Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Pillar Talk

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   some stories are worth watching and every journey has its beginning [Music] whether it's a quick stop for some fuel and snacks or out beyond that asteroid belt wherever you go you'll find moments to stick beautiful efficient just enough teeth get you through a

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   scrape let me introduce to you Salah dated Outlands newly redesigned 2948 Mustang bata more than a ship apart consolidated Outland where risk meets reward we just saw the winning entry in our recent consolidated Outland Mustang commercial contest congratulations to the crew that made that pretty impressive ad yeah it was very impressive as some familiar names in the credits they're like mr. haschke but you know what all you know like the entries were actually really impressive

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   so I would definitely recommend check them out not just checking out the winning one but the runners-up and the other entries too there's a thread that has them all in and you know the community generated content is awesome so well done everybody it is and with that we welcome you to another episode of around the verse I'm sandy Gardner and I'm Chris Robbins today we'll dig into some ongoing progress with core tech but first we're going to take a look at the state of alpha 3.3 and some upcoming changes to the roadmap yes so we've got some good news and some good news first okay it's always much better so alpha 3.3 is going live tomorrow which is really cool and 3.35 with Hurston and louisville part of it is coming to the PTU in short order as soon as we go live on three point

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   three we add a get three point three out live to people before we could move the next sort of release into the PTU phase so that's a real important space step and people will be able to play you know well it's nice stable three point three but also have you know explorer person even if they're willing to put up with a few crashes in the PTU and that all gets us closer to next thing at least well that doesn't suck no no it doesn't i mean it's a little later than we wanted to be but it's a lot of content and the most important thing is the object containing streaming technology is now stable enough for us to go live and that's a big big thing to be working on there for well over a year and it's the it's the sort of tech pillar that's going to allow us to scale the rest of

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   the world on the client side and then on the technology side we're really happy because that's sort of passing a pretty big goalpost that we need to get past it you know it's taken us obviously longer than we thought and it's been a bit more complicated and difficult than we thought but that is the case with that sort of R&D that you have to do and there's so many you know issues that go into it that we've already discussed bird a ya know it's it's it's it's good to be done good to get that working very cool so what's the bad news then ok well the bad news is some things are going to move out of three four into three five I mean I think people understand or aware or the fact that three threes been running late so it's been putting a lot of pressure on three four and the the biggest knock-on and this is probably not

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   particularly apparent to people is the fact that each one of our releases when we make a three three or three two comes from gamedev which is our main development stream and so it tends to be both a combination of slightly unstable and also full of a whole bunch of content that you're not ready or you don't want to put in the current release so excluding things because we've got so many things we include things and say okay we want these things in this release and so it takes a lot of time you know anywhere from I think we've never done it shored in two weeks but it's more usually like four weeks because we have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of files it's you know gamedev itself is almost two terabytes of just the data set of gamedev itself and that's not just the archive stuff that

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   is like the actual working set so most people actually only have a small portion of it depending on area they're working on so we have to make sure that we're make the right ones are going across and there's only the stuff that you need four three three which none else would takes time to stabilize so if we go back and forget three three back to gamedev and then try to stabilize it and then also test and get it out everybody on the development side and this was something that came up you know just this week essentially have said it's going to put us in risk of releasing three four by the end of this year so we still want to be date driven where we can when we're not waiting for some tech pillar and so we made the hard decision to basically stay in the 3/3 branch which

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   will become three four one three three and three three five is out and then move the bits of content and functionality across that we can easily from gamedev that means that we can't move everything that we were planning to have four three four and some stuff is a bit of a bridge too far so we're going to lose some what if so what are these things that are being pushed out okay well I was just saying that so some of the things we can move from game dev and some of the things we can't now we're going to have the Hurston business district in three four so we're making sure that's going to be in and polish we're going to do a lot more work and improvements on the type and the VoIP stuff the other ships that we had scheduled for coming in for three four will be in three four as well because

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   it's much easier to bring a ship or a weapon or an item or a gun across but you'll know in the roadmap that's going to be updated tomorrow what what has moved in what hasn't moved so the biggest ones that female player character because that touches massive amount of stuff but why is it so hard for me to get my female character that I want it's not just the fact that there's you know thousands of animations have to be done I mean we have the same issues that you do in the real world where like you know in your car seat you can adjust your seat to you got different leg different length arms or different length legs and the female skeleton is 5/8 and the male skeleton is six foot so we have to have solutions for the female getting into cockpits and you know not

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    having that hands hyper-extended or the legs hyper-extended so there's some tech that comes in there there's some stuff that happens and the character customizer clothes or another issue so there's a huge amount it touches a massive amount of departments and there's a lot of work and people have been working on it for quite a while so it's not something that we just started it's just it just is in game dev and not in a position to bring it into the three three stream the other one is art Corp our Corp has a whole bunch of prop planet improvements that have happened in game dev we have some shade of work we've done for the new city stuff that's sitting in gamedev so we can't get that across which kind of stops and ello DS for the cities and stuff so we can't bring that across and also it's just our corpse big and we want to take the time to it right and that's okay because I'll cop itself

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    probably you know it's been we've been compressed by how long three threes taken so it'd be nice to really make sure that's that's why we're those are the two sort of big headline ones on a ship basis we're in pretty good shape and all the ships except the 300 series has sort of run up right against the end of the year and that's not including things like the LEDs and the setups for the damaged states and stuff like that on the variants so he sort of made the decision to move that out to three five to give them time to finish all that up properly but those those are the sort of big headline ones that have moved out but making this decision why now like why am i hearing about it now why do you make these decisions it seems late is what it feels to me well yeah I mean I mean this came we had you know we do our Monday morning leadership meetings and

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    in the most recent meeting basically production came back crunch the numbers and said look if we go from game dev in two three four based on you know if we come into the worst-case scenario and it takes us four weeks to stabilize that we're gonna have no time to get testing and PTU and ever catty and be out for December twenty so basically everyone came back on the wrong side and said look if we do this we'll be in grave risk of missing a three-four release at the end of the year on December 20th so so it's either no three point four for me or three point four lights yes it is but we're a big company and there's a lot of things going on and you know it's

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    we have better tools now to look at how long it takes us an estimate trajectories and make decisions and soon enough time to you know not have everything like for instance miss getting out of three four at the end of the year so is there any silver lining in my bad news well I don't know if there's a silver lining other than you know we're all and we're working on all these things right so you know we try to share everything as it happens live so really the proper answer on like why is it so late is because you're you're basically learning at it within you know within a week of us deciding that and coming to that Rosalie realization it's not something we've been sitting on for months you know we were hoping and projecting to

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    get three three stable and out weeks ago and we haven't it's taking a lot of time but it's worth it because three three and this is one of the reasons why we sort of deviated slightly from the date driven model because object container streaming is foundational tech it's a major pillar to be able to first they're able to have worlds with the detail and fidelity we want on a sort of universal scale and we have to get that working or else you just won't be able to load all this you know extra content in whether it's art corp or micro tech or another star system and you also won't be able to have it perform well if everything has to be loaded into memory so you know people are definitely seeing an improvement of performance because of object container streaming and pan cooling which are two critical parts to

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    make it work and once we have it done and we're almost there we're like just about ready to yeah we're at the cold post sense so I'm still working on everything but I thought you guys were working on some like making the game dev more efficient well our goal is with game dev is that we're going to quarantine it and we're going to have some down Street down stream development streams that people do their future development in and so what will happen if that's the case is they'll develop a feature in the feature stream and then once it's done it will get reviewed and then once we say okay this looks good it will go through what's called a QA TR which is a QA test request and we'll get fully tested and then we decide ok does it is it stable does it work well does it hurt performance and if it doesn't

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    but if it is stable and doesn't have performance and it all works well then it gets put into game dev so we're only going to put things into game dev that are like working and it been tested and they're being polished which will mean that game dev itself will be a lot more stable and therefore it will have several benefits one people like artists who are always at the mercy of so on putting something in stable and gamedev and crashing the editor there you know the next they get they get the editor tool and they want to like do their build an environment it crashes because someone's got some other feature that's broken now to be able to test these streams and have all these multiple whether it's a release stream and a game development stream in a feature stream and there's multiple feature streams the build system has to be able to handle all those streams and deal it and what we call copy builds up tunnel tool that you download whatever build you want to do has to be able to

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    take that this is the short answer so anyway it's a lot of work everyone's been working on the dev up side and the tool side on this for over a year and that's our goal and we're planning to have this rolling out in the beginning of next year so we're still working on all this stuff that yes we are most definitely working on all this stuff some other things that are in game dev like the cloud tech which are extremely excited by and we're actually doing some really cool stuff for this I think we actually have a little piece to show about that cool here's Jake Mathis and Jake Gainey to show us the current state of the cloud generation tool and it's variable users so this new volumetric talk that I've been working on for for not too long now and it's still in very early development but the main focus of the tool is to help artists create volumetric clouds and gas clouds in much

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    faster iterations that we have been in the past so we can see here is a nice relatively simple shape and at this stage we just want the silhouette of the clouds so we look at the borders here this is our body and what we're going to start with and by adding more geometry to it by with using the tool doing this for you procedurally and automatically we've gone from a really simple shape of of the cloud into a much a much more traditional cloud that us see with these nice soft edges here that this is the key thing that we've really been been lacking in the past and from there he can iterate on it really quickly really fast and we're cutting down development from from weeks and months to days and weeks so every month from there we're now moving

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    on to the L system or on lines and splines so we're really only created this tour to help artists create the more organic look within the coil we do that by using Coe noise wrapped around using the the initial strain that you saw before to really add all these really intricate patterns and lines that wasn't wasn't there and something is it's again it's this iteration that that really did really help to drive development from that simple spline that we saw turn turning into something more intricate and more detailed such as this here we can see all these gaps within the clouds we can see you all of these

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    the fluffiness and it's not really something that that was done if we look at the clouds now it's got really hard edges and it's no longer a cloud it's just geometry turned into volumes so as we can see from the demo the tool is really quick at creating volumetrics with a lot of lots of detail that just one able to in the past and because it's so easy designers can now you show artists what they were talking about and what they envision rather than telling artists what what they're thinking we're hoping that as development continues we can take this tool into Max & Myers to allow artists to actually work in their native programs rather than having to learn a whole new set of programs just to work on one you on one you see

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    so I'm just going to take you through how we normally approach setting up spacing in the game in squadron 42 we've got various space capes to make one challenge that we we have is trying to create interest within spacings as you can see from from this this is just a derelict location in the middle of space and you know it's okay but it's you know what you've really got is Kerala plus the star field so we use a technology called cask weld which uses volumetric PDB to create interest within those spaces I just drop one of those into the engine and take you through how I would normally set up an approach one of these space scenes in the game this is our volumetric entity just called a gas cloud we DV and I'm just going to drop one of the stock kind of volumes that

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    the VFX team have made in in their tool into the scene and kind of put this in place and you can see even though this is the kind of base VDB and it's kind of got no color information or anything like that on at the moment it's already creating something quite interesting in the scene once we place this we can then start to kind of play around with color child in them let's go for something you know more towards the kind of the orange reds and we can also then play around with a density of it as well know so you can have something which is a little bit more wispy and kind of a core then you can go for some sandwiches you know quite dense and volumetric kind of along those lines and it gives you you know as an artist that gives you an awful lot of control to craft these spacings and the way that you would want to so just wrap that guy in there and you know you can

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    you can kind of play some how you want to scale them up a little bit and create something quite interesting and then just drop into the game now and show you how that feels to fly around so you can see straight away we've gone from something which is in the middle of open space not much interest to something which feels very cool you know as a player this feels like a cool location to come in to come and find in the game there's just a few different examples of you know different results that you could achieve of the same technology and the same tool that the VFX guys have been making since is this is probably I would say the more extreme under the example it's quite kind of dense and and kind of volumetric and this is more towards the kind of the coil but then you can also do stuff which is a little bit softer you know more their Star Trek style nebula it's you know it's just kind of color in space really and you

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    can also then do some get some quite lucky results from it too and this is all using the same technology and you can see from just three different examples there how you can craft pretty much free quiet kind of independent and visual space locations wow that looks pretty cool ya know it's definitely cool I mean it's we were you know developing the tech first off a squadron but you know we're gonna use extensively through the PU in a lot of different situations in fact in some situations like just around a derelict or a small asteroid that you may not even think that it's using the big volumetric cloud tech but I'm looking forward to because we're gonna escape space sort of almost like an environment and have space weather it's gonna be cool all right and that just about does it for us today tune in to reverse the first live tomorrow on twitch where environmental

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    art director Ian Leyland will follow up on his team's various citizencon presentations and talk lor Ville with Jared thanks of course to the subscribers for sponsoring these shows yeah thanks for subscribers and also a huge thank you as well to the backers for supporting the enrollment of star citizen squadron 40 we could not do it without you guys and until next time we will see you around the race thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen a squadron 42 you can subscribe to our channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library