Inside Star Citizen: The H2O Show

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] Alpha 323 is just around the corner and with that a host of new gameplay in general life in the verse features but it also includes a variety of technological improvements like the replication layer split our initial implementation of Vulcan image of scaling breakthroughs and the subject of this week's show changes to the water rendering and simulation system that were first discussed at last year's citizen G so here now are the water Wizards themselves to tell us more you've been doing this for a while now why do you think people are so interested in water in just any scenario is such a focal point you go to a national park you go see the rivers and the waterfalls you're looking up stock photos of anything it's people focus on the water cuz it is just so different to

2. 00:00:49

   kind of anything else you find in nature like everything's unique and everything's different but water is just something else entirely wow you're making me sound like I'm a water cult or something when you came aboard did you imagine you'd be the moist master I still don't refer to myself as that name try as you might Jared uh Hydro homie uh I guess I didn't see it being such a focus but I'm glad that it is it's good fun I really like it it's not all water water's just the nice things I get to talk about more someone asked me when I was at siton

3. 00:01:44

   recently what makes water 3D in games what's different to anything else and the truth is you have to work to make it look like water because what we perceive as a volumetric liquid in real life in graphics we break down into different Parts you have the water surface which is what you see reflecting what you can look through where you see your waves and your foam and so on you have the fog underneath and any particles floating around that makes you feel like you're inside water rather than just underneath a surface above you and then you have all the effects that go to selling that whether it be the lighting the co stics the boundary when it's intersecting your visor or any of the splashes or simulation that we're going to move on to so we showed a slice of what we've been

4. 00:02:32

   doing with water at siton last year and what we put out into 323 is a few steps ahead of that so we're going to show you what we've been able to do since getting the rendering right was really key to making sure that the Sim looks right because anything that catches your eye and tells you this isn't real is going to stick out far more than any work that we put into the Sim it has to be said that the way we've entered water in the past in St czm was not really up to scatch so we have spent a lot of time trying to make it a lot more realistic water is quite an interesting thing to render it has very complex form in its Dynamics and it the way it animates but optically it's very interesting too in some ways water is like glass it's transparent it refracts and distorts light which passes through

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   it and it also has a surface which reflects the environment around it in some ways water is also like fog it obscures the background behind it maybe completely obscuring it and certainly impure water we'll have suspended particles which themselves reflect light and give the water a cloudy Hue the water surface May feature foam certainly where waves are occurring or at shorelines one thing we wanted to do was improve the way we render foam on the ocean surface and this involved having it show detail when view close up and also having it disperse in a very naturalistic way where the form breaks apart into small patches and the bubble dissipate one thing we did to get the

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   details on the closer views of foam is photograph a pan of soapy water this gave us the required detail to project onto the form surface and give the look we wanted it's nice to think that all of the form you see on any ocean in the verse started its life in a soapy pan of water in my Kitchen in Star Citizen players can enter the water this means they can view the water from underneath the surface so we spend lots of time making sure underwater views look correct showing fogging and so on similarly when the player enters the water the water line may cut across the player's visor and we took a lot of time getting that to render correctly and short as expected I really think the improvements that have gone into the rendering of the water

7. 00:04:57

   especially the surface the fog it's Leaps and Bounds ahead of what was in 322 so from rendering let's move on to surface simulation what we wanted to do was provide some Next Level visuals to go with all the things that can interact with water in our game with the nature of the sandbox Universe there's just so many ways you can interact with it and with all our spaceships and The Colossal thrusters and wakes they can throw off we really wanted to be able to match that with the water rendering the way we decided to approach this instead of having a square that follows the camera like many games do of water simulation we wanted to have something more powerful than this we wanted you to be able to stand at the top of a mountain and watch a ship fly across a lake underneath drawing the Wake behind

8. 00:05:46

   it and you wouldn't get that with a fixed square around the camera so the approach we took was something called region-based surface simulation this allows us to to allocate areas where we need to be simulating and propagating water waves at any given moment regardless of where the camera is we can allocate and deallocate these as we need and we can have a pool of them of any size depending on the spec of your PC you can actually change the maximum allowed regions in your graphics options on medium setting you can have 32 regions simulated at the same time you can even go to a very high setting which would give you as many as 100 28 to choose the best regions we try to have U the closest and most important

9. 00:06:35

   ones show up and call the other ones the fact that we sort it by the number of interaction how strong they are means that only the most important ones will be shown on screen which helps because um having a little interaction right in front of you could be useful but it might not be visible when there's a very big ship going right by and creating a huge weight sounds like you a very efficient system then we've tried to build a very efficient system in order to interact with things that are in the water we first need to know that they are there we've hooked up to the physics system so it sens as events when physical objects like boxes or the player or bits of ship debris are in or floating in the water from there

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    we can work out how much water has been displaced and the velocity and pick an appropriate simulation wave speed to match those from there we can apply forces to different texels of each Sim region which then propagate as we update that region over time as well as responding to physical objects in the water we can also hook this up to other input types for example we could have a ship falling into water creating a huge displacement but we can also have footsteps near the beach or we could also have a bullet and missiles and explosions for the player this means that you can be way more immersed in your game as you can see the Direct effects of what you are doing how you

11. 00:08:11

    are playing on the water we wanted to be able to create the best visual impact we could without having an impact on your bandwidth and server performance Etc especially as we move into bigger and bigger player accounts so our water simulation is done on the client and is visual only and I think that way we get the best possible result out of it all of the information that we get from the different systems is then packaged and sent to the water buffer tying this all together is the water buffer this allows us to take in inputs from multiple systems to the shape of the water surface and then use that information in lots of other systems such as additional effects and of course rendering the water each patch of ocean is able to render with both the

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    water buffer on and off if it is off it simply shows the ocean waves according to where it is on the planet if it is on it first populates the water buffer region with the wave data in that patch we then add in any simulation data or data from other inputs then when we come to render the ocean patch we look up again from this buffer where we have the total added together result of both the original ocean waves the simulation and any other inputs to copy the simulation in we build a mesh that covers parts of the water buffer that we're going to write into the UV coordinates of each vertex in that mesh point to a specific part of the region Atlas this allows us to read specific parts of simulations and input them to other parts of the water buffer and it allows us to do it in just one draw call having the water buffer set up like this to receive

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    multiple inputs leaves the door open for implementing multiple types of simulation going forward for example Beach Crest waves could be input into this system this means as well that any other system nearby can look up to see where the waves are and see how high the water is we use this to drive a number of different effects having the water buffer allows us to have the graphic system query what nearby waves are doing this allows us to render things called Co sticks Co sticks are where the ocean surface is focusing sunlight onto areas nearby so for example it may focus light from the sun onto the seabed making certain bright patches animate around and similarly light can be reflected upwards onto the side of a vehicle for example cor sticks a very important

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    visual clue for water rendering and leaving them out would would have meant the water did not look correct well that was a look into all the work that went into the water in 323 the whole thing is pretty sweet I'm really happy with how it looks the team has done a fantastic job Planet Tech have got some really exciting things coming I'm really really excited to dive back into the planets of Star Citizen I hope you guys enjoy it so what we learned this week well we learned that the updated rendering system makes water look more like water that region-based simulation makes water behave more like water and that the new water buffer itself hooks into all the other systems like physics which will get its own series of improvements down

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    the line to make water interact better with a variety of things that players throw into it boy you you love throwing things into the water don't you for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckaby thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week e