Inside Star Citizen: Loot En Route | Summer 2021

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:04

   For me, when it comes to exploring areas in a game, I tend to prefer when I've earned something. So, when you've had to fight to get past some people to get somewhere, you expect there to be something cool to find, something to make it worthwhile. There are just some things that you just don't go and buy in a store, things that you have to go out and find. That's, I feel, one of the most important aspects of gaming. I've often found that if there's no tangible reward, whether it's something that you bring away from there or something that you find that maybe leads to something else to discover, that something can be lost in the experience of exploration. Imagine you go into some dungeon, you're

2. 00:00:53

   excited to explore, and there's NPCs there just kind of standing around, but there's nothing to find. There's There's crates, but they're empty. There's storage with nothing in it. Not only is it disappointing from a gameplay perspective, you don't get any of the cool loot you were hoping for, but it just doesn't make sense. What were all these people doing there with no food, no supplies, nothing? You want there to be something amazing at the end. So, we're working on this new system called loot generation. We have built this system on the foundation of the harvestable system. Which is going to empower our designers to set up locations all across the verse uh to be filled with dynamically

3. 00:01:43

   generated loot. They function using a system we've called loot archetypes, which are on-the-fly generated sets of tags. So, the idea is that a designer can lay out a list of uh tags that they want items in the loot pool to match and then maybe some that they don't so you can say I want I want things that are tagged with weapon but not things that are tagged with ammunition. And then what really makes it powerful is it's not just a uniform distribution of okay, we have all of these potential items just pick one at random. When the designers are specifying tags to use they can assign a weight to each one and say I want rifles with a weight of five and I want pistols with a

4. 00:02:32

   weight of 10. So you're twice as likely to get a pistol in this crate. So we have like full control over how many items spawn, what specifically spawns. We could even if we wanted to and I've actually been doing the tagging for this myself, we could actually tell a loot archetype, hey, spawn me a bunch of armor that's red. Your loot archetype could have the weapon.fps.rifle as an example and that would then give you the option of all of the weapons that spawn underneath that or that are populated underneath that tag structure. And you may then have armor.fps.heavy which would give you all of the selection of the heavy armors under that. And then it could be gadget.medkit. So you would then have a loot archetype

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   that says, give me any rifle or any heavy piece of armor or any medkit. It's been a lot of work to get it working that way but all of it sort of works in conjunction with each other and with some of the future stuff coming down the pipe as well such as quanta. The loot generation system actually will read from the parent object containers that we use in in the game at the moment. So say you're spawning containers on Hurston, your main object container would be Hurston. And then let's say got Louisville, which would be L19. And then inside that you might have let's say that we expand the city and there's like a an abandoned hovel underneath that's maybe occupied by pirates. If Quanta decides, oh okay, so authorities came, cleared

6. 00:04:09

   that place out, that place is now no longer a pirate base, it's now storage site for Hurston Dynamics, then all of the containers in that area then might switch to be containing Hurston equipment. Quanta can then determine way up the chain, way at the top, this is how things are now happening because AI has moved in, things have happened, things have changed, and the the the archetypes and the the loot generation system reacts on the fly to that. So if Quanta was to decide this planet has been raided, it's been full of conflict, there's been wars here, like people are leaving in droves because it's not safe to be here anymore, the the status of that planet, the the richness of that planet lowers as well to the point where then the loot generation system says, okay,

7. 00:04:57

   where most of these containers might have been 50 to 60% full as they were, now we're only going to fill them up to like 20 to 30%. It's all about adapting on the fly to where you're at, what you're doing, and seeing what can be. So where we're at right now is um we've got a a pretty solid base for internal testing. We're trying out marking up a few different locations with some containers, mainly filled with weapons and armor at the moment, but we're hoping to expand that to other items in the future. And we hope that it provides an immersive experience more than anything else, that people can get excited about this sort of thing, that they know that when they go to a planet once, they might go back a few weeks later and it's just completely different. Loot is an essential part of any MMO,

8. 00:05:48

   and when it arrives later this year, it'll be one more step towards fulfilling the the exploration-based promise of Star Citizen's persistent universe. But up next, we've got a special Oops, it's all VFX edition of the Sprint Report, so let's get to it. To start things off this week, if you remember from our last Sprint Report, we showed how the team had been working on an update to the thruster dust system that converts the existing particles from a radial effect to a directional one that's actually based on the thruster direction to any surface normal it may be hitting at any given moment. Now, this causes the effect to change not only by the raycast angle being perpendicular or parallel to the surface, but also the strength of the thruster output, the type of surface itself, and the force of the surrounding

9. 00:06:37

   wind volume. And you can see here how that tech has progressed in the weeks since we showed it. Now, while this update showcases the progress made since then and still has a little ways to go, folks are already thinking about the myriad of tactical uses this feature might have in things like the upcoming Jump Town 2, over bodies of water like rivers and oceans, and even against the soft body objects like those seen in the upcoming colonialism outposts. Alpha 3.14 sees the initial implementation of Orison, but the work doesn't stop there. And coming up in a subsequent patch, the VFX team is currently working on tech that uses vector fields around the player character's feet to disturb the various piles of cherry blossom leaves that tend to accumulate around the commercial and residential areas. Now, while the first

10. 00:07:25

    implementation of this tech will be Orison, the team is already looking ahead to utilizing it in other areas, including on vehicles. So, let your imaginations run wild with that one. All right, not that wild. And while Now talking leaves, the team recently completed a sprint adding rotation effects to GPU screen space colliding particles utilizing the velocity of an object to determine the amount and size of turn applied to leaves making for a much more organic looking effect as they blow over the edge of a surface and fall to wherever down below. And we're pleased to report that this feature was working so nicely it actually just went into PTU builds last week for Alpha 3.14. Currently in the persistent universe weapon impacts on ships occur in what's

11. 00:08:12

    called the ship zone which causes the impact effects like sparks and such to stick to the ship meaning it essentially gets carried along with it as it moves forward which looks unnatural. But in a recent sprint this was remedied so that now the effects trail behind as the ship moves away from the original point of impact much as one would expect them to. Now it's a little thing but at the core of building an immersive universe are hundreds and hundreds of little things adding up to a universe that functions or behaves in believable and expected ways. And here's a second look at the same system in Atmo where you can see the sparks fly up into the air against gravity in the old system and now falling down to the surface as you'd expect them to in the new. The VFX team is also exploring several

12. 00:09:02

    different destruction mosaics for the space station orbiting above in the Crossroads of Crime map for Theaters of War. Since these destructions being explored are simulation based in the Houdini software these mosaics utilizing various factors of stiffness and damping ratio allow for a degree of art direction not normally available. Plus it just kind of looks cool to see all the different ways a thing can explode you know? Also always cool lightning. Now previously lightning across our game suffered from a number of different maladies, including poor performance and poor scaling effects. But due to recent R&D by the team and the use of instanced scale multipliers and ribbons, the team has not only found a way to author these

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    same effects at a wide range of scales, but the use of ribbons reduces the need for high particle counts in the runtime GPU particle system. What's that mean? It means more developers can use more lightning in more areas without destroying their performance budget. And that's especially good news for the upcoming Pyro system and the visual revamp to the dying star map in Arena Commander that's currently underway. In wrapping up our look at VFX this week, the team has returned from a brief hiatus away from fire propagation to create their version of a concept, a cinematic look dev, if you will, at the goals for fire propagation utilizing the tech features and progress already in hand. What you see here is a basic electrical fire in a relatively high-tech environment, exploring the

14. 00:10:39

    type of propagation effects the team are currently pursuing. Now, as a test exclusively for how the fire moves and spreads throughout the ship, there are still a number of limiting visual factors here, like the still outstanding shader work that will one day make the fire feel even more alive than it already does. As the fire moves across the white surface that is flammable, you can see it dripping down to ignite the same surface below. While interacting with the black, glass-like surface on the ceiling that is understandably resistant. Combined with the heat and noxious gases affecting players via the actor status system, it's an exciting look ahead at some of the new dangers and hazards players will encounter and have to deal with on a regular basis as Star Citizen's development continues.

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    But before we let you go, let's jump ahead and see what happens when you ignore the fire and let it go about its business for about half an hour. So, what do we learn this week? Well, we learn that while it's fine to go into a store and buy you something from the vendor, there's still something about discovering the item while adventuring that can make it just a little more special. That the work on Orison doesn't end with Alpha 3.14, and that we'll be seeing more of what's coming as this quarter progresses. And just when I think I'm out, those advances to fire propagation pull me back in.

16. 00:12:14

    Now, remember this quarter we're on the road to Digital Citizen Con, where all kinds of panels and content await for hours full of Star Citizen goodness. That's October 9th, so mark your calendars. For Inside Star Citizen, I'm Jared Huckaby. We'll see you all next week.