STAR CITIZEN: CitizenCon 2947 - Graphics and Tech Development for Star Engine

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:19

   welcome to our tech and graphics panel the visual bar as you guys know that we've set for star citizen is incredibly incredibly incredibly high takes a lot of unique technology to actually get us there next presentation is put together in a cool way they're gonna take you step-by-step through a frame and through some of the techniques that we use to actually achieve that visual quality and they'll also give a small glimpse into some of our future plans in regarding the tech so let me introduce mr. Ali Brown he's the director of graphics engineering from the UK office thanks man hey guys so we've got a few things to go

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   through today the first thing I'm going to do is do a bit of a deep dive and to looking at all of the things we do and to make it one frame of star citizen and as you all know we use lumberyard as our base engine but we have some different requirements to lumberyard so I'm gonna particularly point out the things that we've had to extend and build on top of lumberyard after that I'll go through some of the recent updates we've put into the free point not be in your hand soon and then touch on some of the graphics roadmap that's coming up dive into some CPU parallelism which goes back to what we Chris was talking about with Intel earlier and then talk about some of the mid to long term goals we have in the graphics and the tech department so just to start you off I'm just going to give you a quick video to show you all the breakdown of one frame and then I'll go through and explain what is you're seeing on screen now

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   [Music] so then it's quite a lot to go through there so I'll try and get through all of it in time so the first thing we do is not too exciting but we because we have this these procedural planets now and

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   all this procedural content we can't possibly bake the lighting for all of these locations so our first job is to bake an environment probe for that location that you are currently stood at on the planet or on a moon or even in space we still have to do this so this is a render of six different angles of the local environment and then we have to process this and blur this and compress it all on the fly and this all happens at the start of the frame now this is quite complicated takes quite a while so we split the work up so this one texture you're seeing here actually is spread over 20 frames to process this wing and so every 20 or so frames we can update the localized lighting to give you a flexions formula ships or nearby objects after we've done that next job is to do the shadows now what you're seeing here is what we call our shadow pool which looks a bit weird but it's an

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   it's 8 K texture and it's where we pack all of our shadows in so here there's about six large shadows then there's a whole bunch of little small ones Crandon up there so this is something we've extended from lumberyard we needed quite a lot of variation in our quality for our shadows sometimes we need 4k shadows for cinematics especially for squadron or something like that or any type of close up conversation and then other times we're looking at Levski or something where there might be hundreds of lights and we might need 30-40 shadows at once so this system we have allows us to very to get the high quality when we need it and the spread of lots of lights when we need it okay now we onto the actual frame so the first thing we do just for a few

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   optimization is to render out everything that we think is going to block something else in the scene we want to keep the cost down as much as possible so we have to try and pick what we think is a good occluder so we find the big meshes the ones without too many vertices one so close to the camera we do a cheap shader and all of them get rendered first so that's what you see in here and then this at the end of the frame we also read this back onto the CPU and we actually use that to do an extra set of culling on the CPU spread across multiple cores where we can avoid a mesh even getting to the GPU of the next frame which is awfully best optimizations not to do any work in the first place so that's what we aim for but this also is gets used on the GPU to hide all the meshes of behind after that we start about four material

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   rendering now this is just a tiny subset of the textures we use on one material but we can have like up to 15 or 20 textures on one material so this is Stan from the left its albedo just that color basically a normal Maps smoothness map a blend map and a height map and you typically have this set of textures twice before on one material but some of our materials have four more layers and the planet can have up to 12 layers so now we aren't actually rendering the scene so we don't actually render color we actually render into what we call a G buffer in what we call the Z pass which is where we write out material information like in this case normals which means the direction that the surface is facing so as well looks a bit abstract and then we actually also

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   render this in multiple stages so we start off with the planet geometry which is what you see in here put in all of our instance objects which here is walks and some asteroids in the distance then it's all of our static objects and then our dynamic objects in our characters and then also our decals as well and the orderings really important so we can composite everything correctly for example the decals might be like mud or something you'd want them to apply to your static geometry but not to apply to a dynamic geometry they have a different system boundary now okay after that we this re at the same time we render into about between 3 and 6 textures at once so this is the next texture we're writing out which is the albedo which is fancy word for color we've got smoothness which is how do opposite of roughness does how rougher

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   surfaces the white areas of the smoothest we've got reflectivity which is based on the index of refraction or our harder surfaces so all of our metals will appear bright white here and all of our nonmetals will appear a dark shade of gray here is the hue of the surface it's not showing too much interesting here but it's if you had like a gold or brass something that has a particularly colored reflection it would show up in this one we mask out some special materials so you can see the guy's face it's got a mask on it and we've also got the planet terrain we do some special effects on the surface of the planet so that needs a special mask and then a bunch of extra material properties now these can vary per material so on the face it tells us how much subsurface scattering to do to simulate the skin

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    and then we use that this buffer to sort of a miscellaneous data we might need for the whatever material we're currently rendering okay now onto motion vectors and this is what we use for our motion blur and also our anti-aliasing technique it's not too much going on here it was a fairly static scene so the guy is off he got some if there's any variation in him he's pretty flat at the moment and it's the planet in the background which also is a dynamic object obviously so that's got some motion vectors but the rest of the screen is just black which is because we know that we're stood on the planet and we know that the static geometry on the planet must be moving just at the same space let's paint paste so we don't actually need to write anything out for them and that's a bit of an optimization and the last texture is just a missive anything that glows or hesitant bright

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    surface so we've got a some headlights on the on the helmet and we've got a few things on the speeder bike and then we've got the Sun okay after that pass we start doing all of our first stage of post effects we have two stages of post face and for the first one the first effect is to calculate the atmosphere this looks a bit abstract because it's not actually the colour of the atmosphere but it's just a free computation to work out how we will do the atmosphere later and apply a later stage this is something that's done by the Frankfurt office the atmosphere and the result seemed to gamer grade it's it's great to be able to fly up the atmosphere and see from every angle all the different colors you get after this we've got the shadows so we saw the shadow map earlier is a view from each light of what the scene looks like from their perspective now we have to apply them to the screen

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    so we actually render five different shadow maps for the Sun this is the first one and as we go further out into the scene we lay up more and more distant but low resolution shadows and then next stage is we have two composite all of the other point lights in the scene so this is the Sun shadow and this scenes got a couple of extra lights in it but we can have up to twelve shadows all layered on top of each pixel so twelve shadows per pixel and as many shadows on the scene as we want after that we've got the occlusion so this is something that the Frankfort team have just upgraded so the way we calculate our occlusion is if you imagine for every pixel you had like a small cone that was sticking out from the surface we try and work out which direction it would point if it was going to be

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    pointed in the direction of least occlusion so in the sense of this table if we point straight up but say in the corner here if we point in diagonally and this is a visualization of that direction you'll notice it's bidding noisy and patchy in places and have some weird artifacts so we do a smoothing pass to go get rid of all that but that's basically there is an optimization we can't afford to do two full occlusion calculations at every single pixel so we type of mix and match each pixel there's a slightly different calculation and once we blow them all together we get the correct result this is another part of that this is rather than the direction of the cone I was talking about its how wide the cone would be so from this table we've got 180 degrees of included where I say in a corner you have 90 degrees of occlusion and then in a crevasse you would have even less so it's the same thing here we

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    pass moving pass to get the quality higher okay now onto some of our lighting so this is the first stage of our lighting this is our screen space reflections most games do these effects now so the fairly standard at this point there's not a huge amount of reflective surfaces on here because it's on the planet there's actually just a mirror just out of shot below the guys foot which we'll see later a little bit on the top of the spaceship as well we do these by tracing little steps across in screen space to try and find something that looks like it might have reflected from a surface and we can't rely on it too much because obviously it's based on what you have on screen so anything that off-screen we can't detect and we have to use other techniques for them okay so now we're starting to look like a bit more of a

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    game so this is our take surface lighting pass and this is a hugely complicated shader that we spend a lot of our time on and it combines everything you've seen up until this point into this one image so that's our environment probe shadow mask z-pass all their material properties screen space reflections the occlusion that's all applied here in one giant shader so this is something that has been extended quite a bit from the lumberyards implementation we have a bunch of new things like area lights or rectangular area lights and a bunch of other features that lumberyard didn't come with though we felt a really important the area lights for example is something our artists requiring for because in a sci-fi environment it just is totally typical to have like those long stretched aerial hair lights everywhere and one Fingal notice is the guy's face

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    is looking a little bit odd the reason for that is we do something special with the face for a subsurface scattering to simulate how the light enters your pores and then is scattered through the blood and your veins so at the moment we're only seeing the reflections from the face we haven't actually got the the main lighting and this is the a separate path to do this is the incoming light to the guy's face and then we do this simulation a screen space simulation of the subsurface scattering so once we've done that simulation which is hard to visualize here but once we've done it we composite it back now we get to the final lighting result for the epic scene so we're looking pretty good at the movement you'll notice the colors are a little bit odd and that's because this image is still in HDR space so the white so extremely bright and the darks are way

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    too crisp and dark so we need to turn that into a low dynamic range color space later on so that's comes later though so first we've got our star applying all of our transparencies so the first transparency we have is the fog system so this came from lumberyard the base implementation it was a really powerful effect our artists were absolutely over the moon when we got this thing in so this is a bit of a weird visualization but it's showing you top-down type of what the fog looks like for one slice of the fog so it's actually a voxel simulation that one's in a certain distance a fixed distance from the camera and you can see lab of like the blocky cubes in here you don't actually see this cube be like problem from your

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    perspective because if you imagine where at the bottom of this frame looking up it's type of the blockiness is in the depth so you don't really perceive it from the camera so the next stage is to light that so this is injecting the light into that and you can start to see some some shadows appearing in it and some shape appearing over near that bike and then we apply it onto the screen it's a bit difficult to see at the moment it's all quite dark but you can see the haziness and the glowing around that there should be a slight glow here but we'll see this a bit more later on okay now we start layering on our transparencies so we've got you know I've got these rings around the planet we've got particles bring them in one at a time we've got the visor on the glass okay and then once we've got all the

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    transparency don't now we need to enter our second phase of doing the post effects to try and bring the quality to the final image quality and sort out these weird colors we've got so the first stage of this is our optic system so we're quite proud of this this is it looks really great it's something we implemented early last year I believe and we had it on one of the ATVs so you might have always seen it but I'll go a bit bit more into details here what's going on so optics were really important for us because two reasons one we have well it's a sci-fi game and everyone knows that we have liked you know these JJ Abrams likes Isles flares everywhere and you know that the contrast in space when you'll still say on a moon which might be brightly lit but there's no atmosphere and it's pitch-black above you the contrast is just enormous

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    between the brightest and darkest area and this is something we wanted to simulate properly we didn't want to fake it or you know try and crush the rains like you might typically do in a game order to keep the full dynamic range almost as high as the eye actually perceives which is a crazy large range but when almost there so the first state of that is we start down sampling the image to try and build these different we call them it Maps smaller versions of the image and the reason we do that is for performance we want to be able to say blur or stretch like say that the Sun might want to produce a flare on the opposite side of the screen and if we need to do such a large effect we need to run it on a low resolution so there doesn't your GPU so here we start making blockier and blockier versions and we really go down to a a really tiny image the bottom ones like 16 pixels wide or something

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    okay and now we've got many images we start doing the fun stuff so the first one is the JJ Abrams effect so we go horizontal and then we you'll see the last one this is what it looks like just stretched but it looks a bit weird so once we level that image and a darken it a little bit then we get this nice horizontal streak well subject to your personal views on JJ Abrams and then next stage is to do the type of lens flares these are a bit of a whaler like these are physically based we have four different type of lens distortions we approximate or simulate and the artist can choose how many each type of lens distortion they want so they can say they want ten elements on the screen and this one should have you know twenty

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    percent of this distortion etc and it's quite sophisticated so they can really build a different palette of lens flares so this one is that you can see the summers that go into a weird shape and it's got this these coloured hues around the edge of it which is a chromatic aberration which happens on but the cheaper the lens the more you get this once we darken it down it starts to look a little bit more interesting still a bit weird at this point we do a slight blur to soften it out and also to approximate the artifacts in the lens and then we repeat this for a bunch of different shapes and sizes depending on what the artist wants and then we just start compositing this thing together with all of the different elements going into one nice giant flare so we're quite proud of this we'll see what it looks like

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    composite in a minute but the main benefit of this system is because it's fully procedural it's it's it's based on whatever the image we've rendered prior to this point so it's not like the artist has to say exactly how this lens they should look on this particular light it just whatever image we get it will generate lens flares as a real camera would do which means things like the shape of your light really make a difference to how the lens fare will appear and it also means you don't have to have a natural light source just a light bouncing off a table or something or or a fire or explosion or laser ball all these things can produce lens flares so it's much more dynamic you get a lot more interesting effects from it and it also doesn't have to be these type of crisp layers you just get a bit of a glare as well so if you're not like a a moon or something you'll get the glare coming up from the moon which look quite nice and final advantages because none

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    of it is based on the actual scene content right the art no the artists doesn't have to manually specify these things it means that the art directors can come in later and totally repurpose and restyle the game by just changing the lens flares so with the scope of our game that's really important to be able to quickly manage all this content because it is a huge amount of content in here okay and the final stage of the the optics is to play bloom this is fairly standard most games do this in the same way now but it's also physically based and also a placement for Lumbee arts color correction was next this is a bit of a odd image but this is what we call a lot a lookup table where every single color is represented here and it's a remapping it tells us how to transfer from the color that we had in the first render into

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    what the artist actually wants so it allows them to change the hue or contrast saturation things like this now the last bit of the optics that we're proud of I didn't mention was this one DM this is the exposure system which is something is quite new to us and it's still being refined a bit the planets and the moons really push the exposure system to its extremes we're quite proud of this we generate a histogram of the entire scene and we have to analyze how bright the scene is and not just most games we'll just look at how Aborigine bright the scene is and then they would adjust the image to compensate so they try to approximate what you'd get in your eye but we go a little bit further because of the extreme contrast we have in the game so we actually simulate two different mechanisms the first is your pupil response so your pupils can open and close from about four millimeters to

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    eight millimeters which gives you a dynamic range of about two to two three stops on a camera so we have that and that that can bring you very quickly for my bike to a dark scene but it's got this limited range so it can't take you from an extreme so if you walk outside from a interior like dark interior like this to bright Sun you'll get a bit of an effect but it won't be enough and that's where the second stage kicks in which star wobbling cone simulation which does the much longer type of exposure and has a much wider range but it takes longer to do it we don't go to the extent of real life which can take 40 minutes to adapt to the darkest of surroundings we crush that down to about 20 seconds so you guys don't get bored okay so now we have to put all these optics together so this is our high

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    dynamic range input we saw before and then we apply all these bad boys and we end up with this which is starting to look a lot nicer now so we've got the flares the colors look a bit better and yeah generally the colors honours as the dark signers dark and the bright Sun is bright everything's a bit more representable on a normal monitor okay so once we've done this we now have to clean up the image so SMA is an effect that was already in lumpy art and in kwangin before that it does a good job it basically finds all of your jagged edges it classifies them into different types like a left-hand corner a diagonal or whatever it might be there's quite a few different classifications which represented by the colors here and then once it's worked out what type of jagged edge is it applies as effectively a

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    smart blur it tries to fill in the gaps and soften that edge to get the correct result if you would have been rendering a higher resolution so if we go from pre until acing to having it turned I think if you look say on the left of the character's leg it does a really good job at softening what you'll notice is even though we've it looks great on the character some of the areas like this crate still have significant banding and jagged lines on them and finish a few of examples over on the bike over there so we've recently just introduced temporal anti-aliasing to hugely improve the results of this which is something we've been suffering from for a long time there are tears in this game so if you look between the two now I'll say on the crate it completely

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    cleans up everything that's left on that and we end up with a really nice smooth image so this is something that's just going into 3.0 and the good thing is it's no slower than what we had before the performance is almost identical and we've had to do we're still iterating this we're going to continue to iterate it but the the engineer is doing it is really talented and we've we've taken it one step further than what we have here actually now in just in the last few days and his temple techniques basically work by looking at the previous several frames of motion in our case we look at four frames before fire and we work out from them previous four frames what the results should have been there so we type of we wobble the image ever so

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    slightly which is impossible to you and then over the four frames we type a work out what the details should have been but in that one pixel and we can recover that and get a nice soft result but the problem of using the previous four frames well there's all sorts of problems to be honest it's causes a lot of headaches so we have we also have we have a lot of moving object softly we've got you know spaceships that move we've got planets that are moving we've got all sorts of things going on that we might not have an in normal game and we also have a UI transparent UI a transparent glass screen a transparent visor all of these things make it quite difficult to account for the previous four frames motion because your visor might be spinning this way the cockpit might be going that way you know there's all sorts going on so I've recently done a change that hopefully will work around them but yeah you'll be able to see this in 4.0 once you get hands on it okay so

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    that's our final frame looking nice I think you'll agree so I'll take you on to the next bit so just dock go back over some of the updates we've had so some of this is not just the UK graphics team but the Frankfurt Engine team which have done a lot of good work here so the first one is the P 4k system which is a new date at delivery system it's something we use internally and externally and it means the time to get a new build is vastly faster nor for like undescribable faster so we're really happy at that it basically the way it works is by rather than having a few giant data files we just have one enormous data file but the delivery system actually goes in and finds the individual assets that need to change and only transfers the smallest part that actually needs to be sent so you

32. 00:25:26

    know we can get patches in seconds where we would have been weighing hours in the office or you know 20 maybe a typical bill download now it could be 10 seconds so we've changed the compression we use on this we've also added a dedicated SSD streaming path which allows us to read transfer transfer multiple files at once so yeah this p4k system has been a huge benefit and I think the you guys will appreciate as well when you get any patches feeling from 3.0 onwards you'll notice a significant difference in the amount of time you set there what I'm waiting for it to download next one is the service performance improvements server performance is something the Frankfurt team of really been concentrating on lately even in the last week one we've been our an EVO party the results they're getting is beginning quite a lot of significant improvements so we're really happy about that

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    which awfully translates to less type of jittering or any type of network bugs we've got a planetary rotation with something we've really been put it in which has been quite a challenge in topic 2 - a lot of text will eyes on things staying still and like I said with the temporal anti-aliasing we expect the floor not to be moving but now everyone's moving at a thousand miles an hour and the malware you are but yeah it's cool you obviously get the changing light conditions the Sun is never still so that's really nice I think the time is accelerated though so you don't have to wait 24 hours to see a sunset but when data texture is something you might have seen on a TV it's actually just an example of it here this hologram on the right hand side they the render to texture is useful Holograms it's used for all of our UI screens now it allows us to embed

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    content into the world from another location or like a 2d set of graphics onto like actual in-world things like the glass or Holograms and yeah it's been a great help to us next one is the temporal anti-aliasing which you just seen the improvements to the SSD Oh which I'll show you a little bit more than a minute we've improved the color correction which is a tone mapping curve and finally we're started work on a new suite of shaders the we're trying to go more physically based on our shading but we're also trying to bring in more gameplay driven shaders so when you have things like damage on a shade or dirt and if you've like being on a planet or where if you've been using the item or object for too long so all these things we want to have a visual representation on so our first version of the shaders is the

35. 00:27:51

    physically-based glass we've introduced which I've got a quick demo of but that will continue after 3-0 when we go through all the materials eventually upgrade in them okay this is the occlusion effect so this is our occlusion turned off this is the previous occlusion if I just go back for fun see it adds quite a bit of detail a bit of shadow but a new one so it's it's different but it's a type of more contrast you get like the you don't necessary have more shadowing they get shadowing in the right places and it's a deeper shadow and if you look at light Mark's chin or on his life the side of his nose and next to his eye there's a lot more detail in the new version so quite happy with that but that's something we're gonna continue improving in the coming release so we've got our tone mapping which is how we take the

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    HDR colors and convert them to low dynamic range for your monitor so if you look at this very boring sphere here in the middle it's got a quite muted shade on the on the right-hand side of it it's it's the old tone mapping is crushing the colors a little bit too much it's not quite vivid enough for artists they like to call it pop it doesn't pop so new version it's a little bit more vibrant a little bit nicer and it follows an industry standard asus tone mapping curve which is we've made a few tiny modifications but we're happy if the colors okay onto our shaders so if we just play this video slice and this is just this is just an example of the canopy of the Gladius but we've done a it's one of the first of many shaders we're taking a pass on because some of them are Stanley a little bit old in the

37. 00:29:29

    tooth need a bit of an upgrade this class has things like physically-based refraction on it it simulates light they're the color shifts you get from like a glass when it's type of greasy there's all sorts of nice joys in this thing which the artist can't wait to get their hands on just to give you an example this is the old glass we had which just looks like something that's clean and transparent not much going on and the new one is quickly more interesting now obviously this is this is my program ah once it gets into the artists hands which it was only completed this week they're going to start doing some much nicer stuff with this and hopefully getting some of the ship's glass looking better 43.0 just go through some of the effects there so here's like the fin film effect I said that it gives you a slight hue on the reflections we've got a fraction transmission if you want colored glass

38. 00:30:19

    dirt which is one of the things I said we want some more gameplay interaction and then as an example of a cracked piece of glass this one's quite nice when you get the side angle it shows you that the the cracks actually have some 3d to them this is summer Chris and the artists have been asking for a long time a very long time but they're they're super happy that well to get it now and yeah with the physical simulation going here it's quite quite involved just to get this but it looks really good and we're really happy with this okay so quick talk on what's to come then so on the graphics side of things we've got new hair coming along we were a lot of work we want to do on the terrain and

39. 00:31:06

    then on the occlusion we've got these gameplay driven material shader as I just mentioned we've got glass clouds also known as space fog so we can do things like fog and asteroid fields and stuff to make a bit more interesting we've got a new shield effect on the way which is going to use our new GPU particles which works just started on this last week we've got some depth field improvements that are coming along nicely color processing improvements we've got a quite a lot planned there we want to really improve the color reproduction and get the result on screen much more faithful to what the artists originally produce in their packages we've got motion blur improvements and finally complex shading models which allows you to do things like a clear coat which is what you know on a car to get like the car paint effect and yeah something the ship guys and particularly the armour and things

40. 00:31:54

    like this they would really enjoy having a bit more complicated shading on them okay I just wanted to briefly touch on something else which was CPU parallelism and so awfully modern gamers are putting huge pressure on CPUs we're no exception we're actually pushing the CPU pretty hard but the gameplay code is got a hell of a lot going on there so in the rendering as well and all these different systems we have like the things that Evo was showing you earlier if the animation we've got the facial animation system all of these things are just adding to the cost of the game so multi-threading is a massive part of getting our game to run well and we use it quite a lot and we're using even more lately to try and get the best possible performance so our Frankfurt team are leading the charge on this our principal graphics engine sorry principal engine programmer

41. 00:32:43

    Chris Polti is is pushing forward of this and we've got two main systems we use to get to performance grades so we've got our batch up data and our background workers so yeah a batch of data is basically it's where we have a lot of the same work to do so we want to call a thousand objects or we want to update 50 fosters or something like that so the batch worker gets one job with lots of different elements to it and it gets all of them done and it spreads on the cost of all of your CPU cores at the same time and that's been a huge benefit for our gameplay like it's very easy to take all of our like I said our us toes or something like that and then we can just match them all in one go and we get some huge performance wins from this so a lot of the game code as we made to make use

42. 00:33:31

    of this now and it's been the bits that haven't been are being converted over so this has been a huge improvement lately and the other mechanism we have is our background workers so these do stuff that we don't need as immediately and so say something like the streaming system we need to stream in a new texture or a new mesh or whatever it might be or some audio and that doesn't need to happen immediately but it needs to happen gradually over time so these background workers they kicking whenever the bat worker isn't busy so they are being programmed a very smart way using fibers that means they can kick into action as quickly as possible to try and fill all the gaps between all the work that the the background work so they're what's called everyone's working mix so okay and something else to mention which goes

43. 00:34:22

    back to what chris mentioned earlier is the background workers are really tightly coupled to our IO system now so in the case you have an SSD or obtain we can read multiple files at once and we start decompressing them the second one chunk of that file is loaded in so we actually are posting up to say four files at once and we can be decrypting many files or decompressing many files at once depend on how many CPUs you've got so these two systems together mean we can get data off the disk extremely quickly which is really important for us because them fast amount of data we have in our game okay and just before finish just one last slide just to talk about some of the things that are on the horizon and we're hoping to get onto you soon so object container streaming is something you might have heard off on a TV it's type of each chunk of our game well than a level which makes no sense for

44. 00:35:11

    something other colors and each likes inferior of a spaceship will be an object a nur a spacestation might be on object Ain a single shop in a in a space station might be an object container this is type of the unit we used to build our soul systems and we're working on the streaming support so that we can very quickly load and unload these things dynamically without affecting the frame way and fellow hitch so that's in progress the planet effects so we've got all sorts of things we want to do on the planet some have been started some are not so soon but we've got things like improved shadows like a bespoke system for shadows clouds we've probably seen some demos of the first version for clouds there's something want to continue working on and there's many other things on the planets like roads and other such things and then in spaced equally we've got things like stars of

45. 00:36:01

    the Sun and rings around planets we need to get all of these effects improved we've got some of the basics in for them but there's a lot further we want to go on that and then dynamic global illumination so we have this on the planet with the environment probe you saw at the start a presentation but we need something equivalent for the interiors so we can accurately update the lighting and this is crucial because we want to be able to shoot out individual light bulbs in rooms and have all the lighting correctly update and we can't just tint the lighting or just it fake it we need to have to do the we calculate everything from scratch and the reason it's more complicated interior versus on a planet it's just because the number of light sources that are involved we might have like you know in a room like this might be 50 light sources in the room and to calculate all that while somebody sat there shooting all the lights out of a machine gun is there's quite a lot of optimization

46. 00:36:48

    needs to go on there and then next few things so we've got to use the batch work as we talked about earlier we've got two threads we want to processes that compute the rendering and the physics and they are still done without the battle worker so we need to convert them over so we get some extra performance wins and then after we've when we've done the render one when we're finished that off that's what's what's going to enable us to really take full advantage of something like Vulcan or these these new api's that really let us on the graphic side likes but it the work was as many calls as possible and we're really going to get some real performance winds okay and that sums up so I'll hand over to Brian hope you enjoyed thanks Ali I don't know about you guys

47. 00:37:39

    but it's like a wall of information right luckily these will you know they'll be on online so we'll be able to check them out and actually see it a little bit slower if we want to so cool now we have time to open up to QA you cool with that yeah awesome would take questions from you guys in the audience I think we have some guys with mics around if anybody's interested you can just raise your hand and we'll run up to you I'll start off with the first one very generic as always as far as tech goes and what you're involved in what would you say would be some of the one of the most unique challenges for star citizen and the work that you need to do unique it's probably the scale compared to effin have worked on previously

48. 00:38:27

    yeah the scale in type of two aspects you've got the physical scale obviously you know solar systems and planets and everything is ginormous and dealing with all that and having a lot of effects work on things like I said like rotating planets and the loading of all this data and managing all the data is like a huge challenge which normally get these little confined levels where you can type of issue more well and rendering is all about assumptions you make some assumptions and that's how you get the frame wave and it's very hard to make assumptions on you've got a completely sandbox open universe and the other part of the scale is like the gameplay obviously you know you can't assume anything is fixed you can't assume anything is gonna stay looking like it's gonna look you know something might be there a minute and then destroyed the next minute everything's type of dynamic there's so much then I make emergent gameplay again it just like that

49. 00:39:15

    it stops has been able to assume anything so then we have to be much more creative and how we can make things fast and look good while still supporting all the great features there when obviously once yeah I've heard that actually across other disciplines as well and it's true I mean with just the vast scale there's so many of the things we need to keep in mind when we're crafting something as opposed to a small little area and so on anyone have any questions from the audience whoever has a mic somebody up front no no here you go right behind you we'll start with the one blind okay it's not really a question but I want to say thank you for your hard work you do that's awesome I'm a prize to everyone at the team a lot of work fighting about a lot of

50. 00:40:02

    people wait for the mic here comes I just want to know if it's possible thanks to render to texture to have internal bridge of a starship like in Star Trek though you might be say for the polar ice for instance or a secretary bridge for the interest is it possible let the current tech depends on you to find possible tectal yes it's completely possible you could do right now it would work it's fine weights the issue if you want to vendors the exactly the same thing or the same quality in you on asteroids and fog and all of the post past we just looked at then you're gonna have your framework so it's very easy to be smart about this stuff and

51. 00:40:51

    reduce the cost and for things like Holograms will reduce the number of lights we vote apply certain post effects you don't need say like a hologram doesn't need anti-aliasing maybe because it's already quite soft and blurry so there's a lot of scope for doing things and I say something like a depth camera or a heat vision these types of things I will a much simpler actually although they might look really cool there would be much easier but doing the full rendering pipeline on a full screen would have to be quite intensive on the framerate so probably not type of that side but yeah it's not a technical question is just purely performance and how much we want to be able to let the game scale back to a lower spec system so that's all we have to keep in mind for that but it gets asked by design everyday so you know the only one either I'm from the graphics area myself and

52. 00:41:41

    I'm kind of like astonished how much PBR is getting now into game engines so this is a quite extensive resource drainage like in terms how much your cars have to calculate do you communicate with AMD and NVIDIA to further develop the PBR based technology yeah I mean when it comes to the physical base stuff a lot of its just to be honest there's a lot of research online that we tend to look at for like the latest SIGGRAPH or GDC presentations there's a lot of information out there and how to do the techniques but when it comes to the performance that tends to be where we do have contact with the independent hardware vendors like AMD and NVIDIA because things like the I mentioned the opaque lighting shader is one giant shader that is really really difficult to get to run fast and that is really

53. 00:42:31

    difficult to balance across all the different architectures and that's why you type of need to work really closely with them to make sure that you hit certain the certain like performance cliffs you have and you know if you have one instruction over you get you dropped like 30 percent performance so you need to know where these boundaries are and make sure you fit within them and it's different for every single graphics card so yeah there's quite a lot of cooperation there a follow up on that do you do research and development on yourself or is that something where you take it from the developers from AMD and NVIDIA like say we type of we don't necessarily take it directly from them and they do they do papers at GDC and SIGGRAPH like everyone else does and we take it from whoever's got the best I mean we do a lot of stuff internally like say the the optics stuff we showed

54. 00:43:19

    that was all in-house one of our graphics programmers just came up all over himself he did a lot of research and all this stuff but other stuff like said our area our implementation we took a lot of research on that that's been done by other game studios and other places like that but yeah it's there's no one source it's wherever the information is you know and it's quite open in game development of people happy to share just like we're showing the guts of our game here it's it's quite open so he's coming a follow-up to the render to texture question so you mentioned that like doing some sort of VR cockpit would be like too much of a strain on the system but what's the extent of it like for

55. 00:44:08

    example we've seen on the RSI Explorer armor it has like this camera looking thing mounted on the shoulder so for example like sending an away team and having like their point of view displayed in the cockpits would that be possible at all so I mean so you said it's possible but would it be reasonable and I'd have to see the actual case to say yes or no I'm not the designer and I don't know we have to sometimes we just run this stuff and just test what the performance is you never know and you got like a hundred different graphics cards you need to test on but generally we'd the advice we've been given to design is if you we've got a page type of show and what is likely to be possible and what's not but generally if it's a type of any type of constraint on the scenario means we can probably do it so you know if I'm in a in a certain room and it doesn't have too many

56. 00:44:57

    windows or any windows I can probably get a view of someone else fine because that room can be made to budget you know to take up a certain number of milliseconds in the frame and then you you're free to do the rest of the frame but if you in an open environment with windows and you can see asteroids planets and everything and then you want to look another view of another planet and another set of asteroids that's what we can't do so as long as there's a constraint I've won the main senior studying or the other scene that you're looking at then that type of what dictates so it's a bit of a balance a so it depends where you are and what you're looking at I hope Lance's we had someone up front yes I you said there was a lot of strain on the CPU I was thinking is there CPU you would recommend one with more threats 8:12 no not particularly I can save one or the other I mean multi-core is just the key though like

57. 00:45:45

    going wide is is the direction we go in the way that everyone is going obviously the higher end CPUs like I seven to nine irons there's plenty of bandwidth there and we're doing our best to fill that so yeah I mean the single course they can't you could never could be on a single court me nobody has single course now but you know there's there's physical limitations that make it extremely difficult so go and wide is the way but in terms of a particular model not particularly now we have time for one more quick question most games I played recently using fake mirrors like Freya for example would it be possible or maybe this one question would it be doable without tanking the

58. 00:46:36

    framerate to use real minerals so I can even beat that cutting quite hair today most games using fake mirrors today would it be possible to use a real mirror image without tanking the frame rate too much again it goes back to Atlanta yeah after the last question yes we can do a mirror it's not we actually have to do a little bit of work because a mirror isn't like a camera it's actually the fact that it flips the image is something you have to do that and to inside the rendering you have to invert and reverse all the geometry to get it to flip correctly but it is technically possible is something we'll want to do but again is the constraint question if you're stood on the bit of an address or something and then you want a mirror there you know next to the captaincy that's going to reflect the rest of the address and outside then

59. 00:47:23

    know if you're in a bathroom somewhere maybe yeah that's completely achievable cool will think you are Lee for your time thanks for everybody thanks guys we're gonna take a short break roughly ten minutes next up will be the joy on history physiology and language thank says [Applause]