Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Hurricane & Character Customization

2 March 201700:51:351,361 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:15
hello and welcome to around the verse our weekly in-depth look at the development of Star Citizen I'm Chris Roberts and joining me uh from our Austin Studio as a very special guest um our persistent Universe uh game director zerve it's great to be in the law anges Studio Chris yep it's great to have you here actually so and you're out here to help us to work on some gameplay mechanics within the star czen Universe could you talk a little about what you're working on uh sure I'm still doing quite a bit of work on the subsumption editor and we've also been converting a representative set of the initial Mission scenarios to this new format and that's been going quite well uh we're finally starting to see some real validation of what we've been saying all along which is that this is going to allow designers to craft this type of logic much more quickly and that's going to lead to a lot more Mission diversity and ultimately fun I'm
00:01:04
also pretty focused on the solar system services at the moment so by solar system Services you mean missions shopping and procedural Planet Commodities uh exactly the first one of these out the door will be the shopping service and it's going to control inventory prices and demand levels for all the shops within a system it's also going to hook up to the mission service so that low inventory levels will automatically result in the creation of missions to reverse the trend uh the mission Services also really interesting because along with a lot of other work that's occurred uh it's going to allow us to start instantiating a lot of dynamic content for the game this is all dramatically different than what we've had in the game to date which has always been much more static in nature uh I should also mention that the guys in Frankfurt recently created a really useful real-time visualizer for the subsumption logic and that's allowing designers to iterate much more quickly
00:01:52
than they otherwise would be able to and that's going to pay some huge dividends in the future y that's cool that's right and we'll actually hear more about the subsumption mission visualizer in our Frankfurt Studio update so you may have noticed last week's Studio update had more detail and was longer than previous ones this was the debut of the revamp Studio update segment the idea is to give you guys a video version of that Studio's monthly report and calls out the work accomplished by all disciplines not just a few we decided to focus on in our previous um sort of Studio Updates this hopefully allows us to give you all a better weekly snapshot of the continual progress we make towards building the bdss so with that let's go to Frankfurt for our weekly Studio update hi everyone I'm Brian Chambers development director here at Foundry 42 Frankfurt little Lio on the team here
00:02:41
we're currently 67 people strong made up of people across 14 different nationalities main language in the office is English so we can easily communicate with the other Studios but at any point in the office you can hear discussions and German Italian Etc uh let's jump into the team see what the team's been working on over the past few weeks techr team here is made up of two people this month they worked on a tool for both cinematic and gameplay animators to quickly render out previews of their work within Maya the tool allows the animators to quickly offload the rendering to a different PC so they continue work on their own PC the renders are an essential part of our review process here so that the global teams can have an eye on everyone's progress across all the studios uh they worked on numerous other small tasks as
00:03:29
well such as skinning of cloth automated file testing within Maya and supporting the weapons team to name a few cinematics team is focusing on telling the rich story of Squadron 42 as we all know the team's making great progress putting scenes of various sizes together they continuously work across multiple disciplines to get the final look and feel that they're after such as the character team for our A-list cast of characters UI and art teams on specific spe ific visuals and the VFX team on unique atmosphere and effects we're holding back and showing scenes for now so we don't give any of the story away but we honestly look forward to the time that we can show them all off to you the weapons art team here in Frankfurt who you've heard from before has broken up into two areas of focus one on FPS
00:04:19
weapons and the other one working solely on ship weapons the FPS team has been focusing on giving the final polish pass for the bearing and clous and verer weapons as well as a new double barrel ballistic shotgun from the CAC arms the ship weapon guys have been focusing their time on finalizing the pipeline for the new modular and upgradeable system which when completed will allow us to more flexibility and efficiency when we're moving forward and creating the variety that we're after the past month on the de VFX team has continued work on the procedural systems for placing particles on the surface of the planet as we showed in our last update I believe the system's in place now and it'll make the setup of particles much easier for the future planets they've
00:05:07
also been working with the system designers on a brand new oxygen breathing system and the visuals attached to it the visuals are tied to the player losing a portion of their oxygen over time for various reasons the system is still incredibly early and it's it's development and may change but it's so far showing good progress system designers here have been working with Pro programming to get the player and the AI both interacting with the same usable and to intelligently be able to use other objects inside that usable for example sitting down at a table picking up a cup drinking from it using a knife and fork picking a grenade or gun from a locker Etc they also worked on getting all the Squadron 42 character subsumption Behavior standardized across
00:05:54
the board they started with a main cast character to get them working in perfect order for a full 24-hour life cycle all the conversations it can form with NPCs Etc and once that's finished the same standard will get applied to all Quirk characters to ensure everything is consistently made and everyone has a fixed template to follow when creating NPC behaviors the level design team is continuing its push on the modular locations for the surface outposts we're looking into the first three variants High Hydroponics Mining and storage and just as with our other locations both the exterior and the interior props are modular and can be combined into many different variants this is the only image they gave me to use for now um
00:06:44
we'll have a more in-depth look into their recent work in the near future and they didn't want me to spoil it now all the modular systems uh were developing enable us to quickly build a large number of locations while still maintaining our high visual Target that we're after for the engine team it's been a busy few weeks for them as they continue on a daily basis to push on the planetary Tech some of the recent work on planetary Tech was uh planetary clouds for one the texture LOD computations for cloud details were revised in order to re reduce alosine and shimmering artifacts in the distance we also included support for simple Cloud animation which we'll see further improvements on in the future for alien planets there's now also an option to tint clouds work also started our solar
00:07:33
system editor which is the first version it's almost complete allows us to set up solar systems in their initial State drag in planets as object containers configure their orbits around the sun set up moons orbiting around planets Etc it's an essential tool that we found out due to the size that we're working with and the amount of objects that we have the team uh Tech Team also did numerous other improvements such as replacing the video player backend which now allows for much higher quality video at a much reduced file size they worked on mesh into uh compression and enable client side feature testing to allow continuous testing against a large variety of game and engine features systems and mechanics and automatically track if and when which submits cause anything to
00:08:23
fail this month the environment art team grew by another two artists collectively they made a lot of progress on the procedural moons around Crusader each moon has its own distinct look and feel a lot of effort has gone into making each one unique at the same time visually keeping them tied to the same family per se the work on the different ecosystems for these moons is now complete and the team is currently working on refining the geological elements that will be found on each separate Moon we're excited for players to eventually visit the three moons yella d R and sellin by flying seamlessly from space to the procedural Planet surface the development of a procedural Tech is ongoing and with a growing team of artists using it on a daily basis and working directly with
00:09:12
the programmers to improve the tools we're creating a strong and extremely strong foundation for our future content the AI team this month successfully completed two separate Sprints related to implementing the subsumption mission systems functionality to enable us to implement the research and rescue missions in Crusader one of the lowlevel features has been the implementation of the superuid a superuid is a way to connect a variable in subsumption to an object in the world that has a specific structure to it for example in Crusader we have one made object container that defines the Stanton system this container has a clear structure and contains several asteroid Fields port osar Etc in the mission logic we can
00:10:02
have multiple superuid variables that allow us to access different specific elements within any given structure this month the AI gu also introduced a new tool this assumption visualizer this tool allows us to debug live Mission and behavioral logic allowing us to modify in real time the variable of the brain of the NPCs or the mission flow this tool is fully integrated into the engine and it will be the central place for the debug functionalities of subsumption as a whole thanks for taking the time thanks for listening this wraps up the update from Frankfurt appreciate all the port support and we'll see you again soon thanks for the update Brian it's great to finally preview the
00:10:50
environmental art for the yellow dear and sellon moons as a unique ecosystems are being populated with objects and geological features U and with the advancements in planetary they're finally in orbit around the home planet Crusader which is pretty cool you want to do that for a while I'm also impressed with the progress they've made on the mission system from completing not just one but two sprints of core functionalities on the subsumption mission system yeah completing two sprints in one month is really quite an impressive feat and with the introduction of the new visualizer that we mentioned earlier uh it's going to be much easier to debug subsumption logic within the engine and that's going to be a huge boost to productivity for both Squadron 42 and the Pu which we need we've got a lot of stuff to be done uh so anyway last week we unveiled the first concepts of the new Anvil hurricane ship we were looking for a new combat ship that incorporated into the
00:11:37
already impressive array of dog fighting ships but it needed to be something with a unique approach so it wasn't like everything else the hurricane was originally pitched as a flying weapons platform hit hard and get out quick the catch is while it's designed to dish out a lot of damage it can't take much in return which instantly felt like it would attract a specific kind of fighting style sort of boom and zoom which is very cool up next in the latest edition of our ongoing series Ship Shape we will take a deeper look at our new fighter ship the Anvil hurricane deved War enter seventh year spell death for D originally designed by Kasa Aerospace as a weapon against the impenetrable tavar and failing Shield the hurricane
00:12:25
provided a unique solution if you can't go through the shields go around them by the time the ship had been produced in significant numbers coral and the rest of his Fleet had burned in the atmosphere of alium 4 so these warships found themselves without a war although it continued to serve in rotation the hurricane fell out of common usage and was eventually eliminated from the fleet when Anvil Aerospace began looking into new ships in 2867 the vuel were slowly pressing into the caliban system in a manner reminiscent of the pushes that precipitated the attacks on Tyber and Virgil 100 years earlier to stem these raids they Revisited the original CA Aerospace Hall designs and began looking into updating the hurricane for the Modern Age the hurricane was originally on a list of starter ships of what our next starter ship would be rather and when it
00:13:14
came time to revisit that concept and get the design really started we keyed in on the turret as being this really important aspect of this ship in this case with the ship I'm I'm giving I'm giv a lot lot of preliminary information like the rough dimensions of the ship I knew the hurricane needed to be about 22 M long I know that it's a that's a fighter that's going to have a pilot and one Gunner I know it's going to have to accommodate uh six guns you know a couple guns on the front it's going to have a manned turret with with four guns on it you know there are various things and I also know it's going to need to incorporate a particular pilot entry animation in this case the the Gladiator animation take all of that information
00:14:02
try to fit a visual design around it in building out our ships we've been moving towards uh embracing our manufacturers embracing the assets that we've already created and how that builds into our style and builds into our workflow so the Gladiator and the hurricane were you know kin and we we took advantage of that to um accelerate the process of of building out this ship because we can take a lot of the similar design cues for that entrance for the pilot and the turret uh although they are much further apart than they are in the Gladiator where they're uh bunk buddies but with the hurricane we wanted to differentiate it a step further when I take a first pass
00:14:50
at the design sometimes I'm taking pieces from The Hornet and pieces from the Gladiator shoving them together seeing uh if I can make a new ship out of those pieces and um trying trying to inspire myself to think of uh think of some new shapes new looks so I will put together a batch of um really rough either sketches or mockups or I'll I'll call it like a 3D kit bash if it's using existing existing pieces I'll send that off to Paul the art director on this particular project and'll take a look at it and we'll see what we like and what we don't we'll move forward from there this came together around the same time as the concept for the prowler which had just begun to have its you know concepts of the directional shield and its you know lore in the the dean war and all those things coming together it seemed
00:15:38
like it would be kind of cool to to pair those things up so the hurricane was kind of the answer to the issues that the the uee were having with the prowler where the prowler would would present this impenetrable uh defense and just sort of stroll up and wreck your day and then and then someone had the brilliant idea of what if we shot them from behind uh so so the the hurricane was about getting the strafing runs getting to it quickly but sacrificing a lot for that so the hurricane needed to get in Fast and it needed to unload a ton of bullets a ton of damage onto the prowler all at once in order to counteract uh its impressive Shield technology and as as sort of a benefit
00:16:28
you know know Finding bringing the hurricane back in in modern times is that it's pretty effective at strafing runs and uh assaults on on um stationary targets uh the the focus is so much on that turret and being able to bring pain to people you're running away from you know the notion that we had for this this glass Hammer as will calls it that uh run face first into danger and then make them regret following you the hurricane is actually pretty underpowered with the exception of those guns it it sacrifices everything to have reasonable engines and insane weaponry and everything else had to go um so it's not going to it's
00:17:18
not going to be able to really power a full laser Suite with your Shields altogether uh your Shields aren't anything really to write home about and the nicest thing that can be said about the hurricane armor is that it has some it's all dedicated to to that that aggressive notion you just have to make sure that you win fast which seemed to go along with the original design idea of of this ship so with with the hurricane I think it takes the the pre-existing recognizable attributes of anvil ships and it it simplifies them and it streamlines them when when you look at the hurricane hopefully you'll recognize a few things you can um we see the bent wings of the Hornet you can of of course see the icon the iconic Anvil Circle there in the center everything
00:18:07
revolves around that has the snub nose that is reminiscent of the Gladiator it takes all these ideas and it it gives them a pretty simple silhouette and it reads pretty well from a distance so I'm I'm thinking that mostly if you're if you're seeing a hurricane from the from a distance you'll recognize the wings depending on the color scheme maybe you'll recognize the uh the shape that is designed on the top which is actually reminiscent of the Anvil logo itself the circle and some of the angles coming off of it so that's what I hope you notice when you're actually looking at the ship uh it definitely requires a particular kind of Gunner to want to fly these things because you are putting your life in in their hands and and to extent the pilot as well uh anyone who
00:18:57
seeks out uh the hurricane to fly is someone who is probably going to cause a Ruckus it's always very cool when a ship can add to the game's history while also distinguishing itself with exclusive gameplay features like the quad gun turret yeah quad gun are cool one time Paul built this well because he's the guy writing the ATM system he had a ball turret on the Hornet and had Gatling gun attached to Gatling gun attached Gatling gun I think he had about 50 guns aren't his we won't sell that one but it was very cool but anyway uh the focus on Firepower will really appeal to experience Flyers uh with a hurricane small build at sensitive movability isn't for rookies unless you're really looking for a challenge um
00:19:45
so we'll see if you want to challenge up next uh we got a really interesting piece for our behind the scenes ever since the project was first announced backers have been asking about their characters in Star Citizen uh absolutely your character is your connection uh the iname representation of your of yourself and developing a character that's as individual as you are is totally essential to creating a unique player experience yeah especially in our world uh so our character customization system is sure to provide a multitude of personalized player experience and along the way we've learned that creating a system that allows you to mix and match pieces of clothes armor and weapons to create distinct looks requires extensive Technical and gameplay considerations so we sat down with Paul Rendell Sean Tracy and Josh Herman to talk about the challenges of bringing the system online in Star have a
00:20:34
look hi there everyone I'm Sean Tracy the technical director of content here at cig and today we wanted to talk a little bit about character customization so to make that happen um I have with me Paul reell did you want to introduce yourself hi uh I'm Paul Rell and I'm the uh director of engineering for persistent univ was um and with me also yep I'm Josh Herman I'm the character art director awesome so uh to bring online character customization you need a lot of different departments working together and that's going to come from design it's going to come from art and it's going to come absolutely from the engineering side so uh the first thing we did want to talk about uh was exactly what we're going to do for the next big release uh uh that we'll be giving out to you um and then what we're going to do moving forward and today what we're
00:21:21
going to discuss is uh what we'll term customization so basically selecting um items on your character and uh being able to customize what you're wearing things like armor things like clothing things like weapons um and basically how we brought that system online um so maybe to give them a bit of a uh a bit of background over how this system came to light um was at the very base of it the the cry engine or Lumberyard engine um uses uh something called character definition files are basically um really just static geometry so you've got a skeleton of a character and then you've got a bunch of geometries attached right problem with that is that none of that can change at runtime um you can't switch out those attachments um changing things like the color of it or even
00:22:10
embedding things like gameplay logic within those pieces of geometry was not possible so it sounds like no customization at all was available no customization was available it was all very static and it was very pre-authored so it works really good for a game that has you know maybe upwards of 20 characters or so but a game like Star Citizen which is is an MMO players going to make their own characters we're going to have hundreds and hundreds of different types of NPCs um it's not going to work very well for so as the ships were being developed and maybe Paul can talk a little bit about this um they had to come up with a system for a ship customization which was the first we basically had the same issue with ships like the the vehicle system in cry engine comes with predefined ships they have predefined weapons obviously we want to have like customizable ship so we buildt like a system called it Port
00:22:59
system which allowed us to build vehicles in a completely modular system where you have like base ship and then you can attach turrets or weapons to it and you can basically build your own custom customized ship out of it and we thought with that system already in place why don't we take that and move it over and use it for custom for character customization to actually use the same system and be able to have like a base character which is like basically a naked person and then put on different arm pieces different clothing and even different weapons on that yeah so and and one of the the the tricky Parts about that is uh with a ship things are uh very rigid in terms of uh you attach this one gun here there's no real deformation going on it doesn't have to attach in any super special way
00:23:46
it's like just align it to that helper and you're pretty much happy but on the character side it can become a little more difficult because we're talking about zones within the character and everything on a character deforms everything's skinned to a costumes are all going to be unique you're going to have jackets that are going to have to fit over different types of things armors that are going to have to fit over different types of things helmets that don't necessarily fit shoes that don't meat the pants like you have all these kind of problems where it's a you know when it is a deformable and very uh unique asset whereas you're saying it's basically you know a port and an item going into that port for the ship system it's a little needs to be a little more flexible for the characters right right so then um what we had to do obviously was was change out that uh that default cry engine or or or Lumberyard uh implementation and over the course of uh
00:24:34
of many months we've been working on this um and things are progressing really well we basically load a skeleton that particular skeleton sitting right there it can animate and do everything it needs and technically that character is loaded there's just no actual geometry that's that's showing it so in the loadout editor here you can see that I have an item port and it's called the body item port and this is what supports a bunch of different items So within the items uh you can see we've got female bodies we've got male bodies so right now I'm just going to load up one of the male bodies and we've just got two very you know uh uh different ones in terms of their skin tone and before I get too much further um I want to attach a head just to show you how we do do uh skeleton extensions and that the base skeleton actually gets built up upon so what I do is the body actually carried a
00:25:23
whole bunch of item ports with it by itself maybe I'll make these a little bigger so you can see it um and the one I'm really interested in is this head item Port so as soon as I select that head item Port it actually tells me what items you know are valid for that particular port and we set this all up through uh types subtypes and sort of rules so you can see we've got a lot of different character heads and in this case uh I'm going to select you know the male tier one uh m09 tier one which is the one that everybody's kind of used to uh within the Pu but we'll uh we'll happily change that around a little bit so I'm just going to add some eyes onto him so he gets a little set of eyes and now let's go ahead and turn off the uh skeleton debug here so here's our guy so he's loaded up and uh one of the things that we're
00:26:10
working on right before we give you uh a character creation is this scene between the neck and the uh body um because we have our heads all scanned from you know actual people uh and our body itself actually wasn't a body scan this was actually just modeled uh by one of our very talented character artists what we have do is align those two so that there's no seaming in there and uh what can be uh confusing but also very powerful within the situation is the dynamic hierarchy that it kind of creates so like we have the skeleton then we add that naked body on top and then on that naked body there's a certain number of ports it's got clothing ports for t-shirts and whatever else but it's also got another Port called the armor Port the way our game is designed is we have the unders suit and then on top you can like layer different armor plates and so on and that's also just like an another item
00:26:58
port on top of the undersuit item Port so have the unders suit item port and then I can go and give him like different um leg plates here so I can I can really customize my character and since the art is all like set to work with each other I can now actually even go further and put stuff attachments on my on my armor so there's like different armor item ports here for like grenades for example so I put a little Grenade on here so yeah and I mean as you can see this this completely ows me to to completely customize and randomize my my my whole player now initially doing this of course uh some of the assets weren't uh really set up to be as modular as they could be um so what were some of the some of the challenges that you ran into uh when we were trying to put all this stuff
00:27:47
together all of a sudden sure uh some of the easy ones are when we start putting up together all different types of art uh shirts or pants and shoes is the easiest example so if I have uh high tops and I have shorts that's going to be a very distinct difference in between the two but then if I have pants that are going to go longer you know now all things sudden things start colliding yeah uh and if those aren't set up early basically what we've started to create is zones or regions or boundaries depending on what you want to call them um to help us make sure that everything is going to line up um the other things is maybe say somebody's got a weapon on um and they want to take that off that this armor piece off does the weapon go away or does is the weapon now does it get does it go down a level and does it get to stay there and is that that's also a gameplay imple implementation as
00:28:35
well should you be able to put armor on or a weapon on whatever is underneath that right uh so all these kind of things where it's like you know we can add it on there but it's also does it look good visually um does it work for the game play and then does it also make sense for the detect to even have to do that sure and that's always that there's always a point of contention in there it's like who who really says where that gun is meant to go because design will say all the time yeah yeah we want to move it around wherever but you know sometimes they'll put it up on the the shoulder it just looks ridiculous there on the back or that doesn't work with that armor so there's always an interesting I think interplay between you know the art as well as the design needs so there's constant iteration on this um maybe there also like the technical aspect of design and artist they comes like oh we want to have all
00:29:22
those different layers but then again like now you you multiply your draw CS because you have like layer on top of layer on top of layer and that's why also this like zone system um Josh just mentioned like really helped this having like defined zones and then layers on top of layers on different zones allowed us to basically take one layer which is underneath and just color it out on the mesh level so we like save all those draw CS which you don't see anyways and like having having a defined zone system really help yeah exactly get this like the balance between the tech and the art art is always going to want to push it and make it as much as possible and design wants to do the same typically as much as possible as cool as possible and then you run into the performance problem where you're saying oh now you've added so much stuff that the game can't run or this character this character is 20 times more expensive
00:30:10
than the basic character yeah uh which turns into a problem sure and it's happen and so now how you with some cool systems like the Zone stuff is that it does actually give us quite a bit of leeway and I'm going to break down that with you guys in a concept we can break them down pretty easily so both of these uh have uh a jacket which is this piece right here both of these have shirts which would be this piece right here and then we have uh a pant uh looks like this guy's probably wearing some kind of a glove and both have boots now this is all exactly what we talked about right so this t-shirt will actually be making the T-shirt If if it's a t-shirt or a tank top all the way into this area same with this if it's a long sleeve or whatever it is we'll be building it all the way out but when we put this uh
00:30:58
cardigan on it'll actually be C out all the way over here so all this will go away which is pretty cool cuz then we don't have to worry about it like we said we get big uh performance savings um and it's is really actually a lot of freedom for the artist which is really cool now one thing we were talking about before which is actually a challenge is pants it's the challenge is actually where any two zones are going to meet because that's where you have two things colliding right um now let's say I have a pair of boots like this and I have a pair of short boots or pant shoes like this and I drag these over and you'll see that maybe I didn't uh change these pants out it's going to actually happen is this would all be
00:31:46
skin right uh but the challenge that we have here is that first off that looks a little weird and then second um you the model that we made for these pants is built to look uh like it's tucked into boots so if we have that problem now this this creates a problem where we have uh a piece of clothing that we've created that doesn't necessarily fit in all of our scenarios uh and we want to make sure that all of our characters are built to be able to fit within a system where it's easily swappable and easily modular and the biggest thing that I'm actually most excited for this was NPCs so right now when you look at you know any of the NPCs you see they're all pretty much the same guy unfortunately but um when we get into randomly spawning them we'll be able to select from certain types of clothes and certain groups and because
00:32:36
all of our uh assets will be able to blend seamlessly together we'll be able to spawn them really quick and really really easily because you just be able to select from anything and all the shoes will work with the pants all the pants will work with the shoes all the shirts will work with the jackets Etc and it does sound like a a very simple thing that oh okay when I put a t-shirt on well just get rid of that whole torso but um um we ran into some great you know edge cases between there and and again I think it comes from uh you know having assets that were built beforehand um that we're now supporting within a sort of molal system so I mean there there was there was clever things um sort of like when you've got a t-shirt so how much of that body do you want to call and we actually had to separate those zones down and I I can't remember the exact number but there's around 20 um just over 20 and uh even zones that
00:33:25
split up say the upper arm for example because sometimes we have T-shirts like the one I'm wearing here but sometimes we have ones that go down past the elbow and then sometimes we have a full arm shirt so you don't want to keep drawing all this stuff underneath and um the other tricky part about that is you would think that you would just be able to layer the clothing like you would in real life so that I put a shirt on and then I put a jacket over that and everything's going to look right well not really because when the topology doesn't match so let's say I put a jacket on top of this shirt and and the literally the edges of the topology don't line up when it deforms they're not going to deform in the same way so what ends up happening is you might not get clipping when you're standing but as soon as the guy animates boom it's all popping out everywhere terrible so and there's never really anything you can do about that if you do not keep your
00:34:12
topology consistent which we don't necessarily have on the shirts because it's a bit restrictive if you have to do that so with the Zone calling coming online not only did it fix the clipping problem but it also fixed our performance problem which was a a super duper powerful thing to have um but it also put constraints on your work right because artists they usually like just work and make everything look cool but then with a system and that like that they start to get like okay you have to build this but this section for example always have to be exactly at that line and then so so it puts some restrictions restrictions but I think that's part of why we had 20 zones on the body is like you know it's not just you can only have shirt or shortt sleeves or no shirt like that's we have more way more than that so you know we can play Within the zones a little bit so that you know we don't
00:35:00
want to get too close to where Clips or you see holes in the mesh but you also have enough to where you can you know get something still that's pretty cool looking so it's not pretty much I think we can come up with anything at this point uh and we still get super good savings and and look good to uh and one last really good example within it because a lot of people maybe are are thinking of a layering structure so that um you would always have pretty consistent assets so a jacket that was always closed okay great that's always going to call out the stuff but guess what we actually have jackets that go on top on the third layer that are wide open so that means what if I don't have that t-shirt on underneath that jacket yeah uh I got to show the chest then but the T-shirt was calling the chest so then how do I make sure the chest is there with that jacket up so there's a lot of little logic within there that has to get all worked out and we worked uh most of it out um anyways and and
00:35:48
something that's really cool about that though is like that we do that I don't know if I've seen other people do is like maybe they have but like if I buy a jacket in some other games and it's an open jacket they just replace the shirt underneath and you get your own you get just a generic shirt um whereas with ours you can wear that jacket with a t-shirt underneath or shirt like with a jacket look like you know Fab I call it Fabio look but you know yeah it's that too it's pretty fun so it actually adds a lot of customization within that uh to where we can start layering much more than we were with just like okay you're making an open jacket and a closed jacket and t-shirt so you get a lot more yeah so a lot questions that present themselves and uh and sometimes I go down this this road with the designers but we have to explain the hierarchy of how this works out a little bit um we
00:36:36
have uh just as Paul explained this this naked body and then on the naked body we have clothing that can get attached to it so then we have this layering so that clothing starts hiding that naked body but then on top of it we have another layer of the hierarchy which is the armor so the armor hides all the clothing which hides all the body right so now we keep building up on it and uh it might be worth explaining how we've split up the armor in in into less granular zones than the 20 or 30 we still have that technique but we have whole items anyway so maybe if you want to yeah sure so when we put on when we're going to put on Armor and one of the things that we're defining right now uh as armor is an undersuit so an undersuit basically means you're going to be able to go into space with it so you can put on a helmet and you can go into space Eva you know jet around and you should be fine so an understood is kind of your it's
00:37:25
almost it's like a FR so what that does is it puts on and you can still see the the player's head you know hair face all that kind of stuff um then on top of that now you put your helmets and you put your chest pieces your arm pieces and your leg pieces uh so right now we've split it up to into four because it's just easy to assemble it's easy it within with less zones like we were kind of talking about before you have way more free play for the art because I don't have to say like if this line on my arm is where I'm going to have a Zone um all the gloves all everything is always going to have to end at this line and it will look a little weird and you'll see it in some other games it doesn't it doesn't call itself out until you see it yeah but you'll see all the gloves go to here all the the boots and the pants like mash at one line um so if we remove those lines we can have a lot more free play in in that art so we have
00:38:13
a little bit less there right um but also it allows for uh gameplay for design so we can put how many weapons go on a chest piece on a core piece um you know and does does that get bigger and better as you go up light mediums and Heavies M um and then Tech within the helmets and all that kind of stuff within the legs and arms as well so uh within this we've talked a little bit about how the how the art is developed so let's talk a little bit about how the um how the tech actually works in terms of Okay so we've got this hierarchy and then we have these character items um so this is all part of the ID 2.0 entries uh that we've talked about with the community quite a bit um so we have all these items that are all predefined um but within those items there can be gameplay components on them so there's a
00:39:03
there's a couple components that are being developed for the character side um did you want to talk at all about any one of those well I mean for like the first thing we did um taking what like originally crry engine camps was like a what you said like the static character definition file and like split even each piece out and we just made them items so they're interchangeable and then we already had the item system for ships so we just took the same thing and basically made okay those pieces which you usually Define in one static file are now just items which you put together and that allows us to give each item different um game values so for example for our chest pieces we give them different Mass values and then the game code just takes the the overall mass of your attached items and that calculate how fast you run so now we
00:39:51
have the ability design has the ability to give like each individual item different Mass values and that gives like them the the ability to okay make a a fast player or a slow player and then it also allows us to build rules so the item system comes with a rule set which says okay on this port you can only wear like a heavy weapon or light weapon or like a small weapon and this type of armor class and whatever and with this system now we can basically build like okay if you have a heavy armor obviously slow but you can carry like the bigger and heavier weapons um and that all like works because we have like comp componentized all those into items right right and then on the performance front that it's a better thing because again we can do uh scheduler updates type thing we can make it so that there's they're not all updating all the time um
00:40:40
it's all very uh controllable yes and then and then still for for for our character still even if they are like now split into different items we um under under the hood we using the um the skin mechanics which basically is still on the rendering side we merge everything into one skin and like since they all use the same material we even if it's split like in logical items on the rendering side it's still one thing which which we can draw in like one one go so it's still very optimal and good for per right this unified seat render proxy piece of the character uh what another benefit of that by the way is something that we have to deal with on the tech art quite often uh which is uh uh on the tech art side quite often is the lods and the culling of that so one thing that can be tricky with a character if he's made up of a whole bunch of different attachments all
00:41:27
various sizes and usually our level of detail calling is based on either a bounding box size or distance or an average poly size and if they're all sort of popping and and doing things at different rates what happens is on those edges that you talked about all of a sudden there's there's there's breakage in those seams so it's important to keep that as one unified piece and actually up until now just a good example that came off the top of my head was that the helmets were separate um these were a bone attachment right so and I'm sure people have seen this Within star Marine is that uh they're shooting at somebody he's running away and all of a sudden the helmet disappears and he's just running around in space with you know no helmet on and his face out um doing Star-Lord or or whatever um so you know we've changing those over to over the skin files and then that'll combine with the render proxy and then all of a
00:42:14
sudden we're we're rendering um or sorry loding and calling out all at the same time which is the best way to do it of course I think in my opinion um so a little bit deeper into the tech um um some people might Wonder um how exactly we manage a skeleton like this so in most games and it's it's a dramatic difference to to how somebody would develop a movie every single character in a movie tends to get their own rig so it's a very very bespoke rig um they've got whole Departments of rigers that are just building up these skeletons for every single character however in a game it's the polar opposite you want one skeleton for everything as much as possible problem with that is that you've got to carry all those joints around so we've actually we've had a system uh within cry and Lumberyard now it wasn't used in any ship game yet you're talking about
00:43:03
SK so um and what the system does is that we can have a base skeleton but we can we can we can additional joint add additional joints to the skeleton at runtime and when there's duplication of those joints they'll Shear off basically those duplication of joints and just extend it to the new one so what this gives us the ability to do is modify the skeleton hierarchy itself at runtime meaning I can create I put that chest piece on and all of a sudden I've got a new joint with that new helper just on that chest piece and that's where the weapon will go so rather than saying I'm going to carry around a skeleton that has a helper here here here here here here here here here here here and I'm using helper 22 you know for that armor piece it's actually coming in automatically with that so um uh was there anything more that uh I've missed maybe on scale extensions or no I think
00:43:52
you kind you kind of touched on the key points I think the key points is really to keep the the joint count in the base like as low as possible and then every piece which comes on top which comes with additional joints can come with its own joint and then um there's very smart people in Frankfurt our animation engineer who built the system which allows us to like combines those those bones skeletons into one single uh skeleton and still all the animations will work and that allows us exactly what you just mentioned we can have like one hour piece which has like whatever like two bones here for attachments for grenades and then another armor piece which has them here and it's still it still works and we don't have to carry like four bones for that it's still two bones but they on different locations in each piece exactly uh and the nice part is is it all becomes data driven U really and
00:44:41
that's that's the key to this entire system is that it was meant and it needs to be scalable as much as it's data driven but it's also it gives the designer more freedom to instead of having oh I always have to put the gun on this position because that's how the system work he can place the thing wherever he wants and then obviously you you have you use the same item Port but then on one armor piece the weapon is maybe here and on another one it's a little bit more here and it still aligns and it gives the artist a lot of Cu now we can do any shape and size and put stuff wherever we want and you guys can just scale extend to that location which is awesome yeah and uh yeah it's it's definitely it's very powerful does do skele extensions affect like non-armored clothing like uh just casual clothing social clothing or anything like that
00:45:28
absolutely so um though uh the design is still up in the air uh not up in the air necessarily we know people are going to have weapons on their civilian clothes at some point um but there is no combat right now when you're outside of armor but it would absolutely appli to those civilian clothes where it applies even more um and and this was a next topic I wanted to talk a little bit about was simulation and and secondary motion really on on a character um so that's where this gets really powerful because um if I was to say attach a cape to a character that Cape is going to need bone chains and it's probably going to need a good you know whatever five bone chains across probably 10 long um that's a lot of joints all of a sudden to be carrying around on your base skeleton but if you can attach it with the AET that's coming in um you've saved that much off off your base skeleton so
00:46:17
that's where we really abuse it is when that simulation comes into play and the the modularity even helps more with that because like what you just said like this this cape it needs to collide something with your body and then usually in traditional in most games how they do it they have like a predefined area and it that makes it always kind of look the same shape for us since we put everything into different modules each piece can come with its own collider zone so you can make like a very fat whatever chest piece which just comes with its own collider Zone and then the cape will still work and collide with that and will collide different with that like big heavy chest versus like a light chest piece so sure and uh yeah we abuse this on not just you know things like capes things like hair uh jackets um the uh sand Nomad that was within the
00:47:08
homestead demo uh was one of the one of the best uses I I think of it uh that we've had so far um so definitely an interesting thing we're really excited about the degree of variety this Tech is going to bring our players wanted to leave you guys with a little bit of a video showing off some of the features so thanks again and thanks for [Music] watching I hope you guys enjoyed this very work in progress and behind the- scenes look of the character system and how you as players are going to be outfitting and customizing your character now no character customization system is complete without something to make unique faces and in a future ATV we're going to discuss this a l a lot
00:47:57
more before then however I wanted to leave you with a technical demonstration done by our partner three lateral of the potential of runtime facial technology to create millions of unique faces this is the last piece of what we need for character customization and we are super excited that it's finally getting to a stage where we can start integrating it into Star Citizen we hope you enjoy and if you want to see
00:49:23
more of the DNA system and three laterals technical presentation go to the link below thanks a lot guys and see you in the verse after seeing the challenge of leveraging the modular system we used for vehicles environments and items into a modular system for characters I couldn't be happier about the team's accomplishments it's very cool uh yeah one of the things that excites me the most about the core Tech we're building is that it encompasses uh everything from clothes to armor to weapons power plants ships space stations and Beyond uh the level of detail that Paul Sean and Josh have been able to create even with small things like hair and cloth movements it's truly phenomenal yeah no it's awesome so the possibility for players to dress or equip themselves just like you could in real life is one of the cornerstones to making a firstperson universe possible and it's
00:50:10
why we've been working really hard on it so that's it for this episode of around the verse we'd also like to invite all of you to join us tomorrow at 12 Pacific for the latest stars and happy hour stream with host Ben Lesnik this week will feature the return of RSI Museum uh one last reminder that tomorrow is the last day to catch GDC interviews live on Amazon's twitch page and again a huge thanks to all our subscribers and backers who make the show and us making the game possible thank you very much yeah none of this would be possible without your support uh thanks for watching and we'll see you around the ver thank you for watching so if you want to
00:51:14
keep up with the latest and greatest and staff citizen of 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.