Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Hovers Are For Lovers | 3.4 Ep. 2

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   I [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of

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   around the verse I'm Eric Kon Davis and I'm Josh Herman in today's update we'll take a look at how graev works in the new flight model and see recent work on playable female characters but first let's take a look at some recent Community Shenanigans our ever awesome Spanish Community got together for their recurring event series loen Quinta this time around they engaged in an epic vehicular battle in a huge crater on dayon yeah those events are always awesome yes they are the Los 50 crew losenta quentas thank

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   you always brings it so moving on to development when creating an entirely new flight model as we are currently working on we cannot forget about gra Lev no we can't let's take a look at how gra Lev Vehicles will work when that new flight model goes live here's David Coulson and Andrew Nicholson with some insights into the wild world of hover bikes the old gra Lev system was heavily dependent on the old flight model and because the new flight model is a a lot of work in the difference of implementation um the old grav have stopped working when we move toward the new flat model the kind of fundamental difference between a a gravl Thruster and a regular Thruster is that it needs a surface to work with so you need to be close to the ground to get the traction and the speed you need and so a onside modifying and refactoring the implementation of gravl we thought that

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   we would reconsider how we want it to feel and how we wanted to actually you know play and so that prompted um a different implementation that we think better achieves the design goals that have been set out for this we wanted to make it feel like you had uh risk again previously you were getting too um disconnected from the from the terrain make the player have to make choices based on the terrain that's up and coming if the if it looks Rocky and rough you want to avoid that and you can sort of build tracks around that sort of thing previously the bikes I think were a little bit too easy they used to hover over obstacles which we no longer do in the new gravli model it's a little bit more challenging um but there's also a little bit more depth for you to learn how to drive nicely and properly this is just how we're how we're modeling this to sort of make it feel a little bit

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   more interesting and a little bit more uh fun to control with with a few a bit more depth and so as you're hovering this is ion model will inform the gra plates how much thrust they need to provide to hold the bike at its at its certain height that it needs to be and we have a lot more control over this now we can sort of modify the height as you're going so if you want to like fly over rocks and stuff you can hold space and it will like go over the tops of rocks and things like that and then the the jet ski model is essentially simulated as though you were semi submerged in water we have this like fictitious water around the bike and then as you're going through the water um we'll model the amount of friction that the the water is putting on the side of the bike and then that will inform the thrusters on the side of the bike what thrust they need to be

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   giving at any point in time um so we still have the thrusters effectively driving the bike and the grab plates but the way they're deciding how to thrust is a lot different to how it used to be um it's a little bit more complicated I guess but it feels a lot nicer to drive the bikes so I think it's absolutely worth it I think overall the changes we're making with the grav l system are going to make for a enjoyable experience the players going to feel more connected to the bikes they're going to feel more like um bikes overall anyway rather than just floaty spacecrafts across the the planet they want they're going to be connected to the ground um and all the potential terrain issues we can introduce can result in some quite exciting new race tracks going forward in the future that looks really cool it does it looks awesome you cannot wait for the new flight model all right moving on devs have been adjusting

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   animations for playable female characters in order to differentiate some movements from their counterparts let's go to Brian Brewer for more info about the process of retargeting animations right now we are undergoing the arduous task of retargeting all of our male animations to our female character typically in games males and females share the same skeleton uh but that has a few drawbacks like the females tend to be masculine in our game we decided we wanted to have a unique skeleton for our female so that she is unique and different from our male character but this does however come with a few um challenges that we have to overcome for example her arms and her legs have different proportions than her male we have two ways of retargeting our animations we have an automated approach and we have a manual approach each has its own advantages and disadvantages the

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   automated way is headed up by Rob Howen our content tech department with thousands of animations it's purely imp practical to be able to do everything by hand our manual method is reserved for retargets where we we want a higher Fidelity it's usually done by the animator who did the mail animation after it's been approved it's usually for when we want to have in interaction with an object like a spaceship uh and it opens up a set of controls for us so that we can better have contact points uh and interactions with that object after an animation is finished and approved by our animation director we import the female character into our scene with the click of a button she is being driven by the male character we then take a little bit of time to turn on on and off certain pull and reach effectors over the course of the animation we also keep in mind technical

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   requirements such as headcam for the player View and the origin node which we call the locator Locomotion when we are happy with the result we bake down the live retarget and Export to game for testing the advantages of first retargeting all the male animations to the female uh is that we're able to get everything in game and hand it off to design right away they're no longer having to wait for animation to supply them with content uh one of the disadvantages though is that the female will still be very masculine in some cases it doesn't matter you'll never notice in other cases we definitely need to replace those animations with properly shot female motion capture once we've successfully replaced all the retargeted animation with properly shot female motion uh it will make our game feel more alive uh it'll give um variety to

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    our universe and uh hopefully make everything feel more immersive so playable female characters MH what are you the most excited about getting that new playable character into the game I think I'm just excited about bringing the additional choice to the players uh just kind of getting an extra another gender into the into the verse is going to be an exciting thing we've been talking about it for a really long time yeah I think it's just exciting to finally be able to provide that to the players so we won't be able to talk about this much after it gets out but what have been the challenges to get this new height rig into the game and everything that the world currently sure Brian was kind of mentioning it shortly but you know getting all of the the skelet an entirely different skeleton of the game is really complex and it doesn't seem like it at first but it's a completely different proportion so all

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    the weapons they're going to use all the ships they're going to use all the usables they're going to use everything needs to be tweaked because it's a different skeleton um so it's a lot of work from a lot of people and it's it's an exciting moment for us to finally be able to deliver that yeah so we I mean you know again we've talked about this before we have female NPCs why is it so hard now to do playable and again you probably answer this question many times the last many years but what why you know we got female NPCs what's the difference uh the difference is that when you look at something like a shopkeeper or a mission Giver or something like that uh they have a defined set of of animations a Define set of data right whereas a player has has a ton of stuff that you can do you can shoot you can fly you can you shop you can do all these different things uh so it's really just the the amount that is being processed is just considerably more

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    exciting times exciting time to be alive finally environment art continues to work on Walla and Lia the two moons of art Corp and That Just About Does it for this week's update if any of you are in the San Antonio area this weekend please make sure to stop by the annual PA South bar citizen event members of the cig team are planning on stopping by so make sure you say hello you can help head over to bar citizen. for more information and thanks to the subscribers of course for sponsoring our shows and thank you to all the backers for all that you do until next time we'll see you around the verse thanks for watching for the latest

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    and greatest in Star Citizen of Squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www. robertsspaceindustries.com thank you very much for watching