Squadron 42: Around the Verse - Welcome to the Coil

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse i'm sandi gardiner and i'm chris roberts this week we're excited to bring you a special feature on squadron 42 yes so back in a holiday show we showed the vertical slice and a first look at the coil and menacing massive planet fragments and static electrical storms it's a very unique environment that pose some distinct technical design challenges yes this month we're only taking a closer look at the coil since our teams just recently got back from the holidays but going forward our monthly updates for star citizen and squadron 42 will include detailed project reports along with one or two features let's check in with the devs now on the coil what is the coil it's a huge volumetric thing out in space it's a thing that you have to be

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   able to fly outside to look at these thing you have to fly inside to be to be surrounded by I think you fly through through bits of it a technical nightmare it's all it's all manner the coil was was sort of a fun element in squadron 42 because it was basically this sort of it plays a big role in sort of the character of the system that it's in so the story being that in Odin system I think it was actually by the time by the time that the UE II had discovered it the star had already gone Nova and so in the sort of the blast it decimated the first planet and for whatever reason it created this sort of like perpetual I

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   say electromagnetic because that's the first adjective that pops in my head but sort of electrical storm of you know chunks of planetary fragments and you know just gas and energy and all those sorts of very weird things and so it created this sort of you know perpetual labyrinthine storm so the idea being that there are these sort of tunnels that you can fly through it that you can say if we navigate but if you hit sort of what we call the walls but they're not really physical the walls of the coil it's it will overcharge your ship basically and fry you to death and so it created this interesting dichotomy of with these planetary fragments a lot of really cool stuff that you would normally not be

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   able to mine like being able to actually mine the core of a planet and and stuff like that and so it created a kind of unique opportunity for more risk risky mining consortiums to basically like take the plunge and you know travel inside the coil to try and get access to this sort of the potential vast resources that could be in there but it was extremely dangerous and the sort of the walls like I said of the coil shift so theoretically where you're mining could seal up and you could be trapped in there but the danger of it also was really appealing to sort of the criminal element who knew that sort of the cops basically would be too scared to try and follow them in there so they would use

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   the coil as basically a den to hide out in and launch rates and then come back in know that people probably wouldn't follow them in there so that was sort of the original guise of it and so so yeah I became a big part of the squadron 42 story of creating this environment that the player has to kind of Navin while sifting through this story if you build in any kind of conventional game environment you've you've always got clear direction oh you've got clear reference you know I wanna mountainscape in there or oh I want my base are pirate elbows to look a certain way but when you're building something this abstract the the concept and the idea it can go through a lot of iteration and that's where we've gone from there well what we're looking at now is that exploited planet feel so when you when you see it

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   for the first time in the system you should be able to see the kind of the big chunks of planet in there you should be able to almost quiz engineer it in your own mind about where this where this idea is come from on the outside and the intro to the game everything is kind of peaceful a little bit tense and mysterious your game can like really kind of wispy edges and things like this but as soon as you start to kind of like probit steps a bit more kind of like routine kind of mysteries out and things like that you started to get kind of like more violent it's closing in on you getting more claustrophobic and kind of it doesn't want you that it's pushing you away and things like that that kind of like lends itself really well to storytelling just through the environment itself traditionally in a lot of level design you'll have these really big recognizable forms that you can kind of see from any direction just gonna keep

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   you grounded in the world and know where you're going and when you're working with a big cloud or that kind of thing it's really difficult so I sculpted these these big bold shapes and things like that and we started come at recognizing things that I think internally started naming some of them and we had like the claw and the horn and all this kind of stuff or named after the devs there's not many games that can render as as far as we can we call it zero render distance so there is no kind of boundary it's yeah if you think about kind of floating through the clouds in the plane it's pretty much that on a huge scale it needs to to do several things for gameplay for design and obviously for Chris's expectations as well on the visuals volume metrics in 3d software hardware generally are very

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   difficult to achieve even offline rendering if you start to enable sort of fog or clouds or or anything like that it becomes a hugely memory intensive so yeah it's it's it's a huge challenge to do this stuff real time and to be able to kind of fly around it the trouble is because this is a volume it's not even this it's not even like having a really large 3d object it's like if you did it in a naive way you would actually need to full like a voxel for every square kilometer or cubic kilometer I should say so yeah any any time you try and turn up the resolution on it a little bit suddenly it costs eight times as much memory it's gone back and forth through a few different sort of technological approaches for a while we were very focused on getting very very hard walls the cost of at the cost of the

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   fluffiness so we were going to be able to have some softness but it was going to be a very clear distinction between like hazy stuff and rock-solid stuff and that worked for some of the interior scenes but it was also we haven't really whydid up to to any third-party tools so it was very limiting experience for the artists and they didn't have a quick way of iterating on it so that didn't work out quite so well since then we switched to a format called open V DB that's I think it was developed by DreamWorks originally for doing foggy type stuff but conveniently that's that's quite a common output format from a lot of third-party tools so it kind of lets the lets the art teams chop and change

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    between exactly how they want to get the asset to the engine and then then we just have to pick it up and convert it into our own format internally when we started doing the coil we started by using fume effects to simulate these large cloud volumes but we quickly found out that doing this using fume effects would take a long time to iterate upon and that the results we would get would vary drastically between each setting that we changed we thought that this would be a bad method to actually is a iterate upon in the future so we started using Houdini so in Houdini we started with this large source object here which the environment art gave us we converted it to a volume and cut shapes through it and we can see

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    that by looking at how it is as a 2d representation of the volume and so the whole process basically allows us to take this step by step and iterate upon what we've made very gently and very non destructively and by applying different noise to various stages we can create lots more interesting shapes that you see we're also able to merge two different graphs together so we have the main graph which is that large dominant shapes and then there's a subtle Ward shell that we put

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    on Indy which we mix together to create more interesting coil so this is the shell we're seeing we also have this haze which is the gentle stuff which you fly through and picks up the light and then we mix it together and we sample it to create better quality at the end this allows us to have the final version of the of the coil you can see here that different colors

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    represent the different density that we're seeing of the shape in engine you can see that we can import the whole coil form as VDB grid straights into the viewport and this allows us to do lots of editing inside of the engine in context so we can change the color parameters and also how the lighting is affected and we can also reduce or increase the density

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    and this allows us to create lots of different effects throughout the whole game we treating the coil really is as a character throughout the arc of squadron' so much like during a Films production you can you can generally kind of get a story kind of color arc from it so many films and you know as many websites out there that break this stuff down now you can you can break down the film's timeline to certain colors it's done to kind of complement what's going on in the script the coil generally kind of will be doing that as well so obviously it's dynamic during the course of of the game it can go from being kind of soft wispy kind of calming to a cat which generally is a helped more than hindrance but also don't you in the ARCA can get aggressive dense

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    stormy it's going to react dynamically to the Sun obviously that's the most powerful light source that we can possibly have in the system so it needs to shade well with that but then also you've got several kind of events that go on inside the coil a different location so they could be plasma storms they could be lightning storms they could just be you just want to over arch any kind of rim like certain things using this technology so on the forefront of it we can do all that with our eyes closed with just general geometry so like the ships and the stage space stations and all the planets and stuff the lighting system is very much kind of catered to that but when you go from something that is that scale to something that is absolutely huge there is a degree of you know new to new technology that needs to be written for

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    that there was new kind of gas cloud light light entities that came in they in turn have their own kind of noise functions so we can hint it kind of flickering kind of like pulsating storms in the distance this in turn gives us just a great tool for composition right so if we want to hint it you know danger in the distance you don't want to go there you generally gonna use a light source for that it was you know another undertaking and another kind of degree of understanding on not only the tall side but also the production cycles when I started using it I was obviously kind of so defaulted back into like your old figures of light intensities so if you were to like say a room you gonna have a light intensity maybe between point five two five right if you go up to like a Bengal hangar for example you got some light intensities running into you know one hundred hundred and fifty but which is

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    almost like a football stadium in intensity when you go into you know lighting a coil if you wanted to like a distance thing you're going into you know 50,000 60,000 70,000 so that sense of scale and adjusting for that is it is kind of mind warping when you when you're doing at points once you've got that in place then you've got this beautiful luxury of okay you put a station next to this kind of cloud you like that cloud up instead of just having this bleached sunlight coming through all the time and just this black on the other side you can bounce that light off and then you get nice three-point lighting on these assets which is is you know key in in my opinion of not that's just that black that you see all the time it's something we always struggle with is to make

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    interest in space environments because when you're in an FPS location and you're trying to build an environment around a specific location on a planet it's quite easy to say let's have a hero mountain I'll let's make something quite unique in this area but when you're in space okay how can we do that we've got asteroids we've got you know planets but how do we feel that void and this was a big answer to that I think it was a way that we could bring a cinematic experience to the campaign and a real centerpiece for the campaign as well so you're not just flying around in an empty void we're always kind of talking about these these kind of veins running through the coil and tunnels that will help with general kind of navigation throughout the game so if you if you do fly into a volume that you know that you

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    can't really see far in front of just prepare for the unexpected it also gives us a luxury of you know potentially Easter eggs here and there and and whatnot which is kind of nice from a design point of view but generally it's it's not advised to go in there is going to be systems fed into the flight model that will kind of complement everything that's going on this so should you fly into a risky area there will be a degree of turbulence it starts to vibrate your cockpit instrumentation panels will start some well function generally it will it will be it will go far much further than just visuals right so it needs to feel like you're you're in a place that you're not supposed to be and that is it that is being fed into a lot of missions as well so at times potentially you may need to be forced out from the cockpit and and

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    go it alone which is a very kind of powerful tool to have at your disposal from from a game scripting point of view we've taken some good steps towards that during this demo but obviously there's a lot more to come so that's going to be our challenge is making the content look good but making it flexible enough for the different departments to do what they want with both from like an art direction point of view to say I want it to look like a certain way and then also from a design point of view to say I want it to play a certain way then also from a VFX point of view because those guys like Caleb and Oliver have been really heavily involved in the look and feel of it as well so they need their opportunity to go in there and to make it look the way that they expect it to look as well and to to kind of come off our direction and visual direction as well because it might be a case of okay this looks great but can we increase the

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    noise or can we increase the density in a certain area if we were creating a planetside location we would expect a certain amount of flexibility in that location it might be the flexibility to say I want to put my pirate base here and then I want to be able to place about one in the background and then maybe sculpt some of the local terrain I think ideally from an environment point of view we want the same level of flexibility with this system as we would expect with all the game systems now because we're dealing with volumetrics it's going to be more difficult and because we're dealing with new technology it's gonna be more difficult but that's what we're going to ask for ultimately is that flexibility in the engine because it gives us so much more power from both not from our department from an art point of view but from designers and everyone else who can have that flexibility in the engine then the key issue for for us to get on top of really is the memory stuff which Ben

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    will probably talk a lot more of which which will be quite quite an in-depth talk I imagine the tech at the moment is it's functional but it uses its very memory hungry compared to what we would want to ship I'd say I'd say we probably want it to run in about 10% of the memory that it currently casts we want to absolutely confirm that the things that were the things that we've achieved with the current tech is exactly how we want it to look like completely nailed down the look of it and then once we've nailed down the look of it we can go back and say where are we where are we wasting memory where are we wasting performance we need more debug tools in engine really so we could take a slice through it for instance and just find out where is it spending memory and is it getting any benefit for the memory of

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    spending there like being able to sort of work out whether the asset has a bunch of areas that it's spending memory that it doesn't need or if it's something in our compiled process that it's wasting that memory it might also involve sort of switching the formats around and stuff so that it can it can analyze what the artists have put in and it'll say for instance they've put some very crinkly detail in and some very wispy detail and rather than just trying to store everything at really high res so that you can have the crinkly detail to sort of I don't know maybe separate separate out the wispy stuff from the crinkly stuff and store them into parallel formats or something like and the other thing actually that it doesn't do yet is things receiving shadows from the coil that's that's a thing where we kind of need to be

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    absolutely certain of the tech that we're doing for now because once you have to cast shadows onto other stuff you're looking at other systems so yeah other parts of the engine would then have to start receiving stuff from the coil to say yes there's a shadow here so we don't want to have to update all of them every time we change the coil that that is a challenge because it has to talk to a load of other systems but at the same time it's it's quite similar to how we have to do atmospheric scattering so I'm kind of assuming that we're going to be able to kind of like thread in to generalize the path that the and that the it's very scattering is using and sort of talk to talk to the system through the same hole basically by switching to a hierarchical format it just means if there's a big empty hole

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    in the middle of it or there's an area where it's fairly smooth data then we just don't have to spend that much memory on it it also means that so we kind of rein march through it for each pixel so anytime you're going past something that actually knows upfront that it's low res it doesn't have to do as many samples as it passes through that area that's what we've currently got in terms of runtime performance we're also looking at doing things like because it's quite fluffy you possibly don't need to be running it at like one ray for every pixel like you could run you could run it a half or quarter res and then after you've done it work out which pixels don't match up with that very well and like throw throw some extra rays at the bits that need that need fixing up afterwards rather than

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    just sort of brute forcing your way through the entire thing Oh overall like if you a lot a lot of space games generally and you know our game up to this point really has been you jump from point A to B so if you wanted to get from planet to planet B for example you're just gonna go into orbit and take a jump that's okay for the most part but for a story a heavy story driven game it's extremely boring so the coil gives us the the facility to almost kind of like design routes and design pacing in space so rather than just you know the quickest point from A to B is a straight line we may be forcing the player into these kind of different scenarios which again it is nice but it's also much like when you design an FPS map you need to design the route through the coil as

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    well so yeah that's that's again incredibly challenging because you've got third-party tools that really don't facilitate that but we've got these tools in the engine that do facilitate that it's about marrying those things up together to make that possible so the the coil opened up this whole gas cloud tech and as the coil is like this large stormy nebula we can actually use the same tech for other parts of the game so whenever you want to get enter and ever late you can we can use the same volume based technology to fly through the different forms and create really interesting different environments for the player to explore so cooking is a process in Houdini for evaluating this large node graph that you make it's a very procedural system so in fume effects you

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    generally simulate so you calculate from one frame to the next frame what happens in Houdini you can also do simulations but you can also procedurally generate from a source match all the different stages that you put up on top of it this allows you to go into one stage and change it and make a small laceration there and have it will follow through one one thing that we concentrated on during the development of the coil was not just the volumetric aspect of the coil isn't as an entity it was also visual targets for how it should always should look and fail at certain points in the coil and we did this really early on as we were developing the volumetric attack we also looked at okay well how does a location inside the coil look how does it look as you're approaching the coil you know

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    what kind of things do we expect to happen as you fly into the coil so that could be things like turbulence on the ship for instance it could be VFX it could be like localized particles that start to ramp up as you get close to this and which is incidentally something we did do based on kind of based on the density of the coil you get localized particles driven and by Game Code so there was a lot of work that went into these visual targets and that was separating scenes out and then saying okay well for instance the Star Ferry wreck which is something we saw in the live stream we took that as a location and said we we know how the like Nathan Daisley went and he even already made that video and he'd kind of defined the look and feel of that area or ID so we took that I said okay we were taking

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    this as a direction of how it should feel and look inside the coil and let's try and expand out of that as well so we built tunnel routes down to where you know we tried to fit like how does it feel when you traverse it inside this thing there was a lot of development that went into that you know some of it you see in the final version and the lives again some of it was was kind of throwaway we didn't use it in the end but it really defined what we wanted for this stuff it's important not only to define the form and the volume of what the coil is but how does it feel how does it how does it look at any point not just specific locations in the live stream but also locations for the rest of the game as well well this is going to be a huge huge part of the game so and we've got a lot of content inside the coil so defining how that looks and feels is important to us really late on

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    in development and we're talking maybe a week or two before we went live we had we had a direction change on it we what we had made was looking pretty cool but it didn't feel menacing enough it didn't feel it felt it felt too enjoyable for a player to be in that environment whereas everything like I was describing before this is supposed to be a hostile environment it's supposed to be somewhere that you shouldn't really go to as a player it wouldn't be where you'd choose to build your station for instance so we we had to change it and we had to make it look more in line with the lore of it and that that was a color change yes we went from the kind of the kind of the etheral blues to this kind of more menacing red kind of vibe to it which I think just changed the mood and

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    the feel of the entire if the entire chapter or mission that takes place there and that's why I like a week or two before I think actually I think it was the Sunday before we would used to go live I think on the Thursday that's when we made the change and it was a case of kind of me and Caleb sitting on it on Sunday and kind of trying to come up with something Monday morning we had a review with the directors web CR luckily they liked it so we were already starting to you know discover new uses for this technology for example like in trios seen in the demo you you in this kind of debris field that's the sort of you know rotating around that around that planet genuinely it looked quite flat without any volumetric shading in

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    it fog obviously everyone knows I'm a big fan of the fog so we already started using you know can we use this technology is compliment for example asteroid fields or you know rings around a planet we do have a type of shader that will do that but it's very kind of cheap and suffers with kind of breaking it certain angles you'll notice it in the game if you catch it at the wrong angle it'll kind of look a little bit strange for a split second and then snap back but with this because it's fully volumetric and fully kind of you know is shading correctly to the Sun model that's there it just looks ten times better and you can fly into it so you get a sense of full volumetric shading and which is which is really nice you get that sense of depth basically that this the other technique won't give you

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    almost like location scouting we call it and similar to how development happens on a planet actually is that once you've once you've built this location you know you've you've you've built mountains you've built rivers you build the sea you know where all your kind of key locations are and then you can go into that environment and say okay I want I want location a to be here on this mountain the one location B to be done by the sea or something like that and then you can work out paths between it it's a similar kind of process here where we we kind of build a section of the coil that just works and looks cool and visually is what our direction expects it to be and this is where I go back to that flexibility as well because having that flexibility means that would have a little bit more control than that in the engine rather than just saying it would look cool from this location oh but the pathway out of here doesn't really work well we would then be able

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    to create a pathway out there that worked well for us in terms of connecting these pockets together that's going to be slightly different and that's a challenge that's going to come up in the next few months we're going to have different locations in squadron' different really cool locations and they're going to be different pockets and we're going to have traversal routes between those locations as well and for me the traversal routes are going to be something that I'm hoping we can really play with you know how do those traversal routes work are they going to be really closed in environments like tunnels we did do some you may hear from some of the engineering guys like when we started really early on in development we did a lot of rather than big open spaces with this volumetric technology we did more confined closed spaces so tunnel systems that connect together no

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    as a player navigating these tunnels it feels cool so maybe we can look to bring some of that back in as well and we've got different mission specific locations in squadron connecting them with cool tunnels design but love that as well because it gives them an opportunity to get some flight of gameplay in there like the stuff that we made for the livestream when you come out from Shubin to the the outside of the coil yeah it felt cool but you didn't really not recognize it as being a volumetric entity until your constant travelled away from it now if we did travel into cons base or any of a specific mission location let's close those tunnels down and see how that feels because I could be a really cool traversal we're being really industry-leading here like when you build a lot of conventional environments there's a lot you can look back on

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    there's a lot of influence you can look back on there's a lot of other games of tents we've done the same things you know if we were looking at an FPS environment around I go back to this pyro base on the planet but you know if we had a jungle around that base then we might go back and look at some of the earlier Crysis stuff or we might look at some of the more recent environments that are coming online to try and kind of drive the workflow and practices that we have but when it comes to build in with this technology because there's not really a great deal out there it we're defining that workflow we're defining those practices so there is a bit of trial and error in there and that's the difference you know if I was going to make texture for a rock I'd know exactly what software to use if I'm going to make a box or for a volumetric system well there's there's a few options in there some of them better than others and that's what we've got a workout really pretty interesting with all the

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    stuff that we're doing and thinking about and working on in the future and as you can see the coil is an integral component to squadron not just as an environment but also as a character in its own right if you want to stand the front lines of squadron 42 s development head to the games web page where you can enlist to receive monthly updates and never miss one of our around the verse squadron specials yes and don't forget to check out the RSI on star citizen sections of the website as well the entire site has been redesigned and went live earlier today and we can't wait to see what you guys think of the overhaul we're pretty proud of it we think it's pretty slick yes it is and to celebrate the new look and feel of the site we have some new merchandise and packages available including a slick mouse pad from Whitley's guide a new star citizen t-shirt and the loot and scoot ship pack from Drake for all you

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    aspiring pirates out there there's a few of those yes there are also remember you can still pick up squadron 42 for just $15 until the end of the month with these super-sized meat promotion yeah that's a pretty good deal for everything squadron 42 for even more than squadron 42 tune in tomorrow at noon PST for a new episode of reverse vers live where i chris roberts sit down with community content manager jared huckaby to discuss the game further and if you haven't seen it check out last week's reverse the verse where guest jeff Zanelli answers questions from backers about pending squadron 42 s music yeah jeff has caught a ton of films and television shows like HBO's and Pacific and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film and it's a great interview for anyone interested in the cinematic scoring process and specifically the challenges of scoring games thanks to

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    all of our subscribers for sponsoring our shows and allowing us to bring you these monthly updates and insights yes definitely thank you and thank you of course to all the backers you make it possible for us to make starters and it's Quadra for you to the best damn games they can be yes you do and that's all for us from today yes so until next week we will see you around the verse [Music] thank you for watching so if you want to

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