there's there's errors on it or or whatever. Oh, uh James said, "Okay, I'm going to send
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this over to James." and then he gets some sort of email that says, "Oh, why is this? You said you were done this thing. You know, it's all so it can create some some friction." So, we've really really got to address that on on a tools and developer workflow side. And this is a non-stop thing. We're never going to be done the tools. Um and and we have to be okay with that. Um but that also means that we have to very specifically prioritize certain things and we prioritize it based on what the bottleneck is globally. Um, so what is slowing this thing down? Is it slowed down at this step, at this step? At this step? Why do we have 30 assets sitting here and one asset sitting here? So, I'm very much pumped up [laughter] on the but I do want to go a little bit further. Um, because the tools thing is a real big focus for me personally anyways right now.
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Um, away from features, so much more on the tools. So we used to have a very very solid mentality uh with the what was cryent is now lumberyard and lumberyard has maintained this um mentality of what you see is what you get. So this is a designer is working within a level. He does a thing. Let's use this sorry I'm going to use your red bull cup for an example. Uh so he places this cup on the table. Cool. Great. Um now he wants to actually test this and see how that actually worked out. Now, if he has to go through a whole bunch of I've got to launch this app, I've got to set this C bar. I've got to do this thing. I've got to get 20 minutes through the level and then I can see my cup placement. He is going to place it one time and never again. And even if it's not perfect. So, it's like actually I wanted that cup on that paper. So, if I wanted to make that little move here
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and then go through 20 minutes, I'm just not going to do that. So, what we're trying to improve is the what you see is what you get mentality. And sometimes that can be totally opposite of of what would make sense for a system. So sometimes what makes sense for a system is that you're not updating everything in real time. You're going to bake it basically. You're going to save it. You're going to export it. You're going to somehow lock it in. Um but the mentality of what you see with what you get is never be locked in. Always be changeable. So there's a there's a there's a mentality that has to be addressed there. And I think some tools that we've developed in the past what we're we have to not really rework the tool but uh think of a different workflow for for said tool. Um so a good example is subumption and something
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we've been looking at is these um uh GUIDs with uh object containers and this is just a method of us identifying certain object containers and then subsumption uses a list of all of these things. The problem is is for a designer if he makes a new object container he can't go manually go add this thing to the list wait for a build to generate and then see his new thing like that's that's that's the exact opposite of the what you see is what you get uh functionality. So that's a big drive um on the tools front and uh yeah that's about it. I think I so cover the show. Right. So the uh so the short answer is no. We're not done with tools. No absolutely not. and and [laughter] uh get better. Now to follow up on that uh uh Forest recently um we released our our feature trailer for Alpha 3.0.
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Yes. And and you were you were a big part of that and the work on that feature trailer has now led to you working on another tool. Yes. Because of that. So So [clears throat] tell us how that went. Uh well originally we we spent some time in getting some footage together for Chris. And by we, I mean uh there's, you know, we had uh QA was capturing, we had some developers in house capturing, and then it came back and then Chris asked me to take a pass at it, look at it, review it, and then kind of revise it with some additional footage. Um, but I'm sorry, just when you say capture footage, just so just so everybody knows, we're doing it the same way you guys do it. We we load the game up. We open up OBS, you know, we when we record, we record using the same engine, the same engine, the same game client, you know, our players are using
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what in the past, right? Um, the way the the rendering uh worked a lot for the cut scenes like in our original uh fundraiser trailer and and then a lot of our commercials so to speak was we you know we have a way to render out you know where we could set everything up in the editor and then we run the game through the editor which was the ultimate what you see is what you get um from you know [clears throat] from our uh engine and then it would render that out into a video format which we would then upload to YouTube and then people would see uh and We but we would do everything by hand. Let's say if I wanted to have a ship fly past, I would have to make a quick particle effect that I would attach to the thruster and then I would have to in uh the software I'd have to say, okay, at this moment in time I need to key frame a boost to the
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thruster so it flares out and you know and everything was very manually done like you were doing like a movie type thing. Um and then our tools got more and more complex. Ships landing gear started retracting you know automatically and uh the tools started surpassing our cinematic methods and it became very difficult to start doing these types of you know trailers and cutcenes and and to show off the the current art and everything. And it really came down to, wait a minute, we were just showing off the art, but now we need to start showing off the gameplay mechanics uh along with the art. And so these cutscenes kind of had evolved from just showing off art to
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showing off the game, right? Because everything's as important as the art. So this was one of the first times that the goal was very clear. Capture in the game, right? That was the goal that Chris was very clear he want he wants in game captures right. So we started getting the footage back and stuff and uh that a lot of the footage was fairly rough right off the bat and it was very clear very early why it was very rough and that was because we have a very rudimentary tool spectator cam director cam whatever you want to call it. So I was like okay well let me give this thing a try. So you know I give it a try. I use it. It it is let's talk about the shortcuts of it. It's rough, you know. I'm like, uh, how do I move the camera? They're like crazy. Hit hold F4 and then you got to
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put your elbow in there. You got to use uh literally you got to put your elbow on a key to to make sure you move it up and down. And then you need to put your thumb on the right joystick to rotate the camera. And you know, and the whole thing was just this very thing. So, I grew a third arm for a week and a half. And I randomly would have people come over and I say, "I need you to hold I need you to hold this while I do this." And then, you know, some of the shots I'm like, "Okay, well, I don't like the shot because it doesn't have camera movement or I don't like the shot because it doesn't use any rule of thirds or it doesn't do all these, you know, all these things, right?" Um, all with great potential, just not quite not quite what Chris is used to on the cinematic front. All because it was very important for us to to make the trailer in the game client on the game ser the
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same game servers the players playing using the same tools the players have access to uh Hoskaha and Frustrm and and and Alex 189 and all you guys out there. We wanted to do the we wanted to do it the same way you guys were doing it. So we went in the trailer and the trailer that you saw in 3.0 was the live product. Um you know uh a lot of people have you know how did you get those frame rates and stuff? A lot of times I did log in when there wasn't as many people on the server, right? Because they're making heavy server optimizations right now in regards to uh you know the the the fact that when you play and there's lots of people in the game, the server the network code is doing lots of things and handling lots of things at once and so they're making sufficient changes to saying, "Okay, if this character is on the planet, maybe not update the skeleton, right?" And stuff like that. So there's a very, you
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know, it's a very known thing right now that is just part of game development and part of having an MMO that is now being targeted. However, there was the challenge of how am I going to get these frame rates? So I would log in at 2:00 in the morning and I would say, "Hey guys, who wants to play with me?" And I would kind of almost go undercover and I would record my experiences with players. Um, and I would be like, "Yeah, I'm you know," and this is how I got them to play with me. I'd be like, "Hey, does anyone want to uh join me?" And they'd be like, "Yeah, what shifts do you have?" I have all of them. [laughter] Yeah, sure. All right. He like spawns a bangle or whatever. Yeah. So, you know, and I would play with people and and also I'd get, you know, QA in house to have uh Star Marine matches with me and I essentially just learned the tool set. I did the best
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that I could and I just played the game and I captured my experience playing the game. So, now that we have the trailer, So, now that we have the trailer, uh, it was like, "Oh, see." And, Chris is like, "See, you you can do this, you know, of course." And I'm like, "Well, you can, but it's not, you know, I think I made it look a little easier than it really is because it is it is difficult and it was a challenge, right? Um, but my part of my job is to just give him what it wants, get it approved, and make it look easy doing it, right?" So, so he was excited about it and said, "I would like this to be revamped. I I want this director's cam. I love the director's cam. We all know Chris has a background in in film. He he understands it. He he loves it. And so, uh, we want to be able to bring this beautiful universe in a cinematic mode, not just in Squadron 42,
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but also in the MMO PU, because who doesn't want to capture their experience because people are going to be making almost these types of movies. And what is it called when we were younger when you would make these things? Machine. Yeah. And that that was still fun back in the day. And people were probably still doing that. It's older now, so I probably But [laughter] uh when I was a kid, I always loved doing that. And so I kind of went back to my childhood and thought about what would be cool is if I can do this with this. So um we decided we're going to make a tool, right? And we decided we're going to uh take the current director's cam, spectators cam that everyone has access to currently. If you hold F4, rub your stomach in your head and take your keypad at the same time. That's it, right? Freaking crazy. Then, uh, we're going to build upon it. And step one, I think, is to just, you know, capture something and have an interface, right? So, okay, who's
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currently doing this now, right? Because I I do believe that you don't just build a wheel from scratch. You have to look at what your competitors are doing and then you have to see what what they're doing well, what they're doing uh not so well and then you you uh basically evolve into a better and it's not stealing [laughter] but but you you make it, you know, you evolve and you you always have to keep up with modern technology, right? That's just the way that it goes. You have to know what people around you are doing because you have to make it that good and you have to make it even better because now you're also doing it, right? You have to know what the expectations are. Yeah. So I asked Sean and some people, specifically Sean, I said, you know, hey, who else is doing this? who's the best and he goes Mario Odyssey. So, and I'd been playing a lot of Mario Odyssey with my son, with my kids, and on my own at 3:00 a.m. getting the power moons. But, um, but they do have Do you save [clears throat] up all the
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power so that when you turn them, you get a big It goes like, yeah, I saved up like all my gold coins and then I bought like a gazillion of them just so I could It seems more rewarding when you save. Yeah, super rewarding. But uh on that point, you know, the barrier to entry for Mario Odyssey is is there's just there's no barrier there to snapshot mode. Um and that's a that's a nice tool that it's really it's a playerf facing tool and that's what that's what Forest is looking at here. So yeah, Mario Odyssey was and it was funny to use that as a reference, especially sending it to Chris [laughter] where I'm like I just I'd never in my life to be sending Chris Roberts a a screenshot of Mario with snapshot mode on and there's you know there he is with Cappy just hanging out in in Cappy Land or How did that go over? You sent Chris Roberts a screenshot of Super Mario. You know what he was like no that looks awesome. Yeah, that's exactly what I
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want. So uh you know it but you know that's that's where we have to go. As well as Nvidia Anel uh was it was the other side of this. So, and and the whole goal to this playerfacing tool um is to remove that barrier to entry and give them the same power that Anel or like a Mario snapshot mode or even in Zelda you've got a bit of a picture uh mode that you can deal with. Um making it as accessible as those are um I think is is a is a very very worthy um uh endeavor. All right. Now, I want to I want to jump straight into this. Another question for the subscriber. I want to talk about the character customization. Uh we just released our public road map. Uh and and people have seen that character customization is is uh slated for the 31 right now. You you talked a bit earlier about how sometimes you have a thing
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going and it's it's done at the development side but implementation side is still waiting undo this. Uh I think the character customizer probably falls as a pretty good example. Yeah. Yeah. and and that one um of course the the the expectations of the uh customizer right out of the gate are are are pretty direct and yeah if you look again to go to Forest's point about looking at what everybody else is doing um is a really important part of this and and you look at games like uh like Black Desert Online or you look at games like Destiny then everybody approaches them a little bit dis differently and as we wanted to do this just very much out of the gate We just want some form of customization. Just select a head, select some hair, select some um eyes, and set the colors
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for the first part. Call that a day. Um but even at that at that uh let's say limited um sort of customization experience. Um you can still make mistakes on the way there and and and some mistakes would be, you know, an interface that isn't as intuitive as you would like even for that kind of thing. uh as well as making sure that whatever system is developed is a totally scalable thing and as I talked about a little bit before because of all the different studios [clears throat] excuse me and uh different levels of uh uh communication from various teams it can happen that a thing will be developed and it's not exactly what you know Chris was expecting or Todd was expecting or I was expecting um so basically it's gone to a full feature team now uh which is a it's a cross-discipline team of
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programmers and UI engineers and artists and everybody kind of altogether uh working on that. So, um they're progressing pretty nicely on it. But what's interesting is Gage had already done the entirety of the asset setup months ago. Um and this was even when I I had done an ATV or a reverse or I had done a show a little while ago. Yes. Um a little while ago and we had talked about that coming out very soon and it was definitely a goal uh for 3, but uh we didn't it wasn't where we wanted it. Um, and not again because the actual assets and things weren't ready. Um, it was more the interface just wasn't where we're demanding the interface has to be um, for doing that. So, um, but yeah, Gage was absolutely back in I think it was October or November late summer
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really went through them all. Um, talk Gage. I should speak speak onto this. [laughter] Uh actually it's interesting about the customizer too cuz we've always had our own version within the office called the load editor and but it's just not something that you'd want to give to people because it's not a very friendly interface at all. So the hardest part was making it a nice interface for the user while also accompanying scalability for the massive amount of assets that we have because we have it on our end but it's very difficult and we often build on to it constantly. So just dishing that out wouldn't be great early on. Like I said didn't want to rush it. Um but an interesting part about that is like it kind of comes in a few stages. We always have our first step of character artists. They make everything on their end and models. Then we have our implementation phase which we've been doing in the back end for a long time now. And then there's the UI phase.
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Um UI is always always there at the end. Yeah. And it's one of those things because it's the visual element. It's something that can is very picked on. So it it goes through a lot of innovative stages. Uh so uh obviously this this first version of the character customizer that we're intending to come with 3.1 uh won't be the final version. It's what what will it have versus what we've talked about that it won't have this first version. Uh it just won't be sculpting. That's the thing. Won't have the DNA the DNA DNA because and and I could we could absolutely give you the first version. We're talking about the first version. [clears throat] Um and and I've talked about it before, but there's there's complexities because of the rig logic and because of things like uh we want to drive the face with faceware. Uh
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we'd like animations shared. Um and then even further uh we want to be able to update the runtime rig code implementation DNA um as it's called um at runtime and be able to save this for for your given character. So, there's a lot of reasons why it's not just as simple as putting a couple blend shapes in and going between them because we could absolutely do this, but it's actually not going to get us to where we want to go uh with this system. So, you're going to have head selection, you're going to have hair selection, and you're going to have eye selection. Um these are good colors between the hair and eyes. Um and I mean, we're even beaten to death some things like, oh, okay, you know, the workflow right now is that we're going to have to have images for each of the hair, but is that really the scalable way to go? Shouldn't we do a render to texture sort of thing of the hair asset and then oh wait you know hair assets don't render super well in a in a render to texture kind of
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setting. So how do we set that up? Do we do there's all the there's minutia in here um that uh that has to be addressed. Um so that's why it's getting addressed on on the feature team. But yeah again to go to to to Gage he's he's already set up all these assets like this because we had to support this for Squadron 42. We have to support this for the PU and for all the designers because we've got that design facing tool, a loadout editor cuz that's how they make all the NPCs and these kind of guys. Um but yeah. Yeah. So technically we've had customization for at least two years now just in in different you know phases. Um what's cool about the faces too is like with our backend setup in our internal load editor um we have all these dynamic tag setups so that when you switch ahead it'll switch the body color and it'll find all the appropriate items to fit this character. That's why
00:31:25
we can have all these, you know, modular setups because they all kind of dynamically switch to each other and kind of piece it together on how we set it up internally, right? Like one of the interesting challenges even even for Squadron, but that this we can talk about how we solved it for PU as well, but in Squadron, for example, all the heads, they've got different size necks. Um, and uh and I think in an ATV, we're going to talk about how we actually scaled uh that Tagaka. He's one of the one of the cool characters within uh Squad 42. Six feet tall or something. Yeah. 66 or something like this. Really big. Save it for the ATV. Oh yes. Oh well, they've already Yeah. talked about it anyway. Um I lost my train of thought. Oh. Uh where we were going with that was the necks were actually different different sizes between the heads. Um and this this totally makes sense, right? Because yes, a human is just
00:32:12
different proportions, these kind of things. But the problem is when you have a modular system and a shirt, um the shirt sits it just doesn't move for it. Uh and then you can't use the same shirt across a bunch of different guys. So that's why we came up with this tag system so that um the tier one and tier zero um you know really high-end uh uh actors um get uh kind of custom clothes that that fit them uh specifically. So and this is going to be the case for um actually I'm not even sure we've talked about this character so I probably shouldn't it's it's a very specific character. Uh nope I can't won't do it. Nope. [laughter] Nope. Uh but whoever they are, they dynamic, but whoever they are, they're they're custom. Um but how we solved this in the PU was actually we unified the next shapes um uh right down and it was just there was a range um um of verts that we actually uh unified.
00:33:02
Anyway, it was a longing discussion too. Yeah, it it was a big decision to start unifying things because you start to lose some character when you unify or standardize anything. That's the big argu um the trouble we've had with clothing too, like you can't standardize so much that everything looks the same. So of course did we want to standardize skulls and head shapes and necks and how similar would everyone start to look at ears in the same position? There's so much. So they they started testing Venet in the UK. He did some tests to figure out how far can we blend before we start to lose the character of this person. And then once we finally decided we made that the new standard and then all clothing up to that point on the neck would then fit the same size and then they can do whatever they want up here. I mean we literally just walk behind his desk and Gage would be like, "Does this look weird?" Mhm. And then you kind of like if if it jumped at you like this is now a different character then we've gone too far right that
00:33:50
the you know because you know you got to shape the skull because you got a hat you got to put on and the hat some people just have giant heads hat stretch to fit people's heads you can't just shove the same thing on there doesn't work. [laughter] Yeah, I have to special order my hats from Amazon. I know. Can't be on our game. Sorry. They don't fit in my hand. And I mean to talk a tiny bit more about it is is there's a lot of there's a lot of logic in each of these items like he said that the head carries logic with it because there's components on that gameplay entity class of the head of that given head um that triggers a bunch of other things on the body. So that's where the complexity comes in. And again, I I you know, sometimes I get jealous [clears throat] of of of other games because there's this it's a difficult thing to have a system that
00:34:38
does everything. You usually can make a system and make some concessions based on your gameplay design. If you're making an MMO, you're going to make different concessions than if you're making a single player scripted experience. So now you see my problem. Uh because we need a system that that one has to coexist. So those they they coexist together. Mhm. Um and two has to do everything. So um we do try to do everything. Yes, we do on everything. Yeah, we try to do everything on everything. I wouldn't have it any other way. No, it's it's the the whole reason we we funded the project in this way. It's the reason we operate the way we do. It's so that we don't have anybody telling us what we can and can't do. It's only except Chris. Well, I'm I was speaking as Chris. Oh, I see. I was speaking the royalty. Okay. All right.
00:35:26
me. So, I'll do what I do with Chris. I'll argue once, I'll argue twice, and then there [laughter] I go. All right. So, so the very first iteration of character customization, uh, we are we our intention is to put that out with 3.1. Uh, you'll see you'll see heads, you'll see eyes, you'll see what was the hair. Hair. And then of course uh throughout the rest of the year and beyond we will continue to iterate and add features and eventually to the point where we get to that the DNA system and everything. It's like anything else with Star Citizen. It's an iterative development. Uh this is a good time uh to to to mention um see a lot of questions coming in uh a lot uh about recent comments as far as the insurance system and you know pirated ships and spawning whatnot. Uh this is a this is a good time to say uh
00:36:15
that we're going to have more information on that on Friday's Reverse the Verse. So you're going to want to tune in to that. We have Todd Papy uh and Brian Chambers who are our guests on Reverse the Verse Friday and we're going to talk all about our future plans for piracy and stuff like that. Uh but I can tell you now that uh the the comments that you saw on Spectrum are very much speaking in the same regard. Uh uh Will Maiden was speaking about current implementations of insurance and how stolen ships work in 3.0 and 3.1 in 3.2 but not the longterm design of the system. Uh changes to the there have not been any changes to the long-term design that we're aware of at this point and we will ask Todd Papy to clarify that on Friday. So just putting that to bed right now since this seemed like a good
00:37:02
time. uh that whole thing with the piracy and the insurance. He's talking about how it is in 3.0 and 3.1. And it's the same it's a follow-up to the conversation we had on another subscribers town hall uh back in November where we where we we perhaps made it a little more clear then that we were talking about 3.0 3.1 3.2 and not the long-term design. So, hope that helps everybody. All right. Well said. and tune in Friday to find out an update on what the future plans are and where what we're thinking about and where we're going. That was the best non-answer answer I've ever heard. I've been doing this for a while. I'm just teasing. That was fantastic. That's why they put me in. I I Yes. And and Todd will clarify all. Yes. So, pass the buck to Todd. All right. So, um [laughter]
00:37:51
interested. Uh so, back to the qu questions from the live chat here. Um, as uh Chris talked about on last week's, uh, RT, I don't know if you're going to know, but I'm gonna go and ask you, uh, that the Hall C was having retraction problems due to the due the animated physics grid. Do you know anything about what we're doing with that? It's currently on hold. It's currently on hold while those people have been moved over to do other work. So, I don't know that we actually have an answer for that at the moment because we don't have yet. Yeah, we haven't come up with a solution yet. Um, but it's not because there isn't one, it's because we're not working on it. You're not working on it. That's kind of it. Um and yeah, like a lot of this is sitting in in Frankfurt on the physics engineers uh for the physics system itself because yes, the the issue there there's a couple different issues with the whole scene. Um but one of them is yes, animated physics like the thing needs to change. Um and that's again this this goes into
00:38:42
those what you see is what you get kind of functionality stuff. But the system that we currently use um that is being re-engineered anyways is a is a pretty static system. So you make it that's it. That's what the physics grid is. It ain't changing. Um, regardless of how that chip breaks up or whatever, we can turn it turn it on and off, but we can't move it around. And actually, there's a kind of a fundamental thing within the engine and and within Lumberyard. Um, that there's a concept of areas versus entities. And an area is not an entity. And thus, you can't do the same stuff with a with an area volume that you could do with an entity just from the code side. So, everybody knows that. Another example of an area physics greatest one. Another example would be a viz area or these things that we battle with with viz areas in portals. So this is what callulls out um certain certain
00:39:31
regions or areas and [clears throat] the uh the difficulty that comes sometimes with those is yeah those don't animate either. Um so anytime we want to really change that ship around um even in destruction it absolutely comes up. And then some other problems with the whole sea is just um I think somebody had done a f just a a quick um sort of setup with like it was like 50 hornets or something attached to it. Um and I don't think this is what you're going to be able to do by any stretch of it. Um but just to give you an idea of the performance implications that that brings. Um the fact that a ship can be strapped with that much stuff um is is a performance concern on the GPU. not so much on the CPU but GPU and that's where we get worried um about it. So there'll be some things we need to solve there, but uh
00:40:19
none of them are insurmountable as as nothing is. It's just a matter of time and money. And uh that's why one of the things I'm most I'm quoted as saying most often is this is game development, not game construction. We are finding the answers. We are discovering the answers in game de construction. You've got the blueprints, you've got everything's been figured out. You know, you and you hire workers and they come on everything's there in the blueprints. The engineering is there, everything's there, and it's just following instructions. They're [laughter] they're complex instructions, but they're instructions nonetheless. Game development is the process of try this. Okay, that doesn't work. Try this, that doesn't work. Try this, that doesn't work. Did you just call us master builders? Um, maybe. Maybe him. Ouch. I'm just We're the only two people in the company with content in our title. So,
00:41:07
So, I we don't know what we do. People do actually. Uh, let's follow that up though. Uh uh I've got plenty of content. We we talked a little bit about what Forest is working on now with the with the uh with the director tools and everything. Uh what are you guys working on now? Uh I sort of talked about a little bit with the tool structures um and and the mentality moving around backlogs and like I mean if you really want to get into the details of it, it's a right now it like I was I was joking with Forest about it, but I'm spending a lot of my time in Outlook at this exact moment. Um, which is not obviously where I want to be, but uh part where it needs to be. Yeah. No, absolutely. And I I can't, you know, I can't complain about that at all. Uh, but you know, I of course miss having the editor open and actually solving some problems directly. Um, but you've
00:41:56
got to kind of you got to have a bit of this production um work to get everything going. So yeah, just working with the various tools teams on getting them prioritized for the year and uh making sure that we're supporting all those feature teams. What are you working on, Gage? Um on my end, uh really just tools development for the character side and Maya. Um this is a lot of working with Red N and the UK team. Um Rob's over in the UK communicating with them. Um we're building tools here that will then sync their tools, implement their health tests, and this will just um help streamline our whole character process. So we can distribute these to the character team themselves. They can create their models and everything, run health tests, make sure it's all good to go. It'll automatically hand off to us and we can run our pipe very smoothly once this is finished and then into implementation. And hopefully, like we said before, implementation can be the
00:42:44
hardest part. Smoothing out this whole process and just delivering it in one go. All right. Next question for subscribers. Hey Sean, we haven't heard about Facewear in a while. What's going on with that? It's coming along. It's coming along good. Um, so like I know I'm always trying to shut it. I shut it down and then I make it take 20 minutes. Uh, so yeah, I mean phase where we took it super far. Um, already in uh was it Gamescom we first showed it I think. Uh, then we had a setup at Citizcon showing it running um, you know, in real time. There's some performance stuff that we want to address. Um, and especially in the statement that we are right now, I I don't think anybody would accept me dropping facewear as a feature um to to sap any any performance right now.
00:43:32
Nobody is is wanting to make I I I assume uh most of the players would not want us to drop that in if it had any adverse effect on the performance. So, we're we're trying to completely address that uh out of the game. Um, and just so everyone's aware, there wasn't a massive massive team working on the the faceware implementation. It was really down to just two or three people. Um, and is Graham Phillips over in the UK. Um, as well as uh some of our QA staff and a bit of design. So, we've got the feature online. It's in the game. Um, it's not in the PU as it ships. It's all shut down um and turned off, but uh we're we're ready to go. Um, there's a couple things left. uh a good you know front end for the players basically because we have a lot of tools that are just
00:44:19
sitting there in in in console variables with different tweaks and these kind of things. So with the new mentality of our our team structures internally and these cross-disciplined teams the FOIP as a feature will go to one of these cross-discipline teams. Now most of the I would say heavy lifting is done. Um so the only things that they really have to do is to wrap an interface around it. So whether that's a spectrum overlay or whether that's an options menu within there so that you can tune different things. Um, I really wanted to put it in the character creator because I think that that'll be a really exciting thing um to be able to drive your character as you sculpt and customize it. Um, but I don't think that the versions are going to line up um in terms of when that that one comes out. So, they'll have to get an interface on it. A bunch of different options. um design will need to take a
00:45:06
look at it just to see uh again how does this interface with um the um I forget what we're calling it but when we do a video com to a player um when you call each other um how that whole party sort of structure works out so it it as a feature is ready but like we said it it it's kind of suffering in the same way of of of asset rot where this is a bit of a and it's not rotting as a feature necessarily but it's not getting it's it's not gotten much further progress in terms of its implementation, but the feature itself is still getting work on it. So, Graham is still making changes um to the way that it actually works. But yeah, it should be coming along shortly and I I'm not even sure if it's on the the road map, but it will appear. yeah, it's it's not currently once that team is is is 100%.
00:45:55
Exactly. Yeah, it's not currently on the road map right now because like I said, a lot a lot of the a lot of the folks that are necessary to implement it into [clears throat] the game are have other tasks ahead of it. So it's at this point there it's it we can't accurately predict whether you know what quarter it would be and or what. So it's so we're holding off on that cuz we are uh well just like the whole sea like people people knew that we were working on whole we've been showing the whole sea in in ATV for a while but it wasn't on the road map and it's because it's kind of it's got a pin in it right now. It's all right we've got it to this point now we have an implementation issue that we need to work with. Uh, we don't know those. We can use those guys on other things that are more valuable to the persistent universe right now because honestly, if we put the we could put the whole scene in the persistent universe in 3.1, what would it really do at this point? It's you still need to be
00:46:41
able to offload and load a cargo to it. I mean, the other game systems that are necessary for it to really function in the PU still haven't come online yet. So, you know, it's one of those things you can you can stick a pin in it and put people on more pressing things. Uh, and that's what the implementation on faceware is. It's it's that you need those guys to do that, but they're on other things right now. And I would argue that in the past we've we've we've driven out features in that way where it really wasn't wasn't as ready as I would consider. And you know, yes, we're an alpha. Totally understood. But I don't think any like and I know the community defends this all the time. Yeah, it's an alpha. It's an alpha. It's an alpha, but we're we're not um what's the best word for Well, I guess judged um as an alpha. We're judged as a live released fully commercial product. So, you know, with that mentality in mind,
00:47:30
we got a little more careful of how we release these features. So, it's cool that we get the features out to you guys. Like, and I've talked about this before, the layer between the developer and the community is so thin at CI that it is so close that, you know, you could work on something um a week away from a player actually experiencing it. And that's scary for a developer. That's super scary because usually we're offline for years at a time working with our own feature, using it, doing things with it, finding issues with it. Um, and then when it goes out, you you're pretty pretty sure that things are going to be okay. Uh, but again, our layer is just just so thin here that it can be our layer is about 24 hours. It can be. It can be. I've done a thing and then 24 hours later, it's absolutely
00:48:18
in your hand. actually a couple items we were working on and I was like, "Okay, tomorrow this is it." Yeah. Well, and and actually I had seen something online, so I'll address it anyways a little bit. Uh because the monle showed up in the patch notes. Right. And now, you know, it's Yeah. Is that the biggest feature? Hell no. I mean, is it is it super important? Not not not incredibly. But we had worked on this thing 6 months ago, right? And it hadn't yet gotten its way in because we knew for sure the concier were going to have this. So, we saw that rolling out and we're like, "What what happened here?" That just hadn't gotten all the way through the the implementation portion. So, it was like a 10-minute job. I mean, really. Um, so a couple clicks and there it is. It's it's ready to go. So, we make sure that that got in. Now, I I fully did not expect to see that in the patch notes that it was just added.
00:49:07
But, you know, that that's how those things happen though. Y, but there's the monle. Well, the monle it's not in 3.0 where it's it's 3.0 301 is is what we're shooting for right now. Uh which is a good time to mention that yes, we have pushed a 301 patch to Iocati uh for testing last night. So you might you might have heard a word of that around is that confidential and I just fail. So I read it on Reddit. Yeah, I know. [laughter] It's on Reddit. I we get all of our news. Sorry. But no, uh yes, we are working on a 301 patch. uh it does have uh uh some some some minor bug fixes. It is not the 3.1 patch that's our big uh quarterly release with with all of our
00:49:54
optimization work. Uh the 3.1 uh 01 patch is primarily designed to address things like the uh golf ball, the pingpong ball, what whatever ball you you you see. It's like a worshack test. Like which ball do you see when this happens? Some people see a ping pong ball and some people see a golf ball. Can I explain that one that why you see that? cuz you're you're you're you're there. Um the skeleton is there and that's actually a representation of the skeleton like and remember remember about two years ago I'm like man I really just want to put a wire representation of the skeleton so that when this happens I know actually what the situation and I'm kind of glad we didn't do it because I I never expect the players would ever see it. Maybe in the case of a bug but I'm pretty glad we don't have the wire dudes running around right now. the
00:50:41
little little ball I guess is a is a safer thing, but that's the uh that's your origin. Yeah. So, uh so so right now it's it's being tested on Evocati and and they they have a pretty solid fix for because it was a UI issue that was causing it, but now the fix has caused a UI issue in typical gameplay. You know, the fix for one bug has now created a new bug. So, they're working on that. Uh so, there's no ETA uh for when the patch will actually make it to live. of course when it's when we think it's ready, but it is currently in testing now. And uh yeah, that wraps up the show, guys. That was about a whole hour. Yeah, just about. Really? Just about. It's all right. That's why we have you on. Yeah, I know. That's why we have you on. So, is there anything else you want to you want to say? You want to leave the stars? Ping pong ball. I want to suggest an Easter egg. Maybe Chris Robert's face on
00:51:29
the ball. I don't know. Whoa. or actually you can suggest it. We're going to sit over here and you just tell us you how how that suggested. There's not a lot of times I I just fully am right behind Jared on something this time 100%. Like I like I do I do a lot of things to mess with Chris Roberts. I'll play with his teleprompter and stuff and I'll I'll I'll How is this worse? Like like No, no. It's like like I mess with Chris Roberts more than anybody in the office. But no, you want to that's all you have a scanned head now. It's redacted over Let's not go that far. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I should I should tell everybody. Oh, is that top version your head? No. No. I don't think it's top secret. It's in It's in Squadron somewhere. So, I look forward [clears throat] to people trying to find it. Yeah, that's the ultimate. It's took a weird direction. Yeah, this took her super weird.
00:52:15
Yeah, but no, sometimes I hook up his face to Foipe and then I tell myself how good of a [laughter] Sean, you're doing great. It's true. Cool. That's awesome. All right, everybody. So, that about wraps up our subscribers town hall for January. Uh, be sure to come right back here in 2 days. Uh, uh, on Friday, uh, Friday we have reverse the verse. It's at a very special UK friendly time of 8:00 in the morning. Oh, it's always a fun one. Uh, so, so yeah. So, you can see you can you can see the difference between Disco doing a monologue at 12:00 in the afternoon and at 8, you know, it's, "Hey, everybody, how am I going to erase the race?" Uh, but Brian Chambers and Todd Papu will be on. They'll be following up. uh tomorrow's around the verse which is our big uh Frankfurt studio update. Uh you all kinds of cool
00:53:03
stuff there and of course uh we'll follow up with Todd on uh the current thinking for piracy gameplay and everything. So yeah, so tune in for that. Uh that's it. So for subscribers town hall, thank you. I'm Jared. That's Sean. Thank you subscribers. Thank you Jared. Thank you. I talk sometimes. Y sometimes. Uh, we'll see you next time everybody. Awesome. Just let's just stop it now. Thank you for watching. So, if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42's development, please follow us on our social media channels. See you soon.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.