Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Outposts and Environmental Storytelling

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:15

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse our weekly look at star citizen's ongoing development I'm sandy Gardner and I'm for Stefan happy to be here with you sandy it's good to have you here to forest today we take an in-depth look at the detail that goes into the surface outpost you'll be exploring in 3.0 from adding specific branding to adjusting the amount of wear and tear from the weather creating these outposts is far more complex than you might think but first last week on burned down we showed you some of the bugs and blockers currently affecting the 3.0 release this included an issue where players would spawn the wrong way in port olisar and immediately fall through the station's geometry Oh to see what issues have been found and fixed since then let's take a look at this week's burned down welcome to burn

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   down our weekly show dedicated to reviewing progress on issues blocking the release of star citizen alpha 3.0 in our week ending report at Roberts space industries calm /schedule - report last Friday we were at 83 total issues which were identified as 12 blockers forty three criticals 23 hides five moderates and no trivial x' with 32 new must fix issues created but let's see how this week is progressing the 3.0 release is the first time that we're going to offer players real persistence it also means that we're finally really leveraging a lot of technology that we've been building towards for a long time it means we have to be prepared to do a lot of interesting bug fixings that it's hard to track down you know it's hard to identify where these are coming from in order to get an idea of how things are up to the tree

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   but over and specifically often a certain email to QA leads earlier today but if you guys can do a 3.0 smoke test today then we can have results of that over the weekend thing that's been really getting through this week and the last couple weeks really has been getting the shopkeeper in order the shopkeeper animations particularly we have these shoots these awesome shoots with a couple different actors that were something to get in and behind the counter and so right now like the counters are where the characters are doing all this and we have a bunch of different counters and a bunch of different characters doing different things at them and so I'm going in and I put it in and I put it all the stuff onto one counter and then they all use it a different way than that like I

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   expected and then you know like right now we're having a place to deliver a box when you need to and I got it out when I got it working I was so happy and then I played it and then I realized that the guys leaning right with a box was going to be delivered and so I walk up and just like stuff it in this face it's something that you think you have figured out and then you see it in and you realize though I didn't have this figured out I had really should have probably thought about this harder before and coordinating with the UK and the design team over here to go through and just get get the animations in and get the face team to have this sync so this is all now one-to-one so she's actually playing face animations and then getting all of that to work in sumption so that if you go in as a player not only we should be able to do this but she'll be able to intelligently like you know turn and look and be like hey how's it going you know I mean this

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   right here I mean this is the result of thousands of hours of in a multiple you know and you know it's it's not one person I mean there's you know there's your snack you know there's you know 7080 a hundred people that were involved in trying to get this a bit at all clicks I think that right now we have to ensure that we first apply today and I think that we need to keep the momentum on the European time zone so we can tell by the girl we're totally done yet and then that way when the US times are going how they have the Momentum's switchover West case by tomorrow morning we have to be in a position where you walk in tomorrow morning and you're like well you should - at least raking end of UK days that would be arguably the best year I'm working on usable

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   those are objects that NPCs use in the game so the frustrating thing about this is that quite a few of those things used to work before but are now broken again so in this video for example we have an NPC who grabs a cup and for some reason it just is in his hands and then he puts it down and he pushed himself out of the booth with with this cup so after a lot of research we found out that this is because the cup actually has collision and the table also is collision and during this interaction they are not supposed to collide with each other because they are both part of the same process namely in drinking in this case but for some reason they do so the embassy puts it down pushes himself out

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   of the booth which then messes up everything that follows including heavily clipping through the booth to be precise though we haven't entirely figured out is really an animation issue so the investigation still needs to happen string givers there's a lot of challenges because we've got a very cinematic experience that we're trying to use with the same feather blending tech for everything else and so we've got some challenges that the other wild lines and stuff doesn't really have to deal with so a car will finish lines in like different positions so he'll he'll be forward to kind of you know talk to the player a little more discreetly year and he'll finish his line there whereas a lot of the other wild lines they kind of can say they're their lines from any

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   positions so you know whether they're wiping a counter or standing at a counter just leaning on it or leaning up against the wall they can all say hello goodbye whatever but Eckhart's you really want to feel that emotion that he's trying to convey and so reusing the same tech has been challenging in that sense and the other thing that we were able to do is look at getting to fix on the car issues that we've been seeing those combination of designing the AI team on their sprints and making sure that each node still actually present so he was missing from the bill at that point and that got fixed as well so to fix that one on which is cool so I'm working on right now is item highlighting its shops we've been updating the way you interact with shop

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   items have a smooth the shopping experience to use our existing interaction system instead of our AR data and so if you take a look here when you look at a weapon on the rack or sort or whatever it'll highlight that weapon so you know you can buy it but if you pay extra close attention you'll see things like the magazine or sometimes the scope or other bits of the gun are not being highlighted and that's because things that we have attached to these shopping items will not get the highlighting just the main item so I'm going through and making it check all the attached items so everything gets highlighted so you don't get weird situations like this so how is it the shovelry cask stuff is that and I didn't go particularly well I mean we saw you sell pretty much everything because the

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    thing about shopping the key is because they're all going to be the same across the board so once you see all this all you've seen everything zooming it gets through everything and unfortunately most of things don't work and you are is not fully established so the primary focus of it is just where's the UI yeah yeah and so it's not very similar towards last time so we're currently having some problems with right now is doors across a bunch of different ships particularly caterpillar as well as the constellation you see the constellation the doors seem to be fleeing they don't want to stay inside the constellation at the moment so we've been chasing down exactly why they are fleeing the nest and leaving everything within the constellation in kind of a rough state because of that some people don't understand exactly how complicated

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    our doors are they're not just a simple open and closed because they also do things like hold the environment in and the you know the atmosphere for your ship as well as represent certain areas of the physics grid we're consolidating all of our door texts of all be variants of the same system one of the things that I'm doing is that a there has been some mismatch in least reported I haven't found it yet with some mismatch in the actual assets being used possibly as a result of that switch so I'm going through and cleaning that stuff up now making sure that everything is are the same naming conventions everything uses the same effects or

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    sounds as they're supposed to or hooks those into the proper bones because all of our doors that bring something in with the load-out will have the same expectations of what those attached points are going to be now we have had some interesting bugs I guess I think because you know when we when Glynn project first staff did a lot of this stuff was kind of more of a pipe dream and we didn't necessarily have the tech to do it now we've got the tech to do it there's you realize that those it doesn't really matter if something is a centimeter off or it doesn't really matter if something's not quite right it is now really really important it's been really really good kind of therapeutic for us to kind of go back there actually do you know what looked at this and it's

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    not quite right but we know how we need to fix this now and it's I think it's been a good chance for us to be much stricter with our our processes much stricter with our naming conventions and our metrics in QA we've been amongst the first wave of guinea pigs for the rollout of coffee world 3 internally it's really benefit others in QA and it will benefit everyone else too I've got on my screen copy all three which is our internal patch a tool and right now I'm just going to be incrementing a 3.0 build to the next version so as it goes through it's picking up on what data we do already have from our previous run and it skips over anything it doesn't need to do and just as the downloads it does so previously on that last run which went a

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    little bit wrong our loose files took a while and already here we have an updated 3.0 build the copy builds 3 application itself is really just the tip of the iceberg we've got many people working on lots of different moving parts to get this to actually worked from the build guys over in Austin through to engineering in Frankfort who have actually developed the app sure that's the copy bill 3 is based upon so really this week's been tying up all the loose ends had a few issues the last minute realizing that we could launch because we needed some changes making to the build system however that's all got resolved and we launched hopefully successfully today so quantum drive involved two major things getting the ship across the system wherever we're going at you know fractions the speedo

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    light and ensuring they got there safely we've been getting the ships there no problem getting there safely has been the issue if two people want to jump at the same point there were chances of them colliding asteroids getting in the way stuff like that so our biggest issue is now has been dealing with the potential collisions along the way and preventing that so detecting at you know a tenth or 2/10 the speed of light am I about to hit something and stopping soon enough we've had several several issues where people would jump to the same point and arrive on top of each other and just explode the big one we had for a while was people would jump to a planet or whatever and end up inside the star and this there and you would just see a glowing circle I've got what's going on look around oh I am now the star of the

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    system now we're still knocking more out than coming in and at the time we're filming this we resolved 54 with 46 being added to our must fix list and we're currently sitting at 88 issues blocking his first release well across all of our internal branches we've checked in over two thousand fifty two updates this week alone the next time our public schedule gets updated you can see even more progress as we work to keep you as up-to-date as we are internally also we've officially moved our development team over to the 3.0 branch which is another great milestone for us to further triage issues coming in and get us ever closer to our first release to non vig testers our optimizations and polish are making for better testing allowing us to move quicker into regression and bug identification so come back next week to see the progress we're making here on

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    burn down just a reminder that there won't be an atv next week while we're at Gamescom in the meantime you can check out the production schedule on our website to track the progress of 3.0 and speaking of 3.0 one of the features we've showcased in the upcoming release is the ability to visit of of surface outposts scattered across crusaders moons these outposts will be places for you to explore do missions and cross paths with other players now take a look at the team responsible for making these outposts interesting and connected to the surrounding environment so the last update we kind of showed you what the outpost archetype is the main

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    shake language how it sat on the surface whereas now we're going to go a little bit deeper into the branding and the integration and the detailing that we're going to put into the interiors so we're given a brief and it will be quite light and in terms of narrative and they'll say something like ol re re is a high-tech hydroponics lab and that grows cutting-edge by engines of plants and they used in medicine so then they'll also say what the field will be will be high clean organized scientific nice place to work and I just convey that in a visual method so this isn't just a process that can just be done in an instant it's a progression thing so I'll do like a first iteration and that'll probably just involve maybe putting down the selection of props and then all them

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    pass that on to my leader and our director and they will review it and they will say okay maybe the field here isn't quite what we need we need something maybe a little more sterile or something a little more cleaner say for example something like the focused on we need something a bit more sinister looking so it's a process of layering the dressing and then building up an authentic atmosphere so we go from that initial point and then we'll get to the end where we're kind of happy with it and we feel like when you walk in in the player goes wow this is cool traditional what you do is you concept out your vest a shot and kind of describe where their location is whereas now with the tools we have it's actually more natural more organic to just have a little Scout around that way you kind of get natural happy accidents so for

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    example you might find a location where the is a nice kind of rich line and then there's maybe a gas chain just peeking over the horizon and then that's when we stop saying this will be a good location you also get that second element of believability were you know rather than putting down an arbitrary location it's what people actually build there you know but this way we can almost validate the location you know is it believable would people build there and then that's when we can start establishing our compositions I found a lot of times where I decided on a place for an outpost and I've dropped a point down and then I fly maybe a mile to the left nothing oh this is a much better place to pull that outpost delete the old one move my type of point drop it down there it's the process of 30 seconds so you know it is very quick to iterate on I do

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    basically fly around the moon and think this is much better oh you know the gas giant hanging in the sky just here really looks good so let's put an outpost here and I tend to move things around quite a lot so secondly about integration and believability it comes to the surface in the weathering so when you see an outpost you can you should see an indication about how long he's been in that landscape the type of climate that's being happening there and thirdly the type of people that live in this location so these three factors go a long way for describing you know the visual style of this location so one of these elements is slightly off they don't kind of break that immersive element so it's something we always pay attention to then we integrate these

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    outposts onto the planet and basically that just means how it fits in if it's a sandy planet you want the outpost and have some of that to help you embed it and it doesn't look like it's floating on this planet and it's nothing to do the environment you know see it's an environment and it will take part of that on we had several levels of how we integrate our outpost onto a planet's surface we've got the outpost itself the exterior walls and the ramps and stairs they have a blend map which takes on some of the texture information from the outpost some of that stone procedurally so by the base of the outpost actually uses a tech to blend the planet surface into the texture of like the stilts and the ramps and then we have

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    our actual walls having their own blend map so if it's the sandy one it will blend sand will come in with the gaps and the crevices and then the ice you want to go the same kind of thing ice will build up like Frost it's like in a jungle environment or more like life like biome then you might get moss or vines or something like that so that's the sort of blending we do on there and then we do the decals themselves so that's like projected decals of of similar things but we can do a bit more localized kind of build up so streaks of coming down the outpost and build up on the roof of the outpost if there's been a sandstorm then it's blown over the top and then we can show that we can actually control the amount of built-up itself so using the blend Maps we can

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    see how new this outpost is it is it sort of quite recent it might only have patches of dirt around or has this outpost been on there for many many years and it's sort of maybe it's abandoned and it's got stuff coming inside as well as it's covered like you imagine like an Arctic base has been there for many years it would be covered in and just frost and ice and then you only get those hints of what the underlying wall might be so on the interiors we've been defining what these spaces that actually are so rather than just having these generic volumes we've been defining what the architects are so you know if you're going into an engineering space or medical or habitation things like that secondly it's about the brand the who who owns this place so we usually get a good

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    brief from the law team and that's our starting point there are different corporations that we have for the outpost so for example we have a re corporation and Shubin interstellar corporation and it's slight differences between these two and so the re re corporation is probably a better place to work and it's more pleasurable for employees and and they focus more on sore alpaca culture the Shubin on the other hand is maybe slightly more impressive is it's not was probably a pleasant place to work in order to do the branding of the outposts we first get the information from the writers the law and the narrative so what these up lists are what company owns them if they are a company or independent and what's the sort of general theme and narrative of

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    that company and how how it looks and how its dressed and things like that so for example if it's Shubin it would be very corporate it's a really big corporation it's kind of sterile they don't necessarily treat their workers badly but they're sort of like just their workers and there's not a lot of character there something like VR is still corporate but it's a little bit more considered like a nicer place to work so you should see that in the in the way it's dressed and even layout and things like that and then you've got like the more rundown corporations like art Corp feel more dirty they really don't treat their workers very well and then you have the independent company so they wouldn't be as dirty necessarily

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    but they wouldn't be as tidy as a corporation to have a bit more character because that they're kind of like a home from home so someone saved up a bit of money managed to sort of buy a mining machine and started their own little little independent so there'd be more character it might be a bit Messier but they've kind of be living there as well that's kind of interesting too that law and stuff which should be shown in the dressing so you should be able to see what kind of company is just by that but then we've obviously got the actual branding like the logos the and the color scheme so we go about that by instead of doing all this stuff spoke Lee with materials we feed in our colors my primary secondary tertiary colors and any kind of logo colors and practical

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    stuff as well into dataforge which is just a library of date really and then that feeds back into the material so we don't manually make like lots of different materials of different colors we just put in our RGB values and then those colors get fed in so whoever owns say this mining station if it's Shubin then it will tie in to that color scheme and take that so it's a nicer way than having to manually do everything and then we've got the logos themselves so we have our we have like an atlas of logos and idents and lines and fonts and things like that and then they get fed in as well so if Shubin owns this then it takes this whole set of materials and then if we aree owns it and takes that set of materials and if it's an

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    independent maybe it doesn't even have a logo and we try not to like just plaster logos everywhere we want to be a bit more subtle you'd obviously sexy some but depends on the corporation but you know we don't want to see like rere rere everywhere you look so some corridors might just have like a certain colored line that they help you link that to the to the company and there might be some not necessarily logos but just symbols and things started around again just reinforcing that with that brand so that's that's how that's done and and it's it's great that it's all procedural so we can just drop one down say okay this is this one is start core it automatically I mean there's a lot of setup it will take the color scheme and the logos format it becomes an

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    incredibly complex job when you have to consider so much about where the surface of the planet works and these environments aren't just a static level that is going to look the same every time you go back to it they'll be in a constantly evolving kind of spinning planet that eventually is going to be orbiting the Sun in a way that makes sense it's a lot to sort of think about so you have to consider things like vistas and lighting are going to change and you can't as an environment artists you can't pick a perfect place to put an outpost and know that it's going to always look like that so we have to make sure that we're working towards environments that look good in many different scenarios because as the moon rotates it's going to go from day to night so we have make sure that it looks good at night and day but it's the same outpost so

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    there's a lot of systems talking to one another there it's a complex task if we think about the eventual purpose of making this entire process at least semi automated we can't maintain individual outposts so we could make an outpost by hand and export it to a level that's an easy job but if you think about having to make a thousand outpaced by hand and exposing each one of those to the level that's a thousand outposts we have to maintain if we go back down the chain all the way to that initial initial geometry prefab if there's something breaks in an outpost over here then all we have to fix is one prefab over here whereas if something broke in an outpost that was custom we wouldn't be able to fix it across all the other outposts at the same time it would only ever be fixed in that custom outpost so in a

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    procedural system you only ever dealing with pieces but you fix one of those pieces you fix all the pieces in every instance of that outpost that is around so it may be complex now in terms of initial setup but once the pipeline tools come in it should be a lot easier to maintain than if we were making a thousand custom outposts yeah so that's the reason really its initial complexity and initial sort of beating your head against the wall of trying to figure out the system but once that system is in place and once the tools are in place the end result is quick and easy to get and it also is a lot easier to maintain so in terms of how I use the editor I'll be given like a set of brushes probably props guys and I'll also get requests for other props

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    because when I construct seams and it'll probably go with my art direct and he'll say look you know we need something more on the ceiling and so lately I've been making a lot of ceiling pieces and these could be for something the in the labs they needed something more technical looking so what I've done not creating more ceiling vents positions for lights particularly so I work quite heavily with lighting artists and he'll say only you know some sort of five degree angles in order to put more lights onto it to illuminate areas of the room which if it was just a flat ceiling would be quite difficult to do so giving him these options he can do his job more effectively we work with pretty bad as well and these are usually pre-constructed brushes use these can

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    have things I like to hear and sound effects and stuff like that so when I put them down the control ready to go and gives a more immediate sort of look as to what we require so because we've got all these systems talking to one another we have a lot of complexity in the way these things are built and just as an example the outposts at the moment in a traditional game you would probably put all your geometry together light it in an editor and export that level and it will go into the game quite a two-step process for the outposts we start with a geometry we put those into a geometry prefab a collection of geometry prefabs goes into a building piece prefab those building pieces then go into final building eg an outpost those outposts go

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    into an object container that gets put into an outpost cluster preset that preset gets spawned on the moon's the moon with its preset gets put into another object container our object container goes into the solar system and the solar system gets exported to the game so there's a multi-link chain of stuff that we have to maintain and manage and all this is reliant on naming conventions and file structures so we're working really hard at the moment basically the tech artist who wrote it Alex who you've already talked to tried it himself and this is the system he wrote he could have managed it it was too complicated so we are working very hard at the moment to basically take all that middle section out completely and automate it so that the artists will only ever be involved with that initial

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    start and all the way through to the preset creation and putting the preset onto the moon or the middle bit with the multiple prefabs and presets and object containers is all going away and should be completely automated because asking an artist to maintain that level of complexity while at the same time being creative is an impossible request so our tools guides and our tech artists are working very hard to make that as streamlined as possible but it is becoming more and more complex as we go along it relies on others basically building a rule set in a set of automation that makes it completely invisible to an artist and an end user because otherwise people are going to go insane what we're looking to do is have the idea of you have a quite a vast landscape and the player kind of locates

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    one of these outposts they should start thinking about how long has it been there who owns it and things like that and what we're looking to do is layer that narrative from the outside to the inside or so all the way down to how the food is arranged on the interior across from the outside to the interior space the play should start getting those notes of the narrative all the way through and I think in contrast to these barren landscapes to these pockets of quite intense detail it's a quite a nice contrast so now we're getting a really good idea of how it feels for the play to explore and kind of Traverse around these locations so continue to polish but continue to refine and just get that experience to a very high standard so

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    we're looking forward to the next release and then get out to the public and get people exploring [Music] as you saw these surface outposts are our next step forward in environmental storytelling that's right there'll be narrative clues about who owns the outpost how long it's been there and who's lived inside be sure to keep an eye out for those details when paying them a visit and that's it for today's show thanks to our subscribers for supporting all of our shows August issue of jump point will be released tomorrow so be sure to check it out and finally a big thank you to all of our backers your continued support of this project is what makes it all possible be sure to tune in to twitch on Friday the 25th at 7:00 UTC to catch our Gamescom presentation and until then we will see you around the earth

39. 00:31:33

    thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest in the star citizen in squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon