Star Citizen: Around the Verse 3.11 - DE

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of around the verse where we take a look at star citizens development I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm Forest Stefan to start things off just wanted to welcome all of the newcomers to the game and if you're thinking of joining Now's the Time this is the last week for the Super Hornet freefly and if you haven't tried one yet for yourself just click on the link at the top of our site to get further details on how to start flying and Beyond the Pu Alpha and Arena Commander content available to play right now we have a lot of other stuff in the pipe you want to update everybody on what's Happening oh I'd love to uh so we have Alpha 2.6 has been making some great progress with new things dropping in every single day the avocati have been hammering away with the new balancing so

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   watch out design has been wrapping up a few new missions for Crusader uh the music logic system is pretty much done U the ship team have two new ships that are featured complete uh and ready for release yeah those two ships are the heral and the Vanguard hoplight they're two pretty different ships uh they're pretty cool and they'll be awesome additions to the game oh totally agree on the arena Commander front art have been polishing up um some new item pickup system and the Pirates have been starting to really swarm about so be careful uh new cameras are in showing off new sweet camera angles there's just so much so much stuff cool we've also been doing a lot of internal play tests on Star Marine with the whole team and been getting great feedback the fronted Network refactor and network improvements are also expected to be wrapping up soon yeah and uh mark As We Know The Bug Smasher uh found a pretty funny bug this week where um we could

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   actually teleport through space I think it should be a feature but you know super cool you can check that out on our Star Citizen YouTube channel so now let's head over to our Frankfurt office uh for a studio update to look past 2.6 into 3.0 that's correct thanks guys I'm Brian Chambers development director from fary 42 Frankfurt the road leading up to Citizen con it was incredibly busy um it's always cool to show off our progress and get that out in front of you guys and the support's been overwhelming for for myself and the team uh team's back at it cross all disciplines everybody's busy working uh for this week's update let's start with QA where Melissa will give you some insight in how the QA Department functions here in Frankfurt the Frankfurt QA team is

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   currently made up of three testers with two dedicated to testing the engine and one dedicated to testing Squadron 42 and FPS we work closely with the development team whether we're testing new Cod changes or investigating an existing issue there are an array of different types of testing we do on a daily basis but test requests are high up on our list of tasks that we do pretty regularly so a test request is essentially a request uh submitted by a developer who would like to submit Cod changes that could potentially break the build uh in order to prevent this the code will go through thorough testing where sometimes the entire game or only certain parts of the game will need to be tested in this specific test one of our Engineers has made Shadow and object optimization code changes he provided us with a custom bin 64 which contained his

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   changes and during our testing we discovered a one-off crash and excessive Shadow flickering throughout Homestead we then compared our findings to the vanilla code version of the client and reported our final results to the developer this process prevents new issues from being introduced into a build however the challenge we sometimes face is if there were any recent code changes to the same system the test request is meant to address and then these changes were then picked up when the developers sync to the latest code in per force to compile the bin 64 it then becomes difficult to tell which code is causing the issues regardless all issues are reported further investigated and fixed prior to submission and the final result is a bill that contains improved Shadows no flickering and no crashes and this is what I like about being QA here in the Frankfurt office being able to track

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   down these issues and contribute to the process of fixing them as well together with a development team it's a really rewarding experience and I consider myself lucky to be on this team and contribute to the development process thanks Melissa uh QA is always a huge part of development uh especially with her and the team working with the engine team here I don't always Envy their job but they do help us dig in and sort out any bugs that accidentally creep in for the next part of the update let's check in with our senior VFX artist Caleb will heal breakdown some of the VFX work they did for Homestead today I'm going to give you a more comprehensive breakdown of the large Sandstorm effect that was featured in the homestead demo this effect required a lot of collaboration with the audio and even the cinematics department

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   to make it function properly within the engine so here we are inside the editor with the homestead level opened up the sandstorm effect itself is actually fairly simple it's only made up of three different Sprites uh there's a thinner sand texture at the top of the effect um a thicker one down below and also the lightning texture the two sand textures also include normal Maps as well as the Optical flow maps for the frame blending these Optical flow Maps give us a virtually unlimited frame rate for our textures because of this we can slow down or speed up the effect without the animation looking choppy something we actually do as the sandstorm approaches the player to increase the sense of forboding and scale the forward motion of the effect is actually controlled by

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   track view the blue line is the path that it follows as it approaches the player there is also a fog volume entity that moves up from the ground this fog volume is to help with the transition as the sandstorm hits the player however it is also used as an optimization technique when the player is inside the storm we can disable the effect and enable a localized effect of sand whipping past the camera by disabling the effect while it's hidden in the fog we can sidestep some of the overdraw issues that can arise when the whole screen is filled with particles as we move forward all of these systems will be unified and controlled by our planetary weather system here we have the final effect running inside the engine thanks Caleb it always surprises

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   me how much particles infects help in bringing the world alive it's it's cool to see the progress uh rest of the team incredibly busy as I mentioned mentioned uh making great progress from cut scenes on Squadron 42 to weapons to design and so on um another quick update is that the office expansion that we've had um we're now actively in it we're now actively here and working and functioning so I hope to show that off soon so that wraps it up from Frankfurt short and sweet thanks for watching and see you next time wow that Sandstorm looks pretty epic it's like something out of the Fury Road oh yeah Max awesome um yeah I mean really now that all this art and Tech is uh coming online we're able to develop some really interesting Planet Side uh

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    gameplay environments right um and even the environment wind is can become much of a threat as you know possibly another player there we go speaking of other players let's now go to this week's Community update with Tyler hey everyone Tyler whiten Community manager in the Austin Texas Studio here to bring you this week's Community update now as previously mentioned and just as a reminder this is the final week for the fall freefly so if you wanted a chance to fly the Anvil Super Hornet you can click the link at the top of our website to find out more information now speaking of free flies Racers get ready the origin M50 will be made available to all subscribers throughout the month of November last weekend the Star Citizen Community in Germany came together to put on their own Community organized citizen con this

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    event had almost 500 people in attendance you don't believe me check this out greetings from Frankfurt that's a whole lot of citizens and if you didn't have the opportunity to watch it live you can find out all the details on how the event went over at citizencon dode and if you're interested in these type of events just a reminder to head over to bar citizen. check out the interactive map because it's very likely there's an event in your area and now it's time for this week's MVPs yes plural because this time we don't have one but seven MVPs so I want to give a huge congratulations to sth avalene Valkyrie firem snow crash can't trip and Mickel 881 for their

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    exemplary efforts on the RSI help desk now for those of you not familiar with what that is this is an RSI chat channel on our website where players can come together to ask or answer questions about the game so congratulations again to all of you your this week's MVPs lastly the week would not be complete without reverse the verse so make sure to tune in tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight time where we're going to talk about everything that you saw on today's episode thanks again everyone for all your support and we'll see you in the verse moving back to our Frankfurt office getting procedural planets working is a massive undertaking one we can't possibly show in a single episode so next up is the first of several segments we'll be doing to focus on cedal Planet Tech being developed in Frankfurt so on that note uh let's take a look now at the ecosystem painting the

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    zone system um and some other cool features that uh Frankfurt has been working on for 3.0 and and Beyond so today we want to give you the first out of probably many deep dives into the core of what makes our planets tick and about the planet creation and this is Tech that is developed here mainly in Frankfurt by Marco Sasha Carson of course basically with the homestead demo for citizen con practical test case of what we call the wi2 um Planet Tech which is we are already basically at V3 now so we kind of needed to say at one point that is it for the demo so we have a couple more features already in progress and the homest set demo of course was not just made because of our love of giant space worms but also to have engineers and artists work

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    on something that is basically a substantial test case so that we can mature our tools our planet editor or what we call it the plan ad and to basically arrive at something where the usability has grown into a mature tool set but also the feature set of course with the massive object distribution the vegetation ecosystem painting and terrain height map working with our environment artist Pascal on the ecosystems themselves which in the case of Homestead were actually only five distinct ones and my job on Homestead was as visual director and for that I basically initialized the in and mood and overall feel of this and then also worked with our environment artist Pascal on the ecosystems themselves and I basically also every day a couple of hours spent with Marco Sasha and Carson

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    on the tool set itself hello we are going to talk about planets today um thanks to everyone on the Star Citizen subredit and the cig Community forums for your positive feedback we really appreciate it initially we were not planning to have seamless transition from space to planets into Star Citizen around September we started rewriting from scratch the cry engine terrain system here you can see my first experiment of a procedural Planet without any atmosphere at the end of October 2015 then this is our first test with atmosphere in November um castom vza has been working on the atmospherics in clouds as well as a number of other in features and here is our first public

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    update at the end of 2015 showing the first Delamar Planet version um it was mostly Pro procedurally based but uh was already integrated into the editor so uh you could place Landing zones on top of the planet in February 2016 we had the first man working on planet um at this stage uh we still did not have ground details and we still had many Precision issues as you can see in the video so during March and April we made a lot of progress we can see more details when zooming into the planet and this is a video of the first buggy driving on the planet surface at this stage the planets were mostly procedural and even though we were getting good results it was becoming difficult to really customize

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    the planets there was no diversity in the planets it was either a big rocky planet or a jungle planet or a desert Planet but there was no variation in the ecosystems on this planet and with V2 this changed we introduced something new which we call ecosystems so when we talk about ecosystems what we mean is basically you can think of it as kind of a level of its own um it's a a piece of terrain and it covers about four or eight square kilometers you could say and uh each ecosystem contains many many different kinds of assets which are created by the artists U part of it is the terrain itself like the information that defines how the terrain looks is it mountains or

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    do we have dunes or do we have um plateaus or canyons and all this type of stuff then additionally to that of course you need all the ground textures that make up the surface of the terrain do you have like Rocky ground or grassy ground and this type of stuff and then on top of that of course you also need um assets all kinds of assets that need to be scattered in a procedural way this cannot be done by hand if you think on a global scale so this is all all of these things come into the ecosystem and for this Sasha hober developed a own editor for the engine and within this editor we basically all this information is accumulated and tweaked we tweak the height of the mountains and where which texture belongs and which assets Belong

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    Together on which surface and all this type of stuff comes together in the planet editor in the engine and once all these ecosystems are done you can basically take your planet which is more or less gray at the moment and just pick some of these ecosystems and paint them over the planet and this is basically how the terrain is generated in the end of course you when this is generated you want to make sense of it you know you want to have a rig lines of mountains and then behind you want to have some hills and that goes into grassy lands or a desert or whatever so as citizen con 2016 we were supporting spherical terrain seamless transition runtime generation at 60

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    frames per second without any pre-processing un restrict and view distance in planetary scale plus uh different ecosystems and the first version of uh procedur of vegetation as well as hard tation and per pixel displacement going back in time a bit before games SC here is a test showing how Pascal had quickly put together a Mars looking Planet using a few ecosystems and changing some parameters like atmosphere colors and so on so with just a few ecosystems and painting them on the planet through the planet editor we can create many different type of environments and planet here I'm showing a bit of our work in

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    progress features one of of the next steps for us is improving the procedure of vegetation placement and object distribution in this video clip you can see trees and grass being rendered through the zone system which Chris bolt is going to talk about in a bit so so here you can see in this last

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    video another working progress feature uh a rotating planet the planet is actually rotating extremely fast but at this scale looks like it's not moving but if you get very close on top of this large static control tower which is not moving we can see the planet rotating very fast another interesting thing to notice is the ocean which was worked on by Anis one of our new hes in Frankfurt the ocean is reusing in the planeter patches with different displacement this way we're getting adaptive subdivision computations for free and we don't even need any extra geometry memory usage for the ocean the original ocean was also just a flat terrain piece more or less and uh of course for the planet we also

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    needed this to be a spherical object and uh this feature made it in you can see there we have proper waves there's vertex animation it's nicely tesselated the shading is working uh Anis has really put a lot of work into it and the next feature would be the clouds uh the clouds are still in a very early stage Carson vensel is putting a lot of work into it doing a lot of research but you can already see some realistic Behavior you can see they are casting Shadows there are different thicknesses to them in certain areas so there's less light penetrating and speaking of light one thing that also changed quite a bit is uh the sun because this is a spherical

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    object uh you have different kinds of lighting all over the planet so you cannot just simply say okay for this planet I want to have daylight I want the things whatever is happening on the planet to take place in Sunset because depending on where you are on the planet you have different lighting situations and all this is now implemented depending on where you are the atmospherics gener different effects uh at the sunset obviously every turn everything turns red and during daylight you have a blue bounce light from this guy and all this type of stuff hello everyone I would like to talk to you about the changes we did to our core technology which allowed us to implement the planets as you have seen them during citizen con one of the first components we changed was the job system um this system is responsible to

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    distribute work which must be done to computer frame in a video game of a m mle CPUs this work is called jobs in our engine um the old approach was applicable for perhaps 3,000 to 5,000 jobs per frame with the new one we can handle a very larger armor um this was realized mainly by utilizing the inherent parallelism of games which is basically the smart way of saying that we have always more than one object to update future more we Chang the job system to better communicate with the prating system to allow for better usage of Sur avilable resources we then build the sound system which is a spal object management system such a system is responsible um to all an efficient way to query objects based on SP properties for example finding objects visible

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    inside the camera or overlapping with a box this system initially placed the old o based scaling approach and is now used to store all kinds of objects the world space position this system had two important characteristics being efficient the system should scale well we already have over 200,000 vorable objects present in Crusader this is realized by ensuring that we use efficient data structures and use a processing layout which Maps well to multiple cores with the help of the job system then the system should cope very efficiently with large clusters of simultaneous moving objects here we use a novel approach of using multiple reference frames the regular approach used in games is to store objects in a single coordinate system the so-called world space this world space position is

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    in sent to to the GPU of 32-bit um coordinates and projected to the screen with a projection Matrix for Star Citizen we cannot use this approach due to two reasons the GPU can only process 32-bit floating Point positions effic efficiently but we need 64-bit POS positions for all large game board we want to move kilometer long spaceships in planets hook space in the old approach this would mean updating the positions of all objects on site ships or planets which is not possible in real time so we did something else at the highest level we organize our world in a 64-bit prision Universe coordinate system to render the object stored in it we compute a camera relative position

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    before we send the data to the GPU this allows us to keep the ru world as one coordinate system by using the more efficient 32-bit position on GPU to move objects around we use multiple zones a zone is its own coordinate system and all objects which move together like a spaceship or a planet with this design we can move an arbitrary large number of objects by just moving around the pivot of the coordinate system calling in such a system is implemented by converting the tested against objects into the sound space this sums up that Technologies we had to advance for our goal of a living Universe thank you that'll about do it for this week's episode remember to tune in for verse

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    the verse tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. Pacific or 3 p.m. GMT we'll be back with the team in Germany to discuss procedural planets and more uh awesome uh and we also like to thank our subscribers we wouldn't be able to show you all this cool stuff like the procedural Tech and produce all these awesome shows uh without your continued support so it's so much appreciated it is and until next week we will see you around around the verse thank you for watching so if you want to

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    keep it with the latest and greatest and Star Citizen of Squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon