Star Citizen Live: Landing Zone Content Team

19 February 202101:15:442,275 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hello everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live landing zone content team i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before it's where we take about an hour at the end of our week hang out with some of our developers showcase a little bit of what they work on answer questions from you the star citizen community and generally just try not to reveal anything like like like a nine tails lockdown if at all if at all possible joining us on the show this week we have our steam panel of guests from the landing zone content team this is not everybody on the team but this is a good cross-section sampling of those who make our landing zones so we're going to take a few minutes and just go around the room and introduce everybody here we're just going to start you know clockwise from my right boy
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who are you what do you do for star citizen uh hi yeah my name is boy i'm an environment artist in the frankfurt studio of the lc team so i mean sdlc chat i guess that's why i'm here and i work on on the landing zones particularly lorefield for example i worked on a new babbage horizon yeah that pretty much sums it up cool thank you for being here jumping immediately to my left this is almost like hollywood squares i had two more people we could have done a hollywood squares gag emanuel who are you and what do you do for star citizen hey i'm manuel and i'm level designer and i was responsible for area 18 and currently horizon in between i also did a bit of modular work for rest stops and the prison
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and you were just recently seen on our origin piece that we aired yesterday on ise exactly uh luann no stranger to star citizen life probably the person on our panel that's been on the show the most all the same tell people who you are what you do for star citizen sure uh hi i'm luanne i'm a senior on the uk lz team um i've been been here for a little while i've worked on a bunch of stuff from let's see uh original rest stops to uh star marine to uh lorville air 18 uh new babbage now arson and a bunch of other stuff in between and i want to take a minute to commend you on
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you owning the heaviest book known to man the ralph mcquarrie doubles concept book from star wars uh i haven't really is it really is carrying that ones i don't know what paper it's made of but it is the heaviest book known to man nick center square who are you what do you do for star citizen hi i'm nick etheridge i'm the lead environment artist for the landing zone team i've worked on landing zones from area onwards uh so that's airy team new babbage origin and before that many other things like space stations and outposts ground locations i've been here for i think coming up to seven years now so quite a while yeah we started very close
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to the same time it started very closely and i see you have your cloud perium exclusive pico prominently on display in the background yep lovely lovely little guy uh andreas we don't see you nearly enough thank you for taking the time who are you what do you do for star citizen well my name is andreas i'm the lead level designer for startup citizen and um i pretty much oversee every location for the build both landing zones and modeling so lead landing zone for star citizen hey they don't hire me because i'm good at this uh last but certainly not least josh who are you and what do you do for star
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hi i'm josh i'm the principal environment artist for star citizen um i've been at the company for a little over three years now i started out on squadron 42 and i moved over to the lz team um over the past few years and um i've covered things from uh sorry new babbage and orizon so but my role within the team is kind of more focused around workflow and setting up benchmarks cool now uh for this show we're going to do things a little different we're going to get to the backer questions in a bit but we're going to start with a bit of a history lesson here we're going to go through the through the overall development of our landing zones uh throughout star citizen's history and the story of our landing zones
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starts with the original arc corp the one that came online in alpha 2.0 way back in the day it wasn't integrated into the persistent universe at the time it was a separate it was a separate mode i know that not a lot of folks here worked on that one back then but just because i don't want to leave it out what what can we what do we remember what what do we remember about about how it went about what we learned from it about lessons from that original landing zone that we took forward into our you know into the work that we use today um just what if anything does anybody remember about the lessons we learned from that original landing zone they're mostly to do with frames per second oh yes yeah i i remember actually when i
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started um it was being worked on but i didn't work on it personally and i think um actually visually and kind of the experience i quite liked it i remember watching watching it and and um i thought it was pretty good but it was very specific to what it was built for it was built before procedural planets was a thing so it was a specific landing zone with essentially a skybox as a background like lots of buildings that were textures and and simple meshes that kind of went back but it was the idea was you'd go down to a landing zone there'd be nothing else on the planet to do so that's that was a very specific um uh plan for it but obviously since then um landing zones are very different you can fly all around them and they're on planets
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where you can visit more stuff for so uh i think lessons from that were how and and challenges from that were how do how do we build landing zones where it's not uh okay now you're in the landing zone we just need to tailor the experience to being inside it it's no you have to tailor the experience to being inside it to flying around it to landing around it that kind of thing is what i what i would take from that yeah it was really hard because like i said the idea of procedural planets at that point was one of those that was one of those stretch goal ideas we didn't think we were going to get to touch until you know years and years later and then you know through the through the uh work of our new frankfurt studio and you know and it just it came to it came in came to be so much faster than normal so that had
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that had a massive effect on the lenses we built and you'll see that reflected in the story as we go forward uh for my own part i can remember i can a terrible the terrible idea i gave to uh to jake ross that they should add buggies to it after the initial release and he was like oh that's a good idea and then two weeks later the video started it was not good uh going forward let's see what's up so after that if we flash forward to alpha 3.0 so alpha 3.0 is our next major milestone we've removed that old kind of separate area 18 and we've added our first true landing zone in in the new fashion which was uh levski on on nick's i know not a lot of folks who were did
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anybody work on left see what what do we remember from from levski in our first attempt at actually integrating uh these landing zones into the physical mass of a of a of a planetoid i mean um we didn't do the interiors of levski but we did do the integration of it into the into dharma right plus building all the exteriors and all the hangers and going back to what mixed that as well you know this whole idea of integrating a small landing zone into a much larger exterior and everything that went in with that right which was a bit of a new um challenge um so the interior was not nameless but the exteriors and everything else was [Music] um were there any lessons that you can
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remember taking forward from that uh wait ways that lev's is there anything that we could see in that original levski that you know we brought forward to landing zones after that i mean it was i would say like hangers for example was one of the kind of first stab and stuff in the ground there right um the hangers in lenski were built quite bespoke and they would remain bespoke in this day um but it was also take away from that that we need to go in a much more modular approach with various things and create common elements to share between different timing zones to speed up the work otherwise this will take forever it was a lot about how you get into the landing zone as well which i think levski was very i mean when i personally look back at it
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if i was approaching it via like a buggy or something i wouldn't really know where to go a lot of the time and um you know now things are pretty straightforward with how you get into a lending zone in out around and all that stuff i mean even to the point where a new babbage we you know we added those surface entrances as well yeah going on from that the actual layout as well like levski is very maze-like and kind of hard to navigate around there's lots of tunnels and that's that's kind of nice in a traditional level design but these are like social hubs so in that respect it wasn't very successful and i think the later landing zones were much more successful to kind of more of a streamlined layout more of the social hub and and kind of leaving the more um traditional level design to other
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that make sense right and also with the kind of multiple floors that they haven't let's create a bit of a it's still there actually this logistic nightmare some elevators you know where i think you're something or something know now levski recently uh uh went back to its home planet in another system when it comes back uh without being without revealing too much do do we do we expect it to be the same levski that we that we're familiar with or do you think we might take the opportunity to uh to uh tweak and revisit i mean we do have our secret lists of things that we would like to do you know so who knows what what comes there might be certain spruce ups video but you might
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not tell anyone about them just happen we'll see their secrets it's definite there's definite lessons from post levski which we've learned which we definitely like love to go back and um you know once when we release it would we would be looking to do some cleanup some some major stuff and then there's some like just general cleanup there's definitely performance in levski which we'd like to tackle uh the exterior is made of lots of little meshes and and um we've we're looking at merging either just merging meshes manually just making larger structural meshes for the exterior as well as tech that you know will will do that kind of job for us so there's definitely um those kind of things which we which we'd be looking at
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there's some things that will just propagate to levski sort of by uh by chance as well which is like we can improve some materials some panels some uh trims and things that we use on the um on that particular art style set that will just inherently make levski look a little bit better right so there's things like that as well but i think the probably on the planet side will be a lot of the improvements that come in because you know our tech evolves a lot and we do a lot of uh updates like uh using uh more realistic assets and materials now on the planets that will likely propagate to levski as well yeah and also from the gameplay site i mean we're getting more and more features into the game and we have to add them into locations as well so it will probably get some kind of passes right things like
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hospitals and stuff like that exactly makes sense um i think i think it's as as we continue discussing about uh discussing the landing zones we're going to see a parallel between the landing zones and our spacecraft development in that the you know we get better with each successive one that we build uh we we we learn more we take more of the lessons forward we get we get more efficient we get we get more clever in our in and how we devise our solutions uh so it can often lead to it can often lead to a sense that sometimes the older landing zones just like the older ships may not seem like they're the same quality as the as the newer ones so uh it definitely creates a desire on many people's parts to go back
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revisit and tweak and bring these things forward whenever possible so while we may not have something specific to share about that with levski today you can probably expect some work being done before it makes its return later on from levski where did we go next was it grimex was grim x was the next the next one so we so grim x different now we we did our first one that was kind of integrated into a planetary base and now grimhex is the overwhelming majority of an entire uh asteroid now i know a lot of the work from grimhex was uh done with our partners at the time of behavior uh but i know we did some white box and stuff here so what what do we remember from from the original development of grimhex i mean the reason for grimhex being
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added in the first place was that we needed a place for bad people to spawn right criminals not bad people they could still be they're not some people just don't like operating within the confines of the law that that's not that that's not a judgment on them as a person okay people with different agendas finally they're placed in kind of spawning and they were right because we didn't have it and we had a very basic version of the criminal system if i ran correctly back so that was one of the main reasons we did the white box in-house in frankfurt way back when right um that was pretty straightforward actually i mean it was an asteroid base it's it's not much more than that it's a base inside that's problem
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particularly about it you know we did want i mean like with all the landing zones that we build of course we we try to future improve them as much as possible we try to add in you know plan for the future make sure that you know we do want to have hospitals five years down the line from now and also really we have to think quite far into the future of all the kind of things and also just use common sense and we can guess what what we want to have and recently we've we've made some additions and improvements to grim hex uh we added the we added the um the raceway uh section uh you know for the for the long fabled you know uh uh scramble races that are supposed to occur there and then uh i think we added some we did some hanger work there recently didn't we yeah we added a full suite of hangers and it never really felt like a full
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complete landing zone until we did that um now now it feels like more integra when it's more consistent with the rest the rest of the landing zones so there's enough slots for players to land in properly and all that kind of thing yeah it required some extensive rework of the asteroid itself as well um so looking back on the uh the asteroid that we had before it was really good but he obviously didn't have a lot of space for things like uh you know a blown out back where you could put in all of these uh hangers really really nicely because we didn't really have i think uh the the solid hanger metrics that we have now we didn't have them and we obviously didn't have the hangers themselves uh things like uh where the actual uh racing location goes um before
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i think it had some sort of tunnel or something that we had white boxed and put in um so we blew that out uh so again it required a lot of uh asteroid uh moving around but um so yeah that was those quite um you know those are things that we learned from later locations that we came back and uh applied or had to you know reject some things to make it feel a little bit more like a modern star citizen location okay yeah there's the beauty of um common elements like hangers is is that we can go to old locations and input them i know there was a bit of rework in the asteroid but in terms of inputting hangers didn't actually take too long did it though and it was it was quite simple because we'd already established what a hangar is and you know maybe the art changes between
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landing zones like in new babbage you've got a different art style of hangers but essentially we've established what that is what the experience is for the player and so it makes refitting old locations a much smoother process so um the idea behind call that's that's kind of the idea behind the common elements like hangers and hats and things like that so at this point we've dabbled everything up to this point has been as has been dabbling has been experimentation has been learning this new tech learning how to integrate things with our new procedural uh planets and stuff next though is our it's to my mind it's it's your first major milestone in landing in in major landing zones and that's the development of
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lauraville so now that you've got a little bit of levski here now you got a little bit of grim x here now you're going to make your first giant city on a planet where where where do you start what the scale is so immensely diff different um what was what were all of your involvements in uh lord of let's start there who did what um i mean like it starts with level design so it people for example andreas and his team start together with lore they create a white box so like a very simplified version of the landing zone to make sure it hits all the beats in the right order like the walking isn't too crazy not too long it plays well the navigation you can find your way through the landing zone basically and it has all the common elements in in
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the right place like this the security the the hangers um and it's it's basically what it died right uh then we have we have the white box and that's basically where the artists jump in and they take the white box to grey box and then to final art that i say it really fast for that of course that takes that takes quite a while it's it's it's a very big place uh i guess it's it's maybe you guys today in a couple couple of days right it was easy yeah i mean we just we cranked out the art like like it was nothing no no it took uh it took us quite a while of course because it's it's we've never done something on on this skill before i think um so it's it was also talking a lot with with technical artists getting getting stuff like uh you know how how do you drop a planet like a flat planet or a flat city on a curved planet that's something we also
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never did before so we needed the tools to support that for example like the we call it the the planet dropping too i believe that's why i called anyway and it just takes all the different uh all the art we make and it aligns it to surface of the planet uh and it was just it's it's sort of going back and forth on that front um this was something new so that took that took about the figure out but we knew how to you know how to build all the the basic beats and implement the common elements because we yeah we did it before right uh yeah and also your involvement was a lot there boy wasn't it it'd be a boy's being modest he did quite a lot of actual actual making of louisville didn't you yeah it was uh so i was involved i did the hd building the the big chunky boy then i did the um
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what was it the leeson square the metro station the transfers in cbd um and the uh the lower half lobbies basically at the bottom of the of the habitation um so it was yeah like lorvel is my baby together with a couple of other uh of other artists what about anybody else's experiences with the laura bell it was also one of the first locations that were we had a landing zone that was in the middle of a huge kind of city kind of thing where we had to develop the transit system of how to bring the players in and out of locations and travel through those very long distances you know those trains are very fast um i thought you would have to catch up with them but um yeah so that was that was one of the challenges as well because you have
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a big city that's located on the planet you have the landing zone in the middle and we had all these gates because maybe they come from a different direction we actually timed it once we had one gate to start with and if you came from the wrong side it would take you like 65 minutes or something to run around the city to get to the gate and be like we need more gates this is this doesn't work you know i remember testing that i just went to an editor and i just walked from one side to the other side of the city just to see how long it took and it was something like that yeah it was pretty insane that's kind of when you start really realizing the the scale of everything right when you yeah get on you know foot and start walking so the scale i remember talking to one of the artists a while back too about this the whole scale thing um especially when it came to where the clusters of the city finish and how we can have a player at the base of
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basically this this massive city and get that scale feeling correct and making it feel tangible and how they had gone over like a whole bunch of iterations and designs uh to make it work and um it's pretty successful what we have now but uh we learned a lot of lessons in that and brought through with the rest of our landing zones as well but that was kind of the first time that we um had ran into that issue because like levski's like it's kind of just a more like localized location but this is a huge city so you have like kilometers worth of you know blending the city into the environment right besides it's not like you know that people from lourville want to keep everyone in or anything but uh it's it's a it's a city where
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you know you can't traditionally just slowly make suburbs and then just you know a few houses are left and then farmland starts etcetera you know it's it's this very uh um andreas i think you quite like the uh hurston um personal policies there but it's very walled-in that's right that's right lauraville was where we introduced everybody's favorite the no-fly zone and our plastic bag heads right that was successful all right like like andrea said the um trend it was the first time we did a transit system outside of elevators and there was conversa i remember conversations about
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this and most people to be honest were like do we really need to do an actual physicalized train that would run on tracks can we not have it go underground or can we have it spawn and then go across and then go into a tunnel and then teleport to the next area and to be to be fair like a lot of us were just like come on chris do we really have to do this it's such a this is such a technical pain and he was always adamant like no i want i want it to be physicalized and and we did it in the end um and it was challenging it was very hard to do but um it did kind of work out in the end it did quite it it does give that feel and any each each landing zone has like that interesting whether it's a train or a flying shuttle it's it is quite interesting to have and it
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isn't fake and all that kind of thing so that was like one of the biggest technical challenges with logo apart from like the scale as a whole i was trying to get the first working training i i can remember dan treffin in those tuesday meetings just week after week uh you know showing the next version the train and and chris just being like no it needs to be a real train it needs to be a physical train it's it's like it should hit people um i hit the trace just to just like a small side note as well i mean i know there some people you know aren't necessarily super enthusiastic about traveling times you know sitting on a train for one and a half minutes you're like i just want to sell my pistol come on but i mean because they are physical we do have to traverse those distances you
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know and even though we try to make those trains as fast as possible it's it's going to take time that's just part of the scale of the universe right and uh one thing the larval introduced which is a pretty keep you know time of the pu and everything is the you know common elements it was the first time we put in the uh the hangers the hams um trying uh the transit um yeah security checkpoints that's right i'm trying to think if there was anything else but um so uh the uk team was uh heavy at work on the um the common element part whereas the german team was heavier work on the actual larval side of things so uh my involvement there was um a bit of work on the hangers um actually i did the the big gorilla head as we call it uh
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as you come into the hangar and you know it looks out um that's a that was always a name of contention but that's what it's called here um i also worked on a habs the hub lobby at the top of the uh the big crane looking building um and the transit where the um train actually comes in and out uh and just on the subject of trains i think that was honestly i think one of my most fun tasks here was that transit platform because it was an opportunity to really call out uh you know look at reference of transit platforms around and make something that's very oppressive like i think my favorite part about it is as you come in you know it's you've got the um the gate and then you come in and you
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look up it's nothing but pipes and let me tell you i spent like three to four days just dressing pipes on the ceiling of the entire platform the rest came came out much faster but the pipes i was connecting things from one side to the other going oh yeah this makes sense and then you look up and it's just this network of pipes because you're below the plates it was one of the most fun like tasks i had here uh because it was just so i don't know those it was the first time we're doing something really quite like that so it was a lot of fun we have a follow-up question from the chat right now uh andreas they want to know why there are no public restrooms at the orville train station um we have actually planned for public restrooms um in most places to be honest um so they're there we just don't have
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gameplay feature yet so when that arrives we will swing open the door to your favorite loose place that would be your biggest question though the biggest question though or the unit section no i think the biggest question is are are are you committing uh richard tyrer and the actor feature team to bathroom gameplay right now yeah we will be we have anyways it's number one on our list right now we're scrapping everything else this year somewhere in our scratch drive there lives some mocap of some ways pooping yeah on a more serious note like andre said that that would just be another common element and we build our landing zones with a lot of future proofing in mind so we don't just have the shops and the hangers that we have currently we always
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look for opportunities for a doorway a corridor a back alley or whatever where we'd say okay this is where a restroom could be this is a daughter there so we know and there's space for it behind that in you know behind that door so we say okay in the future when we get restroom common elements and we get pooping tech and whatever you want to call it then uh that uh that can then be slotted in just we're saying um i mean rip hex did need a bit of rework but for from from like area 18 onwards um there's a lot of extra space and potential and doorways and things like that to to have all these kind of things not just restrooms but more more stuff than that because we always want to future-proof a location we don't
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we don't i know we're talking about reworking things like levski but we don't want to you know break it up and start from scratch and go oh we've got to we do it's more like modules that slot in you know you bite you get the you get the kind of vanilla landing zone as it were and you can connect hey we can connect the hospital on here we can connect more stuff on there so so that's always been our aim for a while now i mean other times when you walk through a city like in the game you might walk through some very boring place and it's just like a flat wall or it's like a weird section that is just there as a temporary cover you know that might turn into a shopping street at some point or a public restroom yeah i was gonna say a couple of ways you can see how we telegraph what we're doing in the future is
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we'll either add a door that goes nowhere or you know a really big empty space like andrea said that like a corridor or something that may uh you may walk by and be like it's a bit weird this look like this area here but you know there's usually some intention with to expand because we can't build that thing being tiny and then being like okay we gotta add this toilet and now where the hell do we do it um i think actually uh boy you added a a nice toilet uh door somewhere in uh new babbage right in the spy grand lobby yeah we have two restroom doors so maybe sometime in the future you know boy you worked on that and there's the main one that goes to a spygram but there's a lot of other uh ones that sprawl out from that main
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one so there's and not all of them are like perfectly connected up with the transit but we we aim for some to potentially go you know to another point of interest or somewhere in the future it's always it's always there even if if we sometimes we know okay we're going to put the hospital here but sometimes we don't and we're just like okay maybe there's in the future we'll put something there but we don't know exactly what it is but it's like it's just planning ahead and just trying to trying to even the foreseen and unforeseen things in the future we tried to plan for that makes sense well if you're just joining us in the show the uh the landing zone content team has chosen violence and committed the actor feature team to three seashells v0 um send your letters to uh andreas johansen
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care of foundry44 somebody's gotta get them it's not gonna be me fine that's okay uh before we move off of lauraville here uh what's your favorite aspect of lor what's your each of you what's your favorite aspect of lauraville and what's the one thing you wish you could go back and change if you could favorite aspect is the utopian atmosphere it's just a really all-around positive vibe you know it's the place where andreas feels most comfortable yeah i for me it's the plates it really is the feeling of being under the plates uh most of the time uh they're so oppressive i think we really managed to to put that through right and i think that that's
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what makes lorville so special um what i would change is i think uh we've learned so much from building cities i think there's a lot that we can go back to and due to the feel of the scale like either by um you know improving materials improving uh meshes but even if we keep it within the same boundary of lorville i think there's a lot that we can do to the to the visuals to make it feel even bigger without changing much okay yeah i would double that i think also yeah i like the buildings especially um we learned a lot doing doing like buildings i think yeah i would love to to go back and do a pass on them and make them hold up from a lot closer which would allow us to you know allow the player to get
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closer as well so i think that would be a great thing and i guess what i love most about norville for me is actually the cbd area because i was just doing low tech for for us for a pretty long time like you know the the grimy art style then we certainly went to do this super shiny marble uh like like this golden utopia and that was super fun uh for me to to work on yeah it was refreshing for everyone right because uh yeah yeah everybody was shocked when you entered there from the rest of the city you were like damn rich i did like panel materials for as long as i was here at that time and uh and then suddenly we came you know we had requests for marble and gold and i was like i don't even remember how to do these organic materials well what i got to do
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i think that location in the cbd is probably my most favorite location and like the the the brutalism kind of like sense of oppression that you kind of get from just standing in that lobby is immense and like the only thing that i would change about it is a selfish point and that is that i wish i could work on it or wish i did work because it's fun i i love to expect when you get off if you have and you see like for those like dirty windows and then you take the elevator down to the l19 plaza to the balcony and watch out for the space fault and you see like the dust and everything going off and i think that's really cool what i would expand on or like um like to work on in the future maybe it's like um expanding the outskirts the suburbs of the city more like um
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i'm adding more shanties in and and more populating it with with life and yeah just isn't your favorite part of loreville and my favorite part together me and manuel the restricted areas yes isn't that you know your favorite tells me every day he goes man we should really make some more restricted areas i can't get enough so we worked a whole lot of time on that like last year and that did some changes and re-works on that so it was that was a fun experience right yeah most fun i had here the views and opinions of luan and manuel do not represent those of cladding premium games robert space industries or its subsidiaries do you return to your previous question
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i didn't really answer properly right i mean my answer was a bit jokingly but it's also a little bit serious you know i do find the this the kind of dystopian of lourville being one of my favorite points there because it lends itself to a lot of environmental storytelling you can do a lot of interesting scenarios there you know um hurts and family versus people who are against them and all that kind of stuff all the suffering of the small people versus the absolute decadence of the rich right so that's also something that i would like to return to and work on in the future because that thing is something that really misses there cool uh let's go ahead and move into area 18 redux uh after lauraville we we got a chance to go back and and and take a second swing at area
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fully integrated into the persistent universe uh it had to be a different experience because it doesn't use the procedural planet stuff now it's this giant city world uh what were your involvements in area manuela myself did the white box forge um he was quite fresh in the company than actually so i did some of the main areas and he helped put a lot of the extra stuff around you can talk about it yeah so i i personally worked on uh the metro center actually um and some of like the ali's leading like away from that and the alice leading to pachico um connecting everything and as well the the plaza uh you come onto a window when you leave the house actually so yeah the transit routes of those
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shuttles flying through there first time we did a kind of a transit route that's not on the track and we have to take a fairly solid object to make it bank and all this kind of crazy stuff that was awesome it actually gives some freedom because you're not bound to tracks but it also makes like like creates much more challenges uh for you guys uh how this is something i was thinking about how easy did you guys think it was to visualize the area 18 and how it would feel during white box because usually you kind of get a feel for it but i feel like area 18 because of you know its nature of being a city planet and cities everywhere
00:38:44
i feel like it was really difficult to get you know sense of how that space was going to feel in white box until you know we had some proper buildings and everything in there i mean when when i started with the white box we did have the previous area teams reference back to of course but that's true there were certain things that we wanted to do to really sell the scale right for example with the streets we knew that we want to have buildings go up really high and i know the first versions of area 18 that they did they had kind of capped streets which basically felt like they're going in the tunnel right so what we did in the white box we tried to break that up you know you can have the buildings coming out on the side but you still see like a glimmer of light really really far up somewhere to kind of give the solution that you're really quite far down right and i mean in general just looking at various kind of movies and stuff you know it's it's
00:39:30
it is one of my favorite settings this kind of cyber punky kind of feeling almost to it right so it is stuff that i also like playing and looking at in my free time right so it kind of i kind of have that mentality like your mind sort of what to do but it takes a bit of creativity to see a white box uh kind of imagining like this white thing here that's going to be an amazing skyscraper but it's just a box yes but it could be a skyscraper i remember way back when um we were trying to look at the um initial version of area 18 that we first put on a planet for one of our sitcom demos and um we took the original area 18 stand alone level and basically just dropped on a planet with like the first iteration of the
00:40:18
procedural um planet tech with all the hard surface elements on there and everyone's like internally everyone's jaws were just like on the floor it was it was nuts but in that same moment we also realized how much work was ahead of us as well with like how we were going to have to change that environment to make it not only work with the new found physicality of the location but also performance-wise and like um andreas is like this is like um half the reason we changed the layout as well because a lot of um those performance considerations had to be made but also we learned a lot originally from the original layout to make it better as well but um i look back on that fondly because that was like one of my
00:41:04
first locations that i properly contributed to on the company in the company um and from the art side of things we did a lot of like loose exploration into where we wanted the vibe to go for that version of area 18 like at least in the city citizencon demo um that we did way back then um that you can kind of see that's being brought through now even though it's a completely different lz now um but yeah it was really fun for for me you uh you touched on a point there about like uh you know dealing with the new tech and everything um so like my what i did for every team uh i specifically worked on the planet along with pascal and i think i i did some material work for 18 but
00:41:52
the taking the organic planet and i've spoken about this a lot in like previous segments and things but taking that organic planet tech and making that work for assets that are sometimes kilometers in size uh sometimes hundreds of meters in height and you know something that boys said before as well like how do you take a city a flat city and you put it on a curved planet especially since our our planets are a sixth scale or something like that right um i don't know what the scale of our planets are but you know you gotta there's so much work that you've got to do to to figure that out but it was i remember having so many conversations with you with you pulling your hair out going
00:42:39
how the hell do i just do this yeah it's like hey josh meet me down at the pub after work i i gotta i gotta cry a little bit but uh honestly it it was a lot of fun i think me pascal had a lot of fun doing that and one there's so much that i'd go back and about how we did this the the city i think one thing specific it's just uh well just the mesh quality really for the for the planet city uh meshes i think there's a lot that i can do to bring a lot of diversity to that now uh while still like really keeping within the same performance um one really fun thing we did back then uh like basically the way the our procedure planet tech worked then is you know you take these meshes and you spawn and like procedurally
00:43:27
uh on a splat map so basically a map that says on the red area you're going to put in these meshes on the green area you're going to put in these meshes and then it puts it in at different scales rotations etc right and i think um one thing that i i thought was really fun to do uh because it felt like that the plan was really still you know i really like adding movement to our locations like my favorite thing is to add movement to the locations so i got um i got i hope i don't get it too technical here so i'm going to try to make it easy um i got a texture that was panning of these little cars and little glowing cars right and i i got a poly strip and some some strips of polygons that just went left right forward and i spawned that across the entire planet just to have a feel for it and then you look back on it
00:44:15
and suddenly there's all these little cars these little pin pinprick movements uh on you know on the overall frame and it just made it feel like so much more alive right and i think now with all the improvements in the tech and shaders and material work we've done there's had we the chance to do that place all over again it's some other thing it's one of the things that i could really really really improve i think um another thing now that i want to take up the entire time here but uh i feel like because we went in a much more modern uh sort of vibe with this arcorp than it was before right it was quite it was a bit more cyberpunky and feel before whereas now you know the architecture is a little bit more contemporary it feels a little bit more like a
00:45:01
downtown sort of la than it does a sort of more 90s grungy uh city where everything is you know all kinds of different like locations um but um it was our first time doing large scale panels large scale windows large scale this large scale and if you look at the quality of a building in our corp and you look at the quality of building in new baggage and maybe orison uh it's it's leaps and bounds the material work the mesh work uh it sleeps and bounces just we've really managed to take everything that we learned there every time and just improve on it to a point where i'm like man had i had a chance i could do so much more with our corp but uh yeah that's i think i think i
00:45:50
could jump in here because you touched on some things but my involvement was um lead environment so that's kind of overseeing the uh level the landing zone uh from our point of view um managing the team giving them feedback looking at schedules and things like that boring stuff i also did some actual artwork by looking at the composition of the cityscape as a whole um but in terms of like what i was just saying uh it's really we had a lot of news with artcorp again noelle and pascal really pushed the procedural planet tech to the to its limits at the time because it's made for organic terrain to spawn lots of trees on it's not made for a planet to spawn lots of buildings on
00:46:40
there's a difference in you know a cluster of trees to a cluster of buildings and how they work right um and also just in terms of like just the budgets like um obviously we know like an end frame budget uh in terms of the draw calls and poly counts but in terms of like how you distribute that between buildings um it was completely unknown how um you've got a landing zone itself with like the kind of the hero buildings um that you're walking around and then you've got some buildings that you can fly around and maybe they don't need to be such high detail and then there's buildings lower to the ground and there's more scattered ones by the by the procedural system but in terms of trying to balance that all out um uh it was very it's very much a a new process so
00:47:28
just kind of it was a bit of trial and error really and finding what we could push what could work and um no in knowing that it's not just a city it's it's a planet city it's like it's a city that doesn't end um whereas something like the babbage is is a city that does end you know eventually it's a big city but it eventually ends and so you kind of you know okay let's do 8 000 buildings or something or 1 000 buildings or 8 000 polys or something or more and that's kind of more quantifiable without course like well i guess we just got to see how many buildings we can put on how many pollies we can push and all that kind of thing so it's very it was very tricky then and trying to figure out that
00:48:16
um that point of view so um but yeah we did learn a lot from from louisville going to area 18 such as don't have the spaceport like in the city which is what we did with laurelville we kind of they're they're still quite close but they're kind of pushed away and that that helped with a lot of different things um and i think something like star citizen terms because yeah well i mean airports usually are not in a city right they're usually like on the outskirts of a city generally um yeah so it's a good reason for that right you don't know planes flying around skyscrapers um but anyway the um the other thing that andreas touched on was the whole track and flying shuttle aspect and i think it was
00:49:04
actually a really good decision not to have trains of like not every landing zone is a train track like some are some are flying some are some are trains and i think there was that there was an expectation that every landing zone would just be trains uh at some point but we decided to collectively like no let's let's mix it up a bit with arc corp and let's have a flying show and that that allowed us to fly in between the buildings with the the kind of bus which i actually really enjoyed like that's one of my favorite bits of air 18 is actually being able to go through the city and actually pass the landing zone you know having that that it still gets me whenever i walk on the bridge and the bus is like going past you it's still such a great moment for me um because they're one of my favorite learning songs actually so we've only got about 10 minutes left
00:49:53
in the show uh we haven't even touched new babbage yet are you guys able willing to do a little extra credit the 5-10 minutes after after our limit amazing sure sure because we do want to get into we do want to get into some of these backer questions the issues with the backer questions uh this this week ladies and gentlemen is that this is the landing zone content team and the overwhelming majority of your questions were feature related not content related so we do so so we we chose to take this time and to do a little review of the work of the past and whatnot but we do have quite a few questions that we think we can answer here before we get to those let's hit new babbage real quick we've now gone from dirt to we've now gone from asteroids to desert dirt to to city
00:50:42
and now we're going to snow uh in our biggest and baddest landing zone to date where did we start with new babbage how how how what did we set out to do with new babbage to separate it from every other landing zone that we did so far well it's just pretty cool you could position to answer that josh try to like segue into you but it might that was awkward go for josh now uh i mean it's it's literally that right it's it's a cold location so like the biggest thing that you immediately notice towards any of the other locations is it has a lot more of an environmental impact than any others um this was actually my my first environment on the star citizen
00:51:32
team coming back from squadron so it was actually a really fun task to get back and play around with um some of the planet tech and how that works so um one of my main tasks was looking at how the the city kind of goes and connects to the planet and its biome being snow um so figuring out like how snow is going to build up on buildings how does like snow drifts kind of like gather in certain places so um we did a pretty early on a little visual target where we took a section of i think it was a small section of graybox city at that point um that we were working with and we did a little bit of a dressing pass to kind of figure out where everything would go and um then took the the snowy planet
00:52:21
and just started noodling on it trying to figure out what we needed to do with shaders what we needed to do with um placed assets like um snow drifts so we we ended up going in with um some individual like a small kit of very scalable um assets which were basically snow mounds where we could um put them up against assets and spread them around to kind of create this nice blend between a lot of the so like you can kind of see if we had a tower structure or something we could have a small buildup of of snow in front of it and then a um a countersink and then another mound on the opposite side to kind of hint at maybe a storm that had come through and like the wind right and um then
00:53:11
at the same time because visibility can be quite low when you're dealing with snow and especially snow storms um it's very ironic that um an australian is working on on this particular thing where there's next to no stone snow in australia but um we we were looking at uh adding more lights to the structures uh for this like area area 18 has a lot of lights because it's a city planet of course but um we wanted to add more lights down low where the players can walk so uh in this same visual target we looked at things where we would be shooting lights up the sides of buildings adding them on smaller structures to kind of bring the scale back but also so you can navigate it through night time or even in a blizzard and and kind of see your way through the entire thing so that was really interesting and then
00:54:01
like at the same in the same breath we we went and explored um a lot more of uh bringing the city out out into the surrounding environment so uh we have like the main landing area of the first person spaces where you go do your shopping and whatnot but the city as a whole is is quite spread out i'm not sure how it compares to to louisville nick you could probably tell more about that but um it's i i really wanted to look at um focus more on the the technology and kind of research side of things so i had actually quite a lot of fun bringing up a lot of those outposts that we see around the surrounding valley um bringing them and kind of figuring out what they could be and dressing them up really nicely and integrating them into the surrounding
00:54:49
mountainscape and dressing them with all the snow piles and stuff so that was really fun and um probably is one of the biggest things that sets it apart from all of our other landing zones i would say from a design point of view as well it's it is inside a dome which um does create a few not issues but it just makes a navigation for example an orientation inside a space like that thing you have to be quite aware of right we also try to improve a lot on the accessibility into the location to add more like side entrances and just get this feeling that you can get in and out in a lot of different places and not just be on the spaceport for example it was a lot about navigation and you know orientation of the player in that location
00:55:37
i think the navigation was the most has been the most successful in the landing zone in terms of getting you around and the the signage is is quite clear in norville it's a little bit it helps directly location as well yeah it's very clean it's it's i've definitely seen people online say it's like the easiest to navigate around like in terms of flying and walking and knowing where to go to it's it's very clean and clear and straightforward and well well signed posted that kind of thing which is which is pretty successful yeah all right so uh last question then we'll get into the backer stuff here uh what's your what's been your favorite aspect of each lighting zone to date so far someone can choose one i have one and it's pretty surprising
00:56:28
coming from an artist like you probably think like it's going to be art related but i think it's actually for me the the sound design um and i think that i mean sound makes like a big chunk of the experience right and we look at the art a lot so we got used to the art and it's super refreshing when when the sound designer submits this stuff and we just get this you go in the editor and it's it's like a whole new place when it sounds kicks in it's it's it's really awesome always to hear one of the last things to come into the landing zone as well like when we've done all the art and well most of the art anyway and we don't hear much the sound cause they've got to composite the music and it's often comes in quite near the end of production in the landing zone so it is really nice to like boot the game up and go ah
00:57:16
there's some like um either music or actually like um sound around the and it's got a specific word uh sound like it's part of the location and stuff that comes comes through it's it's um it's really nice uh i think air 18 is quite successful in that and and you've got to say that's area 18 is like my favorite for that and i think for that exact reason too like the the mood and vibe that you get in area 18 to me is just like yeah there's there's a lot of other games out there that do it quite well but this the area 18 is i don't know it just kind it it for me it runs that feeling of like it feels i don't know it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside [Laughter] like a second that actually is like the
00:58:04
the whole mood and all the neon signs and the city vibe you have around and i think area 18 also has like a lot of potential uh for the further um expansions it's like with all the rooftops we have and and all the things we can potentially do more with like the city like it's it's there and and i think it's the probably most um easiest or like the locations i would like to do more stuff on and yeah yeah i agree like the ambience of area 18 is by far one of my favorite aspects right it's just this sensory overload when you walk around all the music you just walk around in the city after a while you kind of get used to it all the ads playing in your face and everything and then you can kind of do your stuff and then you leave the city like wow it's really quiet now you know it's it's quite successful i would say
00:58:52
yeah i remember and the flying bustle i think sorry i remembered the word diegetic is when the the soundscape is coming from the environment um for me i think new babbage is my favorite landing zone uh partly because it's it feels like the most realistic landing zone in terms of it feels very grounded as a city it feels like a realistic city i know it's all sci-fi and everything but kind of the way it's structured the transit route the um like talking about the navigation again kind of going around the the domes as well as like flying around the actual city it feels feels the most kind of grounded in reality which which i've really enjoyed and i just love snow as well so
00:59:39
i like i like seeing all the snowy snowy uh dusting over the whole city i think is really nice i'm gonna cheap out and agree with boy um but i so i i used to push i used to have a career in audio before i did this so i think audio is one of things that's the most important to me in almost any piece of anything and you know it drives the drives the emotion drives the feeling uh and um there's there's a particular moment that i find quite memorable about my uh you know during my time here and that's was my second citizencon that i was actually on location which is um when we showed off new and uh there was something so incredibly special about the carrick coming in and the music just hit
01:00:27
all of the right notes and you'd see you see the landscape of new babbage and you hear the wind then you hear the the thrusters of the carrick firing and the music is just swelling up and you know that in an auditorium probably amplified the you know the feel of it sure but it to me just that music and the audio is such an integral part of the experience like it's and it's it's sad that we see it so late um it's totally understandable why is he so late but you know like we often just put on our own music that inspires the the sort of feel of the location and we you sometimes we send that to the audio team to send to pedro for uh you know for uh some inspiration but um but yeah like playlists so many playlists
01:01:15
but yeah that's that's it for me all right about times i've listened to the blade runner soundtrack while working on this game it's insane like many many many times actually one of my favorite things one of my favorite things is when they're people are presenting to cr in like the tuesday or the thursday meeting and they've put a track under their presentation and sierra's like what music is this whenever we get sidetracked by talking about the music uh mood tracks are very important what we do all right so we are at the normal time limit guys if you've if anybody's got a meeting or something that they have to go to feel free uh we're gonna try to get we're gonna try to get 15 questions into the next 10 minutes of ot so if you can stick around and we're going to try to keep it under 10 minutes here uh and just jump right into it um why is there no love for player hangers
01:02:06
it will be maybe anything more you can give us yeah i mean it's uh they've been an external kind of external component to the game for a long time and the idea would be that we want to make star citizen will encompass and game right so we would like to probably bring them into the game rather than having us this external thing that we have to support forever and ever imagine so you're saying that at some point there's going to be some revised version of player hangers integrated into the pu you said it yes we started to we started to brand the hangers you know the aero view hanger is now the sort of sponsored and made hanger for new babbage and that we're going to continue that kind of theme forward so we've got these these um the hanger companies the hanger brands that are starting to
01:02:55
show more their influence in in the landing zones themselves okay um how do you decide the number of ship hangers for a landing zone is it based on server caps or something else well when we built lorville i sat down and i said 42 and that was what we did it is based on little common sense right bits if you have somewhere between 30 and 50 take off spots like looking at other games as well there are mmos right um it's it's a good place to be to be able to handle a lot of throughput traffic not all landing zones have that amount hangers at the moment but there is space for it to be added in the future okay um i'm gonna i'm gonna read this one word for word maybe act it out what happened to the landing pads in the lauraville cbd tower
01:03:45
for the love of god and all that is holy let us land on the cbd building in lauraville to sell stuff faster please oh please please please it has all those pads and elevators please that's word for word yeah i mean okay let's do it i'll be right back no i mean the way we handle landing and parking in the game in general is something that we revisit many times right and there will be moments where we change how things work uh that's just the nature of it so it's very possible that in the future we might see revisions to the way the player enters various landing areas okay again i would i would class some landing pads well hangers are a common
01:04:35
element but certain landing pads are i would class as common elements as well and again going back to future proofing locations you'll notice in both area 18 and and you babbage it's not just a landing pad on its own there's always a door there for potential elevator you know and that's that's helping us for the future so hey we do want to go inside a specific building there's the potential there we can link it to an elevator and so on so it's not just cbd but landing pads in general um we want to have the opportunity to expand on on what you can do there not just literally land on take off again but go go somewhere further with that i mean you talk about lessons that you learn from one location to another right like that's a lesson we learned from
01:05:22
lourville like landing packs which we applied to our corp and so on and so forth but you know we learned it after lorville so uh uh you mentioned elevators nick outward facing glassy elevators where the riders can see their dramatic ascent descents are a big part of high-tech cities and sci-fi and many buildings today in the world have them one might expect to see them in places like new babbage or other similar locales any plans to add them in the future people just want to look out while they're going up and down man well if you take for example the rest stop you land in a hangar you jump in an elevator and you ride through the whole thing and then you just appear a long time ago we had a transit system which literally just teleported you from a to b and then we got our physically moving elevators that now
01:06:09
actually take you physically through the space and there will be future iterations of that to enhance the feeling of traversal in a location and what is mentioned here is also one of those things that is very much something that we're looking into because you don't want to be stuck in a box and go five minutes later you arrive right you want to get this sensation of the journey towards the destination right there's there's um correct me from wrong address but there's two forms of transit there's ones that kind of teleport and ones that are on a spline and there's no difference between an elevator and a train i don't have any teleporting elevators anymore at all they're all actually physically traveling um some of them like that are on a spline for example let's say a left elevator that physically moves from like right that one is on the spine and you can see
01:07:00
and you can look through the window and everything right but every other elevator is physically traveling um through limbo so yeah so essentially that the the difference between a trainer there's not much difference at all between a trainer and a lot of it in terms of how they've got myself yeah so we're actually um we are actually looking at that and we were maybe maybe having something like that in origin maybe uh lauraville has a workers district underneath the city will we ever get to see it at the moment most orlando sons are let's say that it's sparse when it comes to gameplay right we do have long lists of things that you would like to do and we do plan to revisit landing zones to do various things to them for example the workers district improve
01:07:49
on rooftop landing areas add in the alleyway network into area 18 and all that stuff right so we have a list of these things we want to do so it goes back to what we said at the beginning but uh almighty lou right we do plan for it and we have it and have it in the location it's ready to go we just need to get around to it all right speed round uh roads what can you tell us about roads streets hideaways anything to let us drive around in landing zones so there's definitely like potential there with roads like at least hopefully you've overseen the the river um showcase so there's potential to do something like that with terrain defamation so you'd have more natural things it really depends on the landing zone there's not been a huge need for rhodes
01:08:38
we wouldn't we certainly wouldn't rule it out in the future there's no roads in oregon that's for sure i think we can fairly roll that out um uh could we ever see open-air landing pads on area 18. seems like a bit of a waste to have all that flat space around the ports that's clearly marked for ships to land and take off from yet not be able to land in those spaces if you look at the landing zones a lot of the specific the i love the landing pads and stuff you see it's it's meant to be for ai traffic you know because we do want to have this movement all kinds of ships coming and going right most places are a little bit static at the moment right so many of those paths will be used for that in the end when it comes to landing for the players we do spawn in
01:09:28
and out their ships and we ideally don't want to have them just pop out of existence so it could be that in some locations we do have landing pads but it's like premium parking because your ship is going to stay there it's not going to spawn you're going to pay quite a bit of money because you're literally occupying one of those magic 42 numbers that exists right so about this safety right like in a hangar you're in the hangar door closes is safe whereas if you land on a pad it's kind of up to you know you've got to lock your ship and it's not going to despawn like andreas it's going to stay there so somewhere someone might do whatever they want to do with it um so it's down to the player really yeah uh are we still planning on doing more landing zones for each planet um so i mean
01:10:17
some planets have a landing zone not every planet has one um some planets have more than one of these big flagship lightning stones right the idea of course is to we don't really want to see like let's say harrison it's it's only lordville right you don't want to have that you plan on having towns and villages and a whole slew of other types of content kind of spread around the planet right but that would be based on the sandbox team um doing that so in the end the plants are grand right so we do want to return to that and start working on that i mean what you see right now is but what you're focusing on at the moment is laying down the skeleton of the solar system and um we will fill in the meat once the skeleton is fully assembled okay uh ships like the carrick can barely fit inside current hangers has there been any talk about increasing
01:11:05
the size of the largest ones that ship used to be smaller just i mean it can't that the ship can you say it can't fit in hangers there's the extra large hanger it's got more than enough space yeah i mean the explosion is like four times the size of a character yeah but how many hangers are there the problem is like it's still flagged as a ship that in theory should land in a large hangar when which it could before it became a very ambitious little ship you know the little ship that could and um now it's stretching the borders a little bit so it might have to move into a bigger apartment it's why ships getting bigger is not automatically a good thing uh grimhex got some touch-ups recently any plans to go back to area 18 and lauraville to do something similar i think we've
01:11:50
touched on this a couple yesterday yeah uh let's see lauraville metro center speaks of an industry line will this ever materialize it's also pretty much the same questions before i mean it's part of all like expanding the landing zones and really because right now you don't really the time it takes for you to go from space to end up in a landing zone that travel time is not really justified with the amount of content we have in them right but it will be justified in the future when the line response gets expanded okay it's all about the priorities so if the if and the feature it's it's more tied to like what the next feature is so if the next features hospitals then would look at something like hospitals in landing zones you know um would want to put just expand landing zones for no reason that makes sense so when when rest
01:12:36
rest rooms is the next feature then that's where the toilets will come in but it's all going to be down to that so when if there's a mission giver for a specific area like like the workers district of louisville that needs to go in for for a specific reason then that's the time it would go in right i mean but like like we've mentioned before we we're trying to future proof all our landing zones to for much more expansion than what they currently are i'm going to get a email from richard tyrer i know it uh last question uh it's been a while since we've discovered a secret area like benny hinge uh do you plan to do more and if you could do anything what would you want to sneak in there okay people should look a little bit more yeah the last place that has been discovered some places may just not have been discovered
01:13:24
so you're saying they're in line there are some areas out there they haven't been found there's areas out there i mean i'm i know that i've made a few for new that um i've i think i've given a few hints at on on reddit every now and again um but i've never actually seen a picture of it so it might have been discovered but i've not seen it personally but there's a few places around arizona that have spectacular views uh where one might have a party at so that could be cool well they can't look at the original ones yet sorry yes i did meant new babbage sorry okay all we're saying is that if you look for it you will find it that you can't guarantee that
01:14:14
clearly you're not looking hard enough i mean the space is pretty big right yeah all right that's it gentlemen thank you so much for also spending the extra time with us afterwards it's i know it's the end of your week it's friday many of you i was gonna say want to go home but that's not the case anymore you're already there um thank you so much anyway for staying afterwards everybody uh for boy for manual for luan for nick for andreas andreas and for uh josh i think it's awesome uh i'm jared uh thank you so much for taking this uh trip down memory lane with the landing zone content team uh we're we are off next week next week is uh the return of calling all devs we've got uh actually we've got richard tyra oh good we've got richard tyre talking about the the future of
01:15:03
inventory the future of inventory and star citizen including personal inventory external inventory and something you've never heard of before local inventory so stay tuned for that next friday uh take care everybody see you later bye bye assuming he still wants to be on the show after we've created bathroom work for him intestinal

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