Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Kiosks and Commodities

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse our weekly look at star citizens ongoing development I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm will weom on today's show we'll take a look at the new kiosk system coming in 3.0 we'll show you how this seemingly small mechanic is an important first step in building the game's Dynamic economy but before that let's check in with Brian Chambers for an update from our office in Frankfurt hello I'm Brian Chambers development director of our Foundry 42 Frankfurt office team's been busy this last month as usual pushing on numerous fronts for 3.0 which is part of the large persistent universe as well as Squadron 42 the past month we had numerous visitors to the office including both Chris and a in we find that traveling to

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   the other offices from time to time to either work side by side with people or to discuss the current status of things and future plans is absolutely invaluable so let's start off this month's update with the VFX team the Frankfurt VFX team has been working on improving existing systems for the 3.0 release this includes checking all the existing vehicles and systems to make sure things are still working as initially intended and doing a Polish pass on any effects if needed with some of the new systems coming online such as the oxygen system for rooms they remade some of the old airlock effects for both the high-tech and lowtech airlocks this month they also started shifting more Focus towards Squadron 42 cinematic scenes that are required for the single player campaign

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   the FPS weapons team completed passes on the last two Legacy weapons that we using our old system completing a first pass on the G I l86 ballistic pistol and completing a final pass on the bearing P4 AR ballistic rifle they continue to make progress on the ship weapons for the Clausen verer laser repeaters they finished off all the work for sizes 1 through three started work on sizes 4- six and finished off the apocalypse arms ballistic scatter gun size 1-3 uh they also worked on some general tasks focused towards 3.0 including polishing optimizing and Bug fixing the tech art team finished multiple animation implementation tasks for both the recent usable Sprint as

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   well as cinematics they continued to debug weapon animation issues and did some adjustments to a few of the weapons rigs to make them even more realistic and believable they also did some work on a VFX exporter this was primarily made to export simulated objects from within Maya having an active simulation on objects was causing some problems with the animation export and the best way to work around this is to bake the simulation and Export the animation but that's timec consuming and leaves the scene in a state where the VFX artist can't do any changes to the simulation so the exporter takes care of that whole process it bakes the simulation exports all the necessary stuff for the engine and restores the scene so the artists Contin continue to iterate on whatever

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   they need the tool also creates all the necessary in engine files so the artist can hit the export button and see the results immediately in the engine they also continue to support the animation code with ground alignment R&D progress is going good and we'll be able to show off some of the results very very soon for game programming last month they spent time fixing outstanding issues and polishing up existing code the new airlocks and elevators are now being used more throughout the game which exposed a few issues where game and engine code conflicted with one another so those items were identified and work has begun to sort them out they also added a small feature to weapons to be able to hide the weapon from The firstperson View during aim down sight

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   which falls in line with the design and will make things much easier while In the Heat of combat the technology to easily apply weapon skins was also completed it utilizes the work previously done for character customizations there's still some UI work to be done on it and the Skins themselves are placeholder for testing but the work will now allow simple and fast setups of weapon skins in data Forge they'll now continue more work on the weapon system 2.0 and additional elevator and airlock feature polish geared towards 3.0 the AI team has been working on more Mission broker and mission system features mostly for pu 3.0 but also offering support for s42 the mission broker has been adapted to support

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   multiple players accepting the same Mission and they had the ability for Mission instances to share information which means players accepting the same collection mission for example will be sent after the same item rather than having their own distinct item to collect they'll now build on that work by adding support for abandoning missions as well as unlawful and lawful asymmetric missions for multiple players this month day added support for takeoff and landing of AI ships and surfaces this includes Landing Pad ship hangers other ships and Celestial surfaces we're also adding Quantum travel functionality for the new non kythera AI this is part of an ongoing effort to create all ship AI functionalities we need for subsumption based AI for the remainder

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   of the month they'll be focusing on adding more subsumption AI support like using nav splines and correct AI Behavior when entering exiting all vehicles and seats they also finished up the second Sprint for Buddy AI designers can now specify if they want to keep the AI in front or on the side of the leader or player this Sprint also brings the ability for an AI buddy to take cover in front of the player and moving from cover to cover Point while following the player this is the first step in having a companion AI that will intelligently follow you and help you out in combat the Frankfurt engine team in cooperation with UK refine the handling of GPU crashes and proper reporting via the public crash Handler as we render frames we now include tokens into the command

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   stream in order to pinpoint more easily what the GPU was last doing in case it starts hanging this info was set along with other crash information for postmortem analysis via our public crash Handler service and these steps should make it easier for us to more quickly react on GP issues found in the PTU that are otherwise hard to produce because the specific machine setup OS driver versions Etc they also did a large number of performance analysis and engine optimizations geared towards 3.0 release another item they started to work on was a new road system to work in conjunction with the planetary terrain the Legacy roads were not suitable for our large scale terrain there was a large performance hit and they also had Z fighting and flickering issues when

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    viewed from long distances the new system is extremely fast and efficient cache friendly and fully multi-threaded to send draw commands to the GPU in the most efficient way the new system uses a screen space approach instead of drawing the geometry conventionally it's powered by a projective technique like what we use on deferred decals it has two distinct rendering passes first we draw the road geometry as a 3D Volume which intersects the terrain in this pass a stencil mask is generated to outline border of the road the same mask is then used in the next render pass to clip all pixels of the volumes that are not affecting the terrain finally to generate UVS and fetch material textures each pistol's position is reconstructed in camera space and then in local space by

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    sampling the depth all material attributes are then finally written in the G buffer to compute lighting thanks to the nature of the projection this technique doesn't suffer any Z fighting or flickering related issues they also created a new tool set to give designers the ability and flexibility to quickly lay down the New Roads and modify them as needed it's still currently a work in progress and the terrain and textures in the video are currently placeholder for testing but the progress is going well and it will be a nice addition to our growing tool set for planets the level design team is currently making a pass on the room system for Levi ensuring that the player won't unnecessarily suffocate in random places as well as general polish and bug fix for 3.0 they also begun taking a look at the lville

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    which is the next Flagship Landing Zone on our list to tackle the Frankfurt QA team wrapped up June with multiple test requests from the engine team including a change to the entity component update scheduler which affects how parts of entities are updated as well as the particle code which was changed to run on threads all code changes have the potential to introduce new issues to an already functional build so thorough comparison testing was performed to sure that nothing new would be introduced into Game Dev they also had test requests for area optimizations and recent code changes affected how things such as doors and elevators work and these changes would give us roughly 1.5 millisecond frame time back which is obviously an improvement subsumption testing continues this month with new features and Bug fixes going into

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    subsumption tool weekly they continue to work closely with the design team and Tony Z to ensure that the tool is Thoroughly tested to their satisfaction performance testing is also underway for persistent Universe they use the performance profiler tool from Visual Studio to gather very specific data in areas of low performance they gather as much information is possible within the internal QA team and continue to do weekly cross Studio play tests in order to increase the stress of the servers and to simulate an actual live environment as much as possible Melissa Estrada our QA technical lead has also had fun time this month testing various gravity conditions on the new moons the system design team has been

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    working on items for 3.0 and with a lot of focus on the lesy landing Zone we have Rob Riner from the Austin office visit and managed to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time they're experimenting with leski having a full AI population the AI behaviors needed some work to ensure that they're not causing them to overcrowd in any given area they also spent time stress testing our servers to determine what AI populations we can support and still get the performance that we need during the process they work closely with the tech team to optimize so we can keep the performance as solid as possible the cinematics team has been continuing to work on scenes across all chapters of Squadron 42 this month they also spent time working with the graphic Engineers

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    to continue work on the two-dimensional render to texture display screens and holographic volume rendering work this month our lead lighting artist Chris Campbell was solely focused on applying some of the final touches in our 3.0 content including color grading for each Moon as you can see here integrating lighting between The Outpost in the moons and doing bug fixing and polishing on the leski landing Zone the environment team has been hard at work on polishing and Bug fixing existing content in the Pu with all the various components coming together we want to make sure the visual experience for the player is as absolutely good as it can possibly be on leski new areas and locations have been added that will increase the number of things the

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    players can do and explore including a new store and an admin office the newly added garages received a final polish and dressing pass making them ready to be used they also put a lot of effort this month into researching and development looking at new features going into the game after 3.0 this includes work on Art Corp procedural cities as well as the planet Hurston an important element of the research phase is that we find smart and scalable solutions that allow us to create more content as efficiently as possible moving forward well that's it for this month's update as always thank you so much for watching and all the support thanks for the subscribers that enable us to provide these monthly updates to the community take care and

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    we'll see you in the verse lots of great stuff from our team in Frankfurt those in-game Holograms are looking pretty cool yeah it's really impressive Tech that we'll be using a lot going forward we captured a ton of ship-to ship comps for squadron 42 and I know that because I spent a few hours sitting in a fake cockpit getting all of Pusher com calls yeah I think all together we spent weeks capturing com messages so expect to see this Tech used a lot going forward another new system that you'll be seeing soon is kiosks arriving in 3.0 these devices will expand the shopping options and services currently in game right kiosks are an integral part of this game's economy and need to tie into other important backend systems like subsumption so getting them up and running has required a lot of effort from numerous

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    departments now let's take a look under the hood and show you exactly what it takes to upgrade your shopping experience hi I'm Rob rininger I'm the lead technical designer in Austin I'm Spencer Johnson I'm an associate gameplay engineer on the LA team I'm Zan bienen I am the UI creative director here at f42 I'm Trevor warish the principal UI artist here I'm Pete Macky senior designer on Star Citizen the kiosk is our first for a into an economy in the game a real living economy driven by the players the kiosk is going to be the users interface to purchase things or sell them within the game that are not physically within the shop in the case of purchasing or um things in their

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    inventory things from from their ship all selling will be done through the kiosk what that will allow you to do is view an entire store's uh inventory you can browse to the list you can filter it you can sort it and view its uh stats and comparison to other things it it will extend to eventually The Landing Services you can use the kiosk to restock your ship and refill and so forth you'll be able to equip a ship item directly on the ship at the time of purchase if you want or have it delivered to the cargo hold of your ship it's almost like uh you know ordering through Amazon or something where you can select a shipping destination so whether you have a ship landed out a cargo pad or there's a cargo area in the landing Zone you're at or you want to ship it somewhere like you can select that as an option so I've been working on economy related stuff almost since January of

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    2013 and so I'm really excited that you know we're getting to the point now that you know the stuff that we were talking about you know in the early days of the project we have tool support internally for that I can actually start building this stuff in addition I work out things like the recipes for the supply chains and Manufacturing recipe in the context of Star Citizen is somewhat similar to a crafting recipe in um other MMOs uh it defines the types of Commodities and resources that go into manufacturing um a given item like a laser cannon or uh even a ship the way that we use recipes and the way that you might find them in another game is that those recipes generally aren't used directly by the players instead they're

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    used by the design team to really sculpt the the the types of goods that are bought and sold at any location in the world and that's to make that location feel correct so if it's a factory that it buys and sells the kinds of things that you would expect from that location I've been working on the backend code side of the shopping and kiosk systems the simplest way to describe making the the shopping component we have is talking with the various systems that are all involved in the player making purchases and transactions through the the whole whole process of using a kiosk or using a storefront to buy things and then have that enter into your persistence so Commodities make up a a big part of the economy because everything within the game is Created

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    from one of the resources that runs through the system iron Gold Titanium uh hydrogen oxygen to get Commodities into the game means that we can start building the foundation for creating uh an actual economy where if deliveries aren't being made to a location then and all of a sudden their manufacturing capability is no longer you know at its Peak Performance so their demand goes up you know prices go up you can start to get that fluctuation in pricing so in terms of the beginning Point like this is really a big step for for getting that in place some of the big challenges for developing this economy is unifying the scale because you know as you know we have items you know from super tiny and inconsequentially priced all the way up to like you know these massive battle

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    Cruisers right and they all have to fit somewhere on the same the same scale and so that's been probably one of the the biggest challenges and the others are just the the scope of the the amount of work that has to get done in in terms of building the recipes and you know even at to the point of building the individual shop inventories um because that's all done by hand we've we have a location and we want it to buy and sell certain things so we actually as designers have to go in and you know determine what what is bought and sold there when you go and buy these Commodities you're going to buy a bunch of iron say I mean where's that iron going to go your ship right that makes the most sense got to go in your ship but what if you have multiple ships so

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    obviously there needs to be a way to say oh I want to put this in my my Hornet or you know I want to put this in my Eder I want to put the stuff I'm buying right now in this ship and you've got you know cargo grids you've got this whole other system that's being developed of how much stuff can we put in the ship and how is the player going to decide what ship to put it in so a lot of these options lead to needing very Dynamic Solutions on the code side we need to accommodate putting these Commodities anywhere we need to give the player the option to select where they're going we need to save where the stuff is kept because certainly you might think oh you know it's just in the ship but it becomes very complicated on the persistence end of things when saving what the player has done well where did they keep it you know all of this iron you need need to keep track of O is left in this cargo bay of this ship which was on this port of you know this space station you know a lot of these

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    different systems are first of all not always running directly on your computer at home sometimes running in our Sig back uh backend systems and there's also a lot of asynchronous events and calls so you you have to wait for things to happen basically you have to send messages and wait for answers rather than just getting immediate feedback because again like I said the shopping component really exists at the center of a lot of different things communicating I also set the prices for the Commodities and it's a similar process um it doesn't have quite as much uh it's not quite as intricate as the pricing for the the items because there aren't uh you know gameplay values associated with this that I need to take into account so um we actually have a tool uh that we internally called trade

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    Slayer and another one called price fixer that uh help with this job and trade layers primarily for fixing the setting the prices for the Commodities um what it does is it helps me figure out what the base value for a commodity should be uh based off of a bunch of different uh analytics data points and then it also helps me figure out like what the uh ranges that those should fluctuate in um and then price fixer does a very similar task but it's quite a bit more complicated and that helps me set the prices for the items but then it actually takes that step one step further and then I use those items to help me value a ship so it goes all the way from uh pricing a countermeasure

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    launcher uh to the the price of a constellation with the included p-52 some of the challenges that we faced uh when designing this was you know CR really wants that tangible feel he wants to be able to see the items he wants to be able to see how it's going to look on on you know a ship or you know in in the place that it belongs so doing that in a way where people don't have to navigate you know 5,000 different layers of a of a hierarchy in a window having that be understandable and intuitive uh to the player is was the big challenge here complexity for the economy is pretty deep um because it it is tightly integrated with the game play a large portion of my time is spent interfacing with a tech design team just to make sure that I understand how the item uh progression curves work and what the

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    expected types of uh play are for those items so that I can make sure that you know they have the right price one of the most exciting things about building the kiosk was the visual style side of it there's going to be a low-end kind of like an old school DOS prompt BBS Forum style and then we also have a mid-end like a mid 2000s Web 2.0 style if you go to Grim hex is where you'll see the low-end kiosks for all for example have kind of the mid nice range kiosk one thing we had to take into account was branding of this interface so when you go into a shop sake Saba Outlet you'll see the logo and the color scheme applied it's all one underlying system but we swap out the graphics depending on the store and the manufacturer it was really fun to design the old school style one the low-end one just kind of

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    developed these frame by frame animations that you would see old you know Doss games and things like that when I talk about the shopping code mod and it existing sort of as this glorified middleman this intermediary step between a lot of moving Parts one of those parts is subsumption like backend shopping service there's a whole bunch of backend Services we have as a part of subsumption in the diffusion system uh one of those is the shopping service what the code that I'm writing does it communicates to this backend service which exists on our Sig servers and gets inventory information alisar dumpers Depot or cassaba has this inventory with these prices this quantity of that item and every store has a unique set of information and so we need to communicate to that backend service and periodically update restock things like that and it's there's just a

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    large communication chain of different moving parts that need to be talked to at different times there's definitely a lot of communication that happens between these different teams like the UI kiosk team and myself the shopping backend team because we're in different countries it's a it's a lot of back and forth it's okay so we need to interface like this uh we need to have this line of communication often times we'll create function interfaces so we could say this is exactly the code you need to call even if I haven't written it yet this is what it'll look like the kiosk actually requires a lot of different changes to go in for 3o uh we needed you know persistence uh for ships persistent DB as far as their inventory so as people purchase Goods there they have to fly a ship to a location purchase the the stuff uh that they want on that ship fly that ship to another location in order to sell it so it doesn't allow

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    people to go to any location they want and spawn any ship it forces them to fly their ships around the universe so previously you were able to just do you know oh I'm MC Grim hex and I want my freelancer now or I want my Hornet now so now that people have to fly these things around it's going to force them to think about like oo maybe I need an escort back to this other place cuz I want to leave this ship here but I want to you know get a different ship and bring it over here so I can buy or sell some things for this ship prices will change based on inventory levels and stock levels and those inventory and stock levels are set on a per location basis so you can have two different casabas in two different uh parts of the world um that have different pricing schemes and it may be that they have the same base

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    price for a given item but due to the fact that one of them might be farther away from a distribution point that it gets restocked less often and therefore the price stays higher on that item uh more regularly uh than at the other shop and that's just one example of kind of the the complexity that uh we should be able to deliver in 3.0 your player persistence is everything that you own as a player so it could be the Commodities you have you know how many uh SEO of iron do you have or you know what shirt are you wearing so that would be your player's persistence data luckily uh that system already exists it's constantly making improvements to it and so this new shopping code we have has to interface with some the older parts of of persistence and some of the newer Parts as well so that we really

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    make sure we're we're saving what you do the big thing that is going to change for 3 is that it's really going to start to feel a lot more like the overall experience that that we've been talking about for so long persistence is a big part of that the ability to interface with um things in the game through the kiosk is going to be another big portion of that uh cargo system is coming online actually being able to carry things and have your ship keep track of the stuff that's on it and require people to to transfer goods from A to B that was a big part of our hauling and trading uh professions that's the exciting part what we're doing right now is it's laying the foundation for these cool features we're going to see coming up like systemic pricing like Dynamic economies that really react to players buying things in certain locations and selling them in others as these things start to come online it's really going

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    to change the experience that people are having now and turn it much more into the game that we envision so the cool thing about the kiosk is it's in world like all of our other interfaces so you know that will have tie-ins with the interaction system where you can you know bring up a cursor and interact with the screen so that will be sort of our first foray into getting interactable screens in world uh working with this unified interaction system so later on we'll expand that to elevator panels and other uh inor screens the kios is is is a nice test because it's it has quite in-depth functionality like sorting and filtering uh in you know pop-ups and things like that so it's quite a complex interface over let's say something simple like an elevator floor selection panel so it's a good test for us this is the big step

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    we've been waiting for for a long time to be able to start adding a lot of these other professions and and features into the game so I'm I'm really excited about it it's going to be the beginning of a lot of great things for the players it's going to be awesome I love the Retro look of those lowend kiosks they're really fun and have a lot of character yeah you'll be able to tell a lot of about where you are in the verse just by seeing what kind of kiosks are around that kind of environmental storytelling is important considering how many Landing zones the game will have and that's all for today's episode thanks to our subscribers for your continued support July's edition of jumpo will be released tomorrow so be sure to check it out definitely it's going to be a good one and finally our big thanks to all our backers for helping us build this game the level of community engagement at this point in the development process is

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    just one of the many things that make St citizen so special true that until next week we will see you around the verse thank you for watching so if you want to 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