Inside Star Citizen: Night and Day | Spring 2020

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:02

   What is lighting? It's more than just placing many lights around to brighten up a scene. We also want to make objects and characters look good. Um, for example, this scene right here, it's it's clearly too dark. The background is too dark. You can't see me very well. So, for an interview situation, this this won't do. So, how would I fix this? Um, first of all, I turn on this light. Uh, this adds a little bit of warmth, a little bit of character on me specifically. Um, the background's still too dark, but we can take care of that later. Uh, I think the next step is I would add some fill lights. So, now I'm a little bit better lit. Um, I've got this uh, this Maglite here. I could probably turn that on. You know, this is it's too much light now for me. It's it's blowing out things. And now for the background, I think uh, I think we can harness the power of uh,

2. 00:00:50

   natural lighting for this one. And there we go. That's much better. So, lighting, pretty cool. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. All right, stop recording. The role of lighting artistically is to create a very interesting atmosphere that the player maybe hasn't seen before and makes them excited to explore the specific space. And the other primary focus is to assist the player in being able to navigate a certain space. So, that's calling out um, certain places that the player can go or points of interest that the player can interact with. So, one of the biggest problems we have lighting in this game specifically is uh, that the the planets are rotating around their axis, which means that we have a fully dynamic

3. 00:01:38

   time of day and all of our locations can be placed in any kind of orientation or location on any planet, which means that we have no control over where the sun is, what the path and the travel path of the sun is, and we have to work around where the sun is and and make it look as good as possible at all times of day as much as we can. So, in the past two concessions that we've had to make for our environment lighting is that for the ambient lighting specifically, we've had to pre-bake our environment probes, which are basically entities that take a sampling of the ambient lighting around it and then re-project that lighting into the environment. Because these are static, we've had to choose what time of day we want to bake them at, which could be daytime, nighttime, dusk, anywhere in between, but they stayed

4. 00:02:27

   static the whole time of day cycle. The other concession that we've had to make is that the lights are always on 24 hours a day, which means that even if the sun is high noon, then street lights are still on, supporting lights are still on. This has impacts on the performance, obviously, and doesn't look so good. It makes environments feel quite static. But that said, the lighting team has been working on two big improvements to our attack, which help us tackle these issues. So, the first new feature that we worked on was what we call runtime probes. This basically is a an extra flag for the environment probe entity that you can enable and this tells the entity to periodically update itself and and recapture the ambient lighting based on several things, primarily the the movement of the sun. So, every few

5. 00:03:15

   degrees that the sun moves in the sky, the probe will try and recapture that ambient lighting and re-project it into the environment. The benefit for the players in this case is that you can sit in an environment and watch the the time of day pass and the ambient lighting should update accordingly, which will help these environments feel a lot more dynamic and a lot more immersive. So, the second major feature that we've been working on is what I call day night light groups. This basically takes the existing light groups feature that we've had running previously in ships for things like damage states and emergency states. This allows us to use those same controls, but on a time of day basis. So, we can choose a specific state for the light group to use during the day and for the night time. What this means for the lighting team is

6. 00:04:03

   that we can add a whole new layer of complexity to environments such as turning on overall city lights when it becomes night time and turning them off during the day, which saves performance because you can't see them anyway. It allows us to turn on and off street lights based on the time of day, which feels very realistic. And it allows us to, in the case of New Babbage, we can create a an entirely new mood and atmosphere in a specific location when it's night time compared to when it's day time. The ambient lighting also changes over the course of the day thanks to the the runtime probes. So, personally, I'm really excited about these features because they allow me to to really create variety within a single environment. So, we have the same

7. 00:04:50

   geometry, but we can make it feel like very different locations very simply and also dynamically. So, as for when these features will be rolled out, we're looking to in the next patch and beyond convert our existing legacy landing zones like Lorville and Area 18 and other planetary locations to use runtime probes and day night light groups. We're also looking to expand this into other planetary locations like surface outposts, underground facilities, and other locations. And you can actually already see these features live now in patch 3.9 in New Babbage, which was our first kind of test bed for this. If you go to Wally's Bar, you'll notice that there's a very distinct night time mood compared to the day time. So, yeah, we're we're really excited

8. 00:05:39

   about these features and what they will bring to Star Citizen. We hope that you guys enjoy it as much as the lighting team has enjoyed breathing new life into legacy locations and new locations as well. From lighting the universe to filling it with characters, locations, and spacecraft, here's the sprint report. Starting things off with characters, we've got a quick look at additional concepts for yoga outfits for the NPCs of New Babbage, where personal health and well-being is an important aspect in maintaining the optimum productivity for any valued employee. And at MicroTech, every employee is valued. Take that, workers of Lorville. Also in New Babbage is work on a mission giver named Eddie Parr. Now, Eddie's the bartender at Wally's, and since there's

9. 00:06:27

   a slew of entertainment coming in and out of MicroTech, it's believed he's been running a side racket with his old friend Michael Shaw to smuggle we'll call it contraband in for the locals. Hey, people got to cut loose, and yoga ain't for everyone. But before we see Eddie Parr in yoga outfits, the environment art team is putting the finishing touches on their high-tech hanger set that will eventually populate the spaceport at New Babbage. Like the hangers already in place in Lorville and Area 18, these will come in a variety of shapes and sizes to accommodate most ships in the persistent universe. Just just wait for the doors to be completely open before you try to pass through. Don't don't be like Disco. The cargo module interiors we first saw concepts for 2 weeks ago have moved into

10. 00:07:16

    white box phase as they look to expand the gameplay opportunities for cargo haulers everywhere with new contracts, new opportunities, and eventually tie-in functionality with the upcoming player trading app, which when used together will facilitate the transfer of commodities and such between players. In tech updates, on Friday viewers of Star Citizen Live got an in-depth look at the gas tech being developed for both Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Now, what we showed on Friday's show could be done in about an hour, but what you're seeing here are tests that are much farther along. The idea here is to explore where we can add texture to the space scapes of the persistent universe. With this test specifically for those wayward space stations found between the planets of the Stanton system. Now, this is look dev in its purest form as artists

11. 00:08:04

    explore what's possible as opposed to building something specifically that you'll find around one station or another. Now, once the capabilities have been identified and the processes developed and streamlined, this work will form the basis for our gases found throughout the persistent universe, including in asteroid fields, around space stations, near jump points, and beyond. Finally, from outer space down to the surface of our planets and moons, as the planet tech team continues to enhance and build upon planet tech V4, sometimes it's required to go back and update older content to match the still advancing state of our tech. In the case of these new height maps, which we touched on a little last quarter, the main objective here is to make better use of the available texture resolution for every piece of elevation and climate data in both the persistent universe and

12. 00:08:51

    Squadron 42. The benefits of which will be better object distribution, nicer ground material breakup, natural color transitions, more accurate far distance reads, and more. Another benefit of this enhanced detail pass is that our artists can now work with data that is much more accurate, which will in turn be more predictable and ultimately makes for a much easier and more efficient time painting the planets, which will just speed up the overall process even more than it already has. So, what we learned about this week? Well, we learned that it can often be the little things like turning the lights off when the sun comes up or enabling ambient light to fill a room as we'd expect that can lead to the greater sense of immersion, that there's even more coming to New Babbage in Alpha 3.1 and beyond, that gas clouds can add a bit of texturing and make space gaping

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    more interesting. And that even with Planet Tech V4 as good as it already is, there could still be ways to make the process faster and look better than ever before. For Inside Star Citizen, I'm Jared Huckaby. We'll see you next week.