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Star Citizen: Around the Verse - The Process of Procedural Cities

16 November 201700:37:501,064 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

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  1. 00:00:15

    Hello and welcome to another episode of Around the Verse, our weekly look at Star Citizen's ongoing development. I'm Sandi Gardiner. And I'm Chris Roberts. On today's show, we'll take a look behind the scenes to explore the origins of our procedural city tech and what went into getting it ready to show at CitizenCon. Yeah, you definitely won't want to miss it. Um it's a really interesting feature, but first let's check in with Eric Kieron Davis and the rest of the team for this week's Burndown. Burndown. Welcome back to Burndown, our weekly show dedicated to reviewing the progress on the release of Star Citizen Alpha 3.0. Progress continues towards the release of PTU as we focus on the category shopping, missions, ships and vehicles, traversal, mobiGlas, and overall performance and stability. As of right now, we are looking at 197

  2. 00:01:05

    issues across all categories. So let's check in with the team to see how each are progressing. We're continuing to close out 3.0. Um basically, I think that we've killed all of the shopping bugs um and tasks. I we go to review today or tomorrow. Um so at least by the end of this week and then from there Paul and myself and the UI team are focused on getting the item 2.0 ships and all the UI that's associated with that um up to snuff and ready to go. And so then we'll be ready to hit PTU um with that. And then from there we're also focusing on PMA and some of these other um features in order to basically close out

  3. 00:01:54

    all the tier zeros. In the next week or two, I will be triaging all of the basically trio bugs that we have that we're currently focused on and making sure that we can refine that to as small of a list and as concise of a list of what we would consider minimal viable product to put that out to PTU and and to life. Shopping this week, we've we've made a lot of progress in shopping. We have a review schedule for tomorrow morning with Chris and all the directors to go over the progress. We've resolved over 150 bugs since this past past couple weeks and we're going to review that progress. Hopefully get a minimal amount of feedback so we can get super close to calling this thing feature complete. So it's not just us here in Austin that are

  4. 00:02:42

    working on the shopping experience. You know, we've got Spencer Johnson in LA that is working through bugs on his end and so we're we're kind of coordinating with him to make sure that he has everything he needs from us on that. We've also got just extraneous little little issues like the the NPC's heads jittering and you know, moving back and forth has to you know, we got Rich Rich K in the in the UK who's who's working on that and you know, just a lot of different weird random bugs at this point that we're just trying to identify causes for and get knocked out just to make this thing super polished and super smooth. As people in our Evocati might have seen, we had like a similar shop or by similar I mean an identical copy of dumpers in both Levski and Grim Hex that we've now divided out and gotten two different shopkeepers in and kind of

  5. 00:03:30

    mixed things up a bit. We got a size two items now. The empty back room is now full of beautiful size two items that we have on some new displays we got from Ben and his team. Also we've got all sorts of art that had rotations all over the place. We had to go back and make sure that everything was placed properly, look pretty on the shelves. Now that we're having all the the final stuff in the game and are all the final assets in the build. There's definitely been our challenges going through this. Shopkeepers has been, you know, the that's generally our first usage of this assumption assumption engine in general. So, getting to know that has been a challenge. The shopkeepers, although what you're going to see is fairly simple compared to the overall AI you're

  6. 00:04:17

    going to see in the long run is still just a good learning experience for us. Getting getting some of the other bugs worked out of the system, you know, interactions with objects, getting the try on camera to sit at the right thing to focus on the items you're trying on. Things like that, just kind of dialing in the the knobs, so to speak. It's just been taking its toll and and taking its time. So, it's it's been good. Interestingly this week we've had to deal with a number of bugs related to how we do occlusion in the cargo grids. For instance, if you were to store a ship in your cargo bay, how do we fill up boxes around that ship so we don't block you so you can't keep the ship there, but still give you the option of storing cargo inside your ship. It's been very interesting stuff. So, what has happened recently is that

  7. 00:05:08

    we transitioned from doing sprints to weekly reviews to close out the work for missions 430. We already have a lot of missions available in Evocati, but there are a few still missing. So, what we're doing is wrapping up the outstanding missions and tasks which we track through Jira. So, the team is working through the outstanding Jira list and to keep it organized we define the focus at the beginning of each week as well as which mission missions we want to review and we are doing the review at the end of each week. Addition to that we are also doing daily things to ensure we stay on top of blockers or any issues that could arise and of course also to track progress. Additionally to the reviews, we are also doing um playthroughs where directors or leads, for example, can experience the

  8. 00:05:56

    missions themselves. They can play through them themselves and provide additional feedback to the team as well on top of the reviews we have. So, this feedback we get all the feedback and it really helps the team to improve and balance the missions further. So, this is where we are. We have made lots of progress doing all these reviews and playthroughs and now we're just closing out the last bits. So, we anticipate to be feature complete in the very near future. Um this week we've been focusing on taking the rest of our missions to final. We've got seven more taken to feature complete. And I think that leaves us with probably only about four more to take there and they're very close. so this leaves us able to focus on bugs and the smaller features that we've been

  9. 00:06:46

    leaving till last. For instance, we've added automated turrets to some of our space stations um that'll better defend against um people kind of hanging around and griefing uh shooting ships on landing pads. and we've also managed to get it now so that when you join a mission, you also join a kind of a radio band um so that that means like if you join a multiplayer mission, you you you and your friends will all just be within one kind of radio band and hear the dialogue from that mission and it won't spill out to the rest of the server. Oh, and people nearby won't like come across your mission dialogue

  10. 00:07:35

    flying back and forth as well, which really neatens things up. So, another feature I'm tracking is item 2.0 UI integration and ship setup. So that's getting all the ship set up and and working using utilizing all the new features and item 2.0 support that the engineering team has has implemented. You know, we've got LA tech design and UK tech design all working hard to to set up the the ships. Getting the the beds set up to be so that you can get into the beds and log out and and and saves where you're at and you can log back in in your ship. We've got, you know, the the lighting set up, the operator seats. We've got a whole lot of different too many to name at this point. It's just a lot to lot to lot to

  11. 00:08:23

    do, but this week we're hoping to make some significant progress there to be able to call a lot of these ships feature complete. The Gladiator, which was previously kind of broken, is now functioning. It's working. It's flyable. It's the we've got things you can actually get in get in and out of it without breaking the animations and stuff at this point. We're excited about the progress of the ships have made, especially on the on the setup side, but also on the UI front as well. Getting the UI integrated into all the other different ships and getting that balance is going to be a key part of of the of the remaining effort for for item 2.0. So as we talked about last week, guys, some of the focuses of the IFCS team was supporting the AI team with bug fixing and then spline following. So we've

  12. 00:09:10

    managed to close out quite a few bugs now. We've got one left, which is going to extend the start of this week before John can start on the spline following tasks. So I'm I'm out here at Foundry 42 Manchester so that I can work with Andrew Nicholson, David Colson on flight model. So helping out with the tuning and helping David work on he's he's been working with me recently. So he's doing the working on the gravlev system and optimizing IFCS and things like that. So, last week we managed to complete or I managed to complete a a full pass on the ship tunings for the SCM velocities to make things a little faster. It took a long time to get through all those ships, but I'm really pleased with how that's worked out. Give us more velocity to play through play with,

  13. 00:09:58

    especially when switching to the higher velocities with the afterburner. This week the main focus is the gravlev simulation for the hoverbikes and atmospheric tunings and the drag simulation in in atmospheric flight. We discovered a little bit before we went to Evocati last week and we found that every so often ships would just lose control. You would roll and yaw to one side and the plane would just start spinning uncontrollably and you wouldn't you weren't able to recover very easily. and we quickly discovered that some performance improvements that were added a few days earlier caused this issue. Uh we weren't exactly sure why, but we needed to release to Evocati, so we removed the performance improvements, which fixed the ships losing control, but you know, we still wanted these

  14. 00:10:46

    performance improvements. So, I went back a couple of days later, took a deeper look at these performance improvements and we discovered that you know, I'd made a mistake and there was some um force couples in the way the ship rotates that weren't balanced very well as a result of the performance improvements and it meant that when the ship tried to make certain maneuvers it wasn't balanced and it would just uncontrollably spin and not be able to get out. Um so, that's been fixed and the performance improvements have gone in back in, so we get a little bit more performance on on ships and um they don't lose control anymore, which is nice. So, we ended up getting the best of both worlds with this bug. We got performance improvements to make the the game 3.0 as smooth as possible for players and we also fixed any issues with uh ships losing control um which is the

  15. 00:11:35

    best possible outcome we could have got from this. All right. So, uh last week on the star map uh it was quite all right. It was uh there were still a few issues. We had some uh cases where we lost the inputs. Um we had a few crashes. Uh those have been fixed. Uh the crashes were kind of hard uh to fix because they're kind of random. They're not 100% reproducible. So, we really have to find like in the code where things can go wrong and then uh try to fix them, send them to QA and uh see if they have been fixed and so far so good. Um we also had uh Todd has been reviewing the uh mobi glass star map uh checking if for like the last few details and the he has a small list uh

  16. 00:12:26

    sent back um with things we still need to fix. Uh it's really like small polish tasks. So, uh with the star map um it's like the first iteration of of of the system and we would really like to have it polished as this now, but this is not like the first uh this is not the last iteration of the of the star map. So, we would really like to see it people play with it and get some feedback on it and like improve it and getting some feedback on uh what people think about it and seeing how people actually interact with with with the system. So, for the star map polish one over last week we've kind of been doing like last few bug fixes there. Um on Thursday or Friday last week we got to a point where

  17. 00:13:14

    we're now happy with it on the UI side. So, that's now this morning gone over to Todd. Todd's reviewed it this morning. Um he just sent over a list of I think it was five or six bugs. Um so, now we're going to estimate those, get them into the schedule, see where they fit. And then, once those bugs are done again, we'll go back to Todd, and hopefully that'll be it. Um just that will be completely signed off and ready for 3.0 live. So, right now there's kind of two things I'm working on right now with persistence. One is just general bug fixing. We've done a lot of work to get um persistent behavior into the game. So, this includes persisting locations, persisting uh inventory item port attachments, and so on. And now that we're getting uh these features into the hands of the backers uh in the Evocati,

  18. 00:14:03

    we're starting to see some very rarer and hard to catch bugs come in. And so, I'm spending time tracking those things down. Like, very rarely, you know, a certain ship might not show up in your inventory whenever you go to an ASOP terminal. Things like that. Um but also, I'm finishing out some feature work having to deal with persistence. Um mainly to deal with the inventory and the inventory app in MobiGlass, so that the players have a way of looking at all of the items that they own, and some useful ways of querying those items. So, you can potentially have a lot of things or um potentially hundreds of things attached to a ship. Um there's all kinds of weapons that you can have. Um there's commodities, there's lots of things in the game now that you want to be able to look at your inventory and be able to

  19. 00:14:52

    kind of rummage through it and see, "Okay, this ship has this gun on it, or this ship has this particular cargo uh commodity on it, and I want to transfer it to a certain location." So, being able to both track and uh modify the persistent values, as well as query usefully into those values, is um something that I'm finishing out the feature work currently on. So, for the high-level agenda today, in order to go to Evocati, um the kind of big ticket items that we're going to run through with Webster and team are how much we've triaged over the course of today, the fact that Todd and Paul have obviously worked with QA to be able to do that. And then also how that triage has started to affect how we've condensed our either quality push into

  20. 00:15:40

    PTU push and putting those tasks and bugs together. So we have a condensed list of what we need to deliver going into next week and also how we push either quality again today. Following on from that, Brennan will start running through the kind of major issues that we've seen, the kind of stuff that's blocking us from doing another push today, as well as the real nasties that are going to affect either quality as and for Will leverage obviously hit let the either quality know the general impacts that we're going to have. And then we'll actually get a discussion of the issues that we're going to see during the course of the day that QA have probably noted as being worthy to raise. And then following on from that we can jump into the player count meeting afterwards. In order to get out to PTU, we're focusing on stability, we're focusing on performance. Now, obviously when we released it out

  21. 00:16:30

    to the either quality, there's a whole different setup, you know, and a lot of times they're seeing things that we're not seeing from our internal play test or our internal QA department just because they're going about things differently, different machine setups and so forth. So it's it's kind of eye-opening, you know, when we start seeing some of those bugs come in, but the guys have been focusing on those and and trying to squash those as fast as possible. Once again made another push up to either quality on Friday. We had a feedback report from Will sent this morning which seems to suggest that playability is taking a little bit of a step backwards. So QA are going through the email that Will sent on this and responding later today with any bugs and tasks relating to what's been called out there. And we'll also aim for QA to provide a crash report later today as well, which

  22. 00:17:18

    would highlight the the main crashes that are affecting either Carti. We currently have 35 issues left on our Eva Carti fixed version. These are bugs specifically that we want fixing. Um around 2/3 of them are crash reports that we've gathered from the public crash handler. So, when the Eva Carti get a crash and they click submit, that goes through to us and our QA here puts them in. So, our main priority is getting stability up. We want to have a very stable build before we go to PTU um to ensure things are looking good. At the moment, I am working on a method of prioritizing these crashes cuz obviously we're getting a lot in and we need to work on which are the worst ones. So, I'm working on a method of looking at the percentage of these crashes that have based on the total

  23. 00:18:05

    concurrency on the Eva Carti servers. Um and once we've got that in place, we'll be able to get the the worst of the worst fixed and then start working backwards from there. In summary, then, we have one issue that we would very much like fixed. That is the crash on Macs. Um if it's looking like we can get a fix in for that, we should kick off a build with that in and have that as our release candidate. Um if not, we should kick a build immediately, which will have Muhammad's extra debugging information and that will be our release candidate instead. But, that'll be for Ash to find out for a Mac. He has to find out where that's up to. Um and yeah, that's the plan for tonight. So, fingers crossed, guys. Um the last week or so, we've not had that many bugs back. So, the network

  24. 00:18:54

    team's mainly been focused on on optimization. Um we've kind of been tackling a couple of areas. Uh we've been looking at um what in the game code makes our marks our serialized variables dirty a lot and generally and therefore generating a lot of traffic. Trying to find ways that they cut down the need for them to to generate that traffic in the first place. Um we've been looking at ways of um analyzing the traffic that's coming in, seeing if we can um cull any of the traffic, reduce any of it that so that we don't need to send it. And we've been looking at the um the network code itself, seeing if we can make it uh work a bit faster. And that's pretty much it, really. For us on the network team, it's the culmination of months of work

  25. 00:19:43

    you know, we've refactored a lot of stuff. We've spent a lot of time optimizing uh the code. Try to make it go as fast as we can. Um looked at um increasing player counts. It's, you know, 3.0 means all of that coming together. first time in a kind of finished, polished product and and looking forward to seeing how that that actually works in life. As you may know, like a couple of months ago, we introduced this new technology which is called like WAF data, which allowed us to reduce like data compilation times quite a bit, down to 10 minutes. Everybody's happy about it, but of course, like during the process, like we came across like a bunch of bugs, which was kind of expected, of course. And basically, I'm going to talk talk you through like one of the problems we had. So, this file uh db.json dictates dictates kind of like, you know, how our animations are going to make it into the

  26. 00:20:31

    builds. And uh in this specific case, for example, this means that uh these four animations here are going to show up in the build in this file airlock.dba. Now, uh the first build was fine, then we realized that when people like were touching these four animations, either like by adding a new one, removing a new one, or even like just touching a new uh one of the existing ones, uh the build was not really working. And then, basically, we realized that uh the new DBA was being compiled fine because like the content was changing, the DBA was was to be compiled again, but like was not being uploaded it to to the just it was not being patched and and it was not being uploaded to the object store. So like as soon as we realized this, we fixed it and everything went much much smoother like we were able to close down like a bunch

  27. 00:21:21

    of gears like five six gears like for PTU right away. Producers were super happy about it and we are confident that this is like a good like platform for everybody to work on be it like technical point of view from a designer point of view we are super happy about it. WAF has been used for couple of months now. Every branch is using it. Super happy about it and uh yeah, it's going to be a big help for PTU. Good optimization for the characters on the server like not updating NPC animations which is unnecessary. Animations are those part of the ships. The player count is working mostly nicely with the network thread parallelization. And so yeah, basically with all the things which scale differently with the number of players and what the players

  28. 00:22:08

    do. So we can just increase the player, measure where it's slow, improve where it's slow and repeat and repeat. On the other side we looked into increasing our CPU count which is supported because for Amazon we get really powerful PCs to run it with 36 and we are testing if it's 72 cores. Just have to check if we actually gain enough advantage from using the CPUs. Something we're going to test soonish and then we would see what in the time frame to release it soon because we don't want to optimize for the next two years before we give it out. We have to find the right compromise to give it out basically. Now that we really have our tier zeros and it's it allows the the different departments to really focus on basically closing this out just because

  29. 00:22:56

    now we don't have all of the necessarily oh okay I got to code this for two weeks and then come back and then or I got to design this and then come back and now it really is just tightening the screws down and making sure that everything is polished as we possibly can make it. Since last week, the team has checked in over 736 updates to the 3.0 branch in Perforce in every one of those categories. We are making steady progress to get this into your hands as quickly as possible. See you next time here on Burn Down. You can follow our development processes in more detail by checking out the production schedule report on our website. Updates are posted every Friday. Now, let's turn our attention to this week's feature. The team knew that creating ArcCorp, a planet that's almost completely covered in buildings, would

  30. 00:23:43

    be a challenge as hand placing the number of structures required would be an enormous task. Yeah, with ArcCorp and the other cities that we need to fill out the universe in mind, lead technical artist Alex from built a tool that used tiles to generate procedural cities. These tiles could then be tailored to contain a variety of areas like whether the buildings were industrial or residential. You saw this tech in action at CitizenCon, but it took a lot of work to get it to that point. Let's check out what went into getting it ready for showtime with today's feature. Alex was showing me some tech he's quite passionate about some of the stuff he does, so he's always looking to share it with with members of the team and with myself. Um so he was showing me this

  31. 00:24:31

    procedural Paris um demo that he did which was creating Paris procedurally through through Lumberyard. And he mentioned that he was looking to incorporate that into our game specifically to create ArcCorp at first. Yeah. And straight away that was like well, okay, we can do something with that. You know, I knew having worked on ArcCorp in the past, I knew we had assets available that we could use and plug into that system straight away. So, I said to Alex, "Listen, let me go away this weekend and just work something out for you. I'll I'll create you know, he he gave me the template." And um you know, he gave me the max files, the source data, and I just went in there with the assets that we'd made before and just tried to get something together for him on the Monday. On Monday, I got his assets and there were just some very very slight changes

  32. 00:25:20

    to the world, to the pivot, to the scale, to the precision of the things, and then I ported the tool during the weekend to the commercial lumber yard, to our own lumber yard. It didn't take that much effort because obviously it's like a kind of the same engine. And then in about 3 days, we got a first version of the city working. He worked a lot on illuminating illumination pollution. Yeah, yeah. In other cases, we set up the scene and we did this video with the real reality Mhm. inside the city and send it off to Chris. So, that was important, wasn't it? Like straight So, we built those city blocks, we'd built the city, but then Alex was saying, "Well, well, it'd be cool now to actually get ArtCorp, you know, the the

  33. 00:26:09

    ArtCorp the players have been running around in, put that onto the surface of this thing, you know, put it in context because previously people in ArtCorp you were looking at the backdrop and going, "Okay, that's a cool backdrop." But now we're looking at the backdrop and it's a city. It's an actual city. With the right scale, you can fly through it, it has trenches, it has landing areas, they're not still detailed, but they give you a glance of what actually a proper city is like, and it will let you put that city on a real planet. So, the other thing I did after is like we didn't have ArtCorp, we just put it on yellow. It's an atmosphere. And fly it around, zoomed in, zoomed out, and so that's where the idea of the demo comes to show to people that it actually this is a

  34. 00:26:56

    real city surrounding our headquarters. But Alex he took the city and he went okay I'm just going to put this on a planet now and then did a video just flying out onto the into the atmosphere of the planet and it was like oh wow. Um you know it was really it was really good fun to work on and there's that kind of early stage for me anyway it was good. And then that first video that um you know so I I you know all I did really was I just gave Alex the assets and then you went away and put it into your procedural system and the great thing about the system is that it's not like you press a button and then you you come back 5 minutes later and the city's built. You actually see it dynamically building and plotting the city down So there's all these assets that are given Alex kind of like flying at the

  35. 00:27:44

    screen kind of building the city dynamically and that was the first video that you did. during that process and that was just such a cool process. in the nothing like in Matrix and you see the city coming to you and building around you It's kind of like flying it's fantastic yeah it's really cool and then you yeah then you're on the landing pad in ArtCorp looking out at it and you did another video where you're in um I think you're in the ArtCorp headquarters looking out the window there. with the city coming yeah. with the city building in the background. It's like it's a shame the players don't see that you know. Yeah we will not yeah. Yeah of course they won't see it. Um but it it was a really cool process. So we have city tiles where we we define a specific block I guess if you look at a city block we'll say okay here we can

  36. 00:28:31

    have uh high buildings low buildings high rise flats um and then from that those collections of city tiles they get arranged into a city. The procedural system will define high and low areas industrial areas where it's more ragged, uh more dense, and then downtown areas where it's more flat areas but high high rise skyscrapers. And it's my job to make those high and low areas interesting. So, at the point where we're generating completely procedurally, that's where it's all done by the tool. I'm hands-off at that point. Well, I'll be there doing subtle very subtle edits. Um so, you may have Uh one example that was quoted to me this morning was we can have

  37. 00:29:20

    an industrial area, but the art direction may be, "Oh, can we have four chimney stacks over here?" So, that would be a very subtle edit on my part. But everything else, that would be procedural. You will want You will want rule sets in the procedural system. Um but there may be times when a rule set's employed isn't enough. You really don't want to say uh a hospital next to a oil refinery. That That's probably too close for comfort. So, you'll want to be able to separate those two areas to some degree. And from that, that's that's the subtlety of the editing. But if if you're looking at thousands thousands of cities, potentially you might have to accept a strange arrangement. So, we have uh Well, it's it's more like

  38. 00:30:08

    uh themes, uh alpha, bravo, low-tech, high-tech, uh and depending on the planet, depending on the theme, depending on the branding, and depending on the uh weather, you will see different materials, different kits, and different conditions. So, that's more on our direction. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's uh Is it Is it similar to the outpost where you can have like if it's there for a separate time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Cuz that was really cool the way you could uh bring in more dirt and and things like that. And I Hurston would be Very sandy. Very sandy and murky and things and then maybe our crops are a little cleaner. and and wet and wet and dark. And then you go to MicroTech and New Babbage and it's just pristine. Yeah.

  39. 00:30:56

    Exactly. Perfect. And the level difference is we have two different resolution. One is the FPS, first-person resolution, which is 512. Yeah, like landing zone specific. Yeah. He did some research and went to Uh which one was the space station that Oh, Olisar. Yeah, so you know the way that we build our exterior content is such that you would we're building these huge kind of almost kilometer-long stations and within those stations you've got landing pads and the focus of the artwork and the texture resolution um is around the landing pads and that's where the the the highest density of assets will be as well. But then obviously because the stations are so big, we can't put the same amount of detail across the whole station. So it's a very similar approach that we've done with the city

  40. 00:31:44

    stuff. You've got the city as a whole and then you've got the landing zones within that city and that's where we concentrate the highest density of artwork is around those landing zones because that's where the player will be spending the most amount of their time. Um that's where they'll be landing, you know, that's where they'll be knocking around with other players. The rest of the stuff they'll be flying around it, they'll be they'll be moving across it in a much quicker way, so. Over time we intend to add with a certain logic locations and kits of the cities where you can land and have NPCs, shops, have interaction, market points. But that obviously with the logic like you can't literally come here and land with an helicopter everywhere. There are places where you can go, places where you cannot go. You're

  41. 00:32:31

    encapsulated to walk out and go in some parts and also drive in some specific parts but not everywhere cuz everywhere doesn't actually make sense. It would be like trying to fly a helicopter over London. Yeah, and just land on And London anywhere, you know, yeah. I think the military would have something to say about that, maybe. Um yeah, it's a good approach to it. now we have some uh hangars locations that we we do initially for the cities in the headquarters where we have MPCs, you have customs, and you have uh interactions, and then over time we will add uh more interaction, more crowd system, monorails, uh

  42. 00:33:19

    flying traffic, uh So so cool. Yeah, like there was some stuff I was talking to Alex about. I don't know if this will happen, but I I always imagined if you were flying over ArcCorp, the procedural city, you've got the London Zone area 18, which everyone knows and visits and goes to quite a lot. But then every now and again, one of the top of these skyscrapers, you just see one of the London pads open up. You know, you see like a dude standing on there, and you can land on it and go and talk to him, and there's a mission from there, and then you can go off again. But the next time you fly across ArcCorp, it might not be there. You know, it's opened up somewhere else. So once I the the tool has been uh submitted as part of the build since a bit more than a month. It's been only used by me and uh Stefan in the uh working on Lorville to refine it and to

  43. 00:34:09

    define how we were uh dividing our assets and what we needed. So we went from using only uh graphic content like meshes, CGF, to using prefabs. So every kit can use lightning, VFX, sounds, uh splines, spawn points, ATC's, and every kind of entity that you need to have a an alive interactable entity. We are just working on human cities at the moment. I would love to see how we tackle alien cities. Is that going to be completely random? Are we going to have some or a greater degree of refinement by hand? I don't know yet. I would hope even on an alien civilization

  44. 00:34:58

    they have some degree of control and they would make logical intelligent choices about where they would place uh specific buildings. Even recreational facilities. So, each time you visit that location, it will look exactly the same as you left it. You could potentially shoot someone there. And if the undertakers haven't come along the body may still be there. Pot marks, you know, broken windows. I know, I think a crime scene sounds interesting. I'd like to see that develop. I'd like to see the the whole timeline evolve as you go away. I mean, it could be very well that um you see buildings decay. paving slabs deteriorate over time.

  45. 00:35:48

    Potholes in the roads. That that would be something to to look forward You really get a sense of how many tiles are needed to build out a location like ArcCorp when you're watching the buildings get generated in real time. Yeah. Uh well, this tool is essential for achieving the massive scale of cities that we want in the game. As you saw though, the team still needs to go in and hand craft some areas and the ability to easily generate large cities and adjust them to our liking is a huge benefit going forward in building out the universe of Star Citizen. It sure is and that's all for today's episode. Thanks to all of our subscribers for your support. One of the many shows you help produce is Happy Hour, which you can catch tomorrow at 12:00 p.m. PST. This week, Jared will be joined by xenolinguist Britton Watkins and Sheree Heilberg to discuss the Xi'an

  46. 00:36:37

    language. Yep, that's going to be pretty interesting. And a big thanks to all our backers for helping bring Star Citizen to life. Developments like the procedural city tech are only possible because of your support and interest in crafting a universe unlike any other. So, thank you for allowing us to push the boundaries. Until next week, we will see you around the verse. Thank you for watching. So, if you want

  47. 00:37:30

    to keep up with the latest and greatest in the Star Citizen and Squadron 42 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.

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