Star Citizen: Around the Verse 3.2 - UK

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] okay you should be good to land on there I just came out of there there's nobody well there were two people in there but one killed the other one and I killed the other one you got an Avenger right behind you he looks like he's going to shoot you yeah he's looking right at you oh this is not going to end well just play cool you're fine he's still just sitting there I wonder if he's waiting for you to get out to shoot you I'm going for it I got the shotgun don't get out yet just stay in there for a second

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   I'm going to try and go around and get in the back of his ship I won't shoot him but if he shoots you I'm going to shoot him okay if okay the back's already open okay I got this got this slowly but surely he's going to move right when I get up to it I just know it oh I'm in I'm in it oh just Ked you a okay I wonder if I can just shoot him out here okay let me see if I can try and get up little close like look around the corner

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   and oh I got him oh my God oh man it took a ship all right I'm done I'm taking this to the end of universe it's over that gu done oh my God that was amazing hey everybody Welcome to season 3 episode two of around the verse I'm Sandy Gardner VP marketing and I'm Chris Roberts CEO and project director of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 making another guest appearance on around the ver uh so on uh this week's news on the Star Citizen Alpha front 2.5 has been making good progress and is currently testing with the evocati uh we're hoping to go to wider PTU this weekend so check for

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   updates on the website for that uh and uh as you know we're rotating between Studios so this week we're going to highlight the UK studio and what they've been working on as you most likely already know I've been spending a lot of time in the UK this year working closely with the team uh on Squadron 42 as well as stares and uh I mean I have to say it's an incredibly talented team now 180 strong which is amazing and I'm lucky enough to have them help me uh build such an ambitious set of games and uh you of course the other Studios also are incredibly talented and great so how with that let's throw it over to Nick Elms um the creative director of Foundry 42 and let's see what he has to say hi everyone welcome to another monthly update from uh here at Foundry 42 in wilmslow we've hopefully got a few interesting videos for you today and uh and we're going to start with uh with

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   Carl and Zane and all talking to you about improvements we've been making to The Landing system we've been working on a new Landing system we want to make everything a lot more intuitive uh make sure the messaging is coming across to the player about what's actually going on in the game um so essentially how that's going to work now is as soon as you drop your landing gear you're effectively in landing mode which drops you down to uh Precision mode as well which means you can um you've got more finer control over the ship speeds and and the ship's movement and it also swaps out the AR for The Landing AR that kind of flags all the landing areas and the potential Landing areas and whether or not they're recommended or whether they're valid or invalid uh and that kind of ties into the Comm system too because you when you approach some of these official Landing

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   zones you'll have to ask permission to land on on certain pads and stuff like that so um you know you'll you'll get near a a particular Landing Zone switch on coms and you'll hail the the the tower at the at the station and request land and permission and then they'll either Grant it or not and your AR will respond to whatever permissions they give so if they don't Grant it AR will tell you that none of them are valid if they do Grant it it'll flag one of them for you call you over um you take your ship over there and as soon as you're in a bounding box um you can either land manually cuz you land the gears down anyway so you just do everything yourself lower the ship down and physically stick it on a geometry yourself or you can uh hold the auto Landing key down which will safely land

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   you at the on the pad itself and whether or not that's available depends on which station you're at you know some some of the more high-tech stations will offer the automatic landing and and some of the others might not it's just all about um what services are on offer at that particular station all aspects of the game we're constantly working on whether or not there's enough message in there and trying to improve the experience and make it more intuitive to the player um and Landon was just one of those ones that we were always aware we were going to come back and revisit and this this pass that we're doing on it now should do a really good job of of clearing everything up for the player in addition to uh making the whole Landing system more intuitive in general to use we wanted to have the UI improvements accompany uh so we created a Motion

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   Graphics mockup of what this would look like um uh with the landing in different states so when you're have a recommended landing pad or a landing pad is not you're not able to land at a certain Landing Pad we have different UI States for that and that's shown and demonstrated in this concept that uh we had uh one of our senior UI artists Rich Mars than mockup for us so one thing we wanted to keep in mind was that because you could have so many different landing pads next to each other that we didn't want too much UI um uh overlapping each other so we wanted to keep simple but obvious enough uh to see when you're approaching The Landing Pad um the other thing that we also had to take into account was say for instance if landing pads are embedded

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   deep within a crater or are hidden away uh that we have a visual element uh to tell you where that Landing Pad is um despite it being embedded so our task was to improve the landing system to make it a lot simpler for players to land their ships um we issues where players found it really hard to align to the the landing area and touchdown so the goal was to add in a few assists so now we've got um a feature where you can the ship will orientate itself to match the orientation of the landing area or uh the terrain of the planet as soon as you engage The Landing system um we switch

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    the flight mode into Precision mode so that helps the player with the um maneuverability of the ship means they can do a lot more precise Maneuvers and bring it down to a smooth touchdown when the ship's within a specific height of the landing surface as well we switch to automatic mode and bring the bring the ship down into in under autopilot to touchdown so when we get close to a potential Landing surface what we do is we fire out a number of um rare casts from beneath the ship to test um surface normals on the ground and then we average those and try and orientate the ship upright to match those ground uh normals so that you should come in at

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    the same um orientation as the potential Landing site even even with um visual aids and UI feedback it was still pretty hard to align the the the ship correctly onto a landing area especially when you've got a massive ship like a Retaliator and you've got other obstacles around the pad that quite easy to collide into so I think this this helps orientate the player better the idea is that the the end result is landing is a lot easier and is a more enjoyable experience but even then you can still turn off all these assists and try and land land the ship yourself and make a hash of it or not this should all go live with 2.5 although we've got a further iterations to do and to get some

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    improved UI and get the latest UI prototypes in so it's still a ongoing process I hope you enjoyed that and now we're going to go over to Gordon who's going to talk to you about some of the improvements we've been making to the FPS cover system you'll already seen the weapon raising system uh that went into live universe in earlier patch uh that's the system when you approach a wall H your weapon will rise up in front of you to stop it clipping uh the cover system Builds on top of that um as you approach the edge of a cover surface uh your weapon will move slightly to indicate that you can lean out from cover uh in that position you can press the um lean key to uh peek out a cover you can press the fire key to Blind fire um or you can press the aim down sights button to step out fully and shoot the parameters for the cover um are all stored in data core

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    um we've got different setups for different weapons and for the different positions in cover um using data forg live edit feature we can connect to the game in real time and and edit these parameters as you're playing it and and this gives the artists and animators and designers lotss of sort of freedom to tweak and modify these values rather than having to go in and create different overlay animations for each one um sort the heavy work of the cover system is performed in Ray casting and we've got lots of rays that check where you're in cover where you can lean out of cover and and also do things like stop the weapon clipping through the wall if you rotate in towards cover these Rays also check how close or try to estimate how close you are to the edge of cover and so that when you do perform a step out it keeps you as close to the corner as possible so you've got the best view while exposing the least amount of your body finally we've

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    implemented a feature called slice the pie um which is used while you're stepped out of cover and so as you rate further in towards the cover surface um it will move you further out and sort of giving you a better view of your surroundings and and we're also going to extend this when we do top cover and we've got a similar feature called slice the cheese which will take you further up so you can see Down From a Balcony or from a higher up position to shoot below you the cover system was um originally conceived to sort of slow the game down slightly more make it feel a bit more tactical um sort of give you the option of um taking your time and sort of picking your targets and when you're playing it um a lot of the work went on with sort of Todd papy in Germany and John over here to sort of get the design right and get the feel of the game right and with lots of work from the various anim um U and Colin um did a lot of work to sort of get these animations feeling

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    Snappy and quick um so it felt sort of natural um and also a lot of focus on making sure you wouldn't get stuck in cover you wouldn't it wouldn't feel cumbersome it was a very sort of fluid and natural feeling system a lot of the designers obviously play it while they're doing their play test all of us play it when we're doing the play test and it does seem to be um getting used more and more now that the more features are coming online um and it does feel quite satisfying when you might to kill someone from cover and when you actually man to use it effectively so all of the guns will work in the cover system and it's sort of weapon agnostic they've all got like I said different setups for data core um so the legs have a sniper rifle obviously have to raise slightly differently from a pistol um you'll hold it differently when you're in cover um but yeah they will all work you'll be able to walk up behind the wall with shotgun look out fire a shot come back in pump shotgun and so on the procedural

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    player cover system is going live in 2.6 and that's all for for this month from Foundry 42 wils low we'll see you next month for another update thanks Nick and in other news Gamescom party tickets are sold out so that is going to be really fun event uh there's a live stream happening if you can't make it on Friday August 19th Chris will be there 12200 PST yeah in person or 1900 UTC uh big Benny's t-shirts in new sizes are still available for everybody um also our staff have been very keen to get in these t-shirts so I look forward to seeing them on future ATV episodes the rotating free fly ship which was the saber last month just ended for subscribers and the next one is now the gladia so get in there and fly that meanwhile there's a flash sale on the saber this weekend due to popular request but uh speaking of ships let's also check out one of the new flyable

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    ships that will be in 2.5 hey I'm Jeff I'm I'm currently working in Tech design I'm working on the Argo multi-person utility vehicle and today I'm just going to be showing you around the Aro um showing you a little bit of the process that's gone behind it and all the work that's gone into it really so uh the Argo itself is primarily primarily a capital ship support vehicle so um what it does is you'll have the Idris fly into a into a location but it might not be able to go through an asteroid field or something like that and the Argo can then fly in it can pick up any survivors in one of its pods or it can um be fitted with a cargo pod would like um with repair gear in the back of it and with that repair gear if the ship gets damaged it can send out a crew of Engineers they can

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    fly around to the damage power of the ship and they can then start fixing it back up it's also going to be having the Argo doesn't currently have this it's still work in progress but it's going to have a mechanical arm that also will be able to repair um parts of the ship but as I say that's currently work in progress unfortunately you won't be going out in the live version of the ship um it is very much a support uh vessel it has no Quantum Drive it has no weapons it's lightly armored it's completely teed to its parent ship but at the same time it's not really designed to be going out and doing its own uh individual thing is purely a support craft the cargo itself has three pods one is a cargo pod which you may have seen in the citizen con video from last year where we introduced the uh the Stanton um the cargo pod has space for a limited amount of cargo and it's also got a a seat for one Personnel to sit in

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    during like transport it's also got a transport variant which has eight seats in it for obviously larger scale Personnel pickup drop off which would be quite handy for when youris is an orbit and you need to send the Aro down to a planet uh and finally it's going to have a rescue and Recovery pod which we haven't finished yet but this pod will have limited medical facilities so if someone gets injured on the battlefield you can cart them into it and then take them back out to the ship to to receive proper care the Argo is also uh going to eventually be able to attach and detach its pods So currently the the different versions of the Argo are different ships so you got the cargo Argo and the transport Argo which each have their own bespoke pod but eventually it'll be able to detach one pod attach another or even if it can get to an escape pod from a destroyed capital ship for example it

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    could go out and pick up one of their escape pods and then drop that off in in the adress or in whatever his parentship would be at the time um and yeah for for a bit of the uh design process that went into the Argo um it used to have a much a much sort of smaller pod but that was revealed to not really be able to store a lot of like cargo couldn't really fit a person in with a lot of other stuff so the Pod was made much bigger and it was given a rear ramp so now picking up cargo dropping off is now considerably easier uh it also looks a lot nicer I think personally um also the lower thrusters on the front of the ship they they're currently located underneath the cockpit but previously they used to be actually on these Thruster pucks which are the circular um objects that all the thrusters are mounted on and what they

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    would do is they used to fire down into the Pod itself which yeah we had to fix that cuz it didn't look too great right is the the thrusters on the Argo um on the legs they don't rotate with the legs so when it's landed it actually use it legs as supports uh and when it takes off the legs will rotate back into like a fixed position so that they can help with flying cuz the ends of the legs each have a main tster on them and they've also got the Retros mounted in there but the pucks themselves on the sides don't rotate so they can actually help with take off and Landing otherwise a ship would have a fairly hard time getting off the ground um there's also a few minor design changes it went through like in the early versions of the Argo that the public may have seen uh the legs were they were sloped much further forwards so a lot of the way to the back of the Argo was actually unsupported

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    there's a few videos floating that we got floating around where the when the Argo was placed into a gravity box the sheer way to theago meaning it would sort of rest on the floor for a few seconds and then just rock backwards and yeah that was a bit silly but yeah that's theago it's a lovely little ship Runner basically it's a GI that is a general Workhorse for all the capital ships hopefully will be thrown around hey guys Tyler wikin here Community manager in the Austin Texas Studio here to bring you this week's MVP a huge congratulations to Lord Bane for his efforts in creating SC lore cast Bane takes Star Citizen lore to a whole new level by bringing it to Life with music sound effects and epic voice acting we can't get enough of these so

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    keep them coming and congratulations again you're this week's MVP back to you guys h there you go as well as the Argo there's

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    a reliant which we showed last week on ATV and we'll be flyable also in 2.5 uh now for the final segment of this week's show we have something I think will blow you all away um going to hand it over Nathan to get it started but um have fun the stuff we're about to show you today is uh full R&D investigation into the um catastrophic damage of capital ships there's uh some very specific milestones and goals that we try to accomplish with this because there is a high level plan to have fully fully explorable dead ships not only in space but also on on planet surfaces the idea behind the the R&D work was initiated should we say from a

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    key point in in the story um it was something that I wanted to kill two birds of one stone so we know we wanted to achieve these things for the Pu and why not try and um do the same for for for some parts of the story so the the starting point was we've obviously got a lot of capital ship material that we can use um ranging from the Idis to the javelin to the go um the key the key point is that we didn't want to have to recreate everything from scratch so you could for example take an environment or a ship and go okay this is this is 100% damage now and start again you would get a very good result that way but what we wanted to do is we really wanted to push

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    strongly use of existing assets simple Shader swaps and full full use of VFX and Lighting to to push a mood and a feel into these areas by default uh when I went around a lot of the the different departments and I spoke to them about the catastrophic damage the default thought that comes to over one's head is it's on fire um everything is burning to ashes and um no one can escape and or get out or get in and that's that's great but if you study um real world reference such as aircraft carriers big ships in in in the ocean um oil rigs they have very Advanced fire retardant systems um that's that's more than capable of essentially putting catastrophic fires out so fire Crews can

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    get in um and not only does that kind of make things accessible but it also kind of opens opportunity to have lots of wet surfaces that we can then with the light going out play with very kind of clever lighting techniques to to try like kind of push a mood that that we're after which is is dark dead slow it should kind of work the the the environment that that you're used to should now be working against you so this is these are the things that we're trying to create as mentioned first we we looked at a lot of willward reference such as oil rigs U large structures that that that can put themselves out like like aircraft carriers obviously that's not enough uh there's a wealth of films and reference that we can kind of look at and and pull inspiration from I'm lucky

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    enough to have worked on on on on some of those so um much like much like the cap but the the the the real kind of mood and feeling came from a lot of kind of Ridley Scott stuff um and and if if the wheel isn't broken I don't believe in fixing it so we had a lot of uh we had a lot of inspiration from IP such as alien Blade Runner um all all the ' 80s classic Sci-fi films should we say I hope that gives you an insight into the the work that's gone into the R&D uh for the catastrophic damage effects uh it's a huge collaborative approach between a lot of departments not just art but also Ali and his team and Mike and his team with the VFX uh seeing everyone come together to kind of produce these

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    results is is all inspiring and I hope you liked it all so for the last couple of months the graphics team have been working on a bunch of features to improve the quality of the lighting predominantly so we could and uh get some better visuals in the down chips or the crash chips um this mainly comes down to improving the particle lighting and the parv effects team which uh We've added some volumetric features there to really make it stand out especially when we've got all the fog and other effects going and the other part of what we've been working on is to improve the the bloom and lens flares to give a better glare when you look at these Bright Lights which we get in these very dark and broken ships when you think of a derel or crashed spaceship probably one of the first things you can pick picture is the atmospheric lighting with shafts of light in the Smoky mangled aftermath so it it's clear that this would be an a

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    of Technology we would need to focus on to achieve that look the first Improvement we wanted to make was on the lighting of our particle effects previously they had used their own lighting system which didn't support many of the usual features of our lights so for example we'd be missing crucial Shadows or the brightness of the lights would be incorrect the rest of the engine however uses a system called tiled lighting which can efficiently cope with hundreds of light sources and so we ad Ed this system so that we could use it on our particle effects too and this really helped us tie the particle Lighting in with the rest of the art much better however because particles are really just approximations of volumes we decided to go one step further and apply volumetric lighting by sampling the lighting many times across each particle's volume this gives every light the ability to cast light shaft within every particle effect the other big change we've made is to improve our

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    Bloom and flare effect which simulates the glare and bounces of light you get due to the imperfections within a camera or the human eye they're generally two approaches to flares artist driven and procedural kangin's base flare implementation is artist driven and blends and distorts many tectors on top of each other to create complex flares that can look great in the right conditions but also aren't physically based and so don't simulate the actual light sh or respond correctly to other effects such as depth of field and motion blur procedural techniques on the other hand are generated by code purely based off the higher dynamic range image data and therefore give accurate highlight shapes and respond to other effects as expected however procedural techniques usually look quite simplistic due to their cost so we came up with an efficient method of generating physically based flares where each

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    individual element can be customized to exhibit a wide range of physically based distortions and color shifts yet the whole system still runs faster than our previous system so hopefully you can see the benefits of all the new tech and hopefully be with you soon in the next few weeks in the next release I've been working on the um sound design for the ambience inside the Idris um and specifically the last few days I've been working on the various damage levels across the ship so from uh 10% damage right up to 100% and today I'm going to show you the more extreme of those damage States and that's the Idis on a really really bad day so here we are on the Idis and obviously looking around something pretty catastrophic has happened so this is the audio design for a very damag

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    uh crashed in fact Idris and we'll fly through the level now nice and slowly so you can soak up the ambience and I'll keep the chat to a minimum once again with this version of the Addis the emphasis has been on detail and creating a very positional 3D

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    environment to explore e and this approach of using hundreds upon

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    hundreds of individual sound spots to create the audio environment does give you this sort of 3D positional thing but it gives you a great sense of depth and as you approach many of these sound spots their character changes they brighten as you get closer to them and we bring in lots more layers of detail so as you examine something and get closer to it it opens up and you see and hear more information so just for a moment Let's uh remind ourselves what it's like at the other end of the damage Spectrum on board the Idris on a good day and you can hear that it's a pretty

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    Serene experience it's a calm gentle Ambience the ship's humming away nicely but as we start to bring up the procedural damage in the audio things start to Rattle and hum and the ambience changes uh dramatically the whole feel of the ship changes much more tension these electrical boxes on the wall rattling and vibrating in different ways again reflected in hundreds of sound spots across the ship that all have this dynamic character which uh

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    morphs and changes to reflect the health of the ship so right now let's have a look back on the uh the catastrophically damaged RIS evacuate that's offer evacu off let's take a quick look behind the

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    scenes so here you can see we've got got some emergency fire sprinkler sounds um and there's a particle system right here and that has a sound of the sprinkler associated with it but here on the floor is an auxiliary sound that is the sound of uh the Water Drops splashing and hitting other surfaces so you know there's these different dimensions to even simple Ambient sound such as a fire sprinkler [Applause] so hopefully that's given you a sense of

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    what we're doing to bring the ship alive really um and take our immersion to the next level so yeah thanks for watching now tell me that wasn't amazing I hope that shows the kind of attention to detail we're aiming for imagine coming across a crash wreck on a planet or floating in space or perhaps in Squadron 42 is just going to be so cool yeah that was totally awesome and in other news Ben is back at work happy to have him back at work uh he may or may not make an appearance on RTV um although it's a little early as we're changing the time to accommodate the UK reverse thee will be on at 4 pm local UK time so that you can Q&A with UK devs including our vehicle art director Nathan dersley who's always very interesting to listen to so um with that uh we'd like to thank all the

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    subscribers out there for making this show possible and all the backers uh out there for making Star Citizen Squadron 42 possible uh and we'll see you around the verse around the verse did you know that many of star Citizen's developers are on social media if you would like to follow Star Citizen on Facebook you can find us here or on

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    Twitter here and even Instagram here and for a full list of develop ERS personal accounts they're willing to share with the community check out this link you can find out uh what I bought at Amazon this week Star Wars stuff it yeah it was probably Star Wars stuff