Star Citizen: Around The Verse 3.8 – DE

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:13

   [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse C's official weekly look behind the scenes of star I'm Chris Roberts and I'm Sandy Gardner we're what three weeks away from citizen con uh yeah well two and a half really so everyone's working very hard they are and not just on citizen con though we've got teams hard at work on 2.6 which as many of you know includes the long awaited star Marine game mode yep that'll be good to have in your guys hands uh we're also aiming to have new flight balance uh changes uh going out to the Avoca test group uh to get some early Community feedback which is just one part of the Arena Commander improvements for 2.6 and we're deep into prep on performance capture shoot for 3.0 which is currently slotted early after citizen con so yes lots to do yeah in fact I'm getting on a plane a few

2. 00:01:01

   days after s and con to do that um so there you go very busy on today's episode we have Evo HK explaining all the tech that went into the vision stabilization in fps which we shared last week with you all yeah everyone really like that um but first let's head to our Frankford office where Brian Chambers will update us on what they've been working on welcome back to Germany I am Brian Chambers development director of The Foundry 42 Frankfurt office this update from Frankfurt we will start off with the weapons team where Dave David will walk through some of the recent weapons they've been working on hi my name is David and I'm Junior weapons artist here at Foundry 42 today I would like to show you some of the weapons we've been working on for the last couple of weeks um these weapons are still work in progress and could slightly change till the release of

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   starmarine we are working on a complete rework of these weapons for squadron 42 one of our goals is to generate a uniform style for the manufacturers with similar materials and an overall look it's important for us that you can see what manufacturer created the weapons from distance also for gameplay reasons we were making a Polish pass for existing weapons with PBR materials using newest software and we changed the look of existing weapons and applied the style guides of weapons you will see in the future so I hope you like the quick look at the weapons we did for you and see you in the future thanks David it's always cool to see weapons with their polished pass uh look forward to playing those in game um

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   as you guys know Star Citizen universe is vast um and we need to create systems that are going to allow for the scalability so we can populate the universe to the level of detail that we need and have the gameplay in there with that said let's go to the level design team where Ben and Tobias will show off some of the modular systems they've been working on Hello I'm Ben I'm a level designer here in Frankfurt and I've been working on a modular system from which we can construct satellites satellites can serve a huge number of different purposes and are going to be really cool when they're in game um you can think of all the different gameplay options that can come out of these diverse array of satellites which uh which we can build now my job was to develop a system whereby we could build numerous

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   different satellites from a number of modular pieces the purpose or the function of a satellite will be determined by the modular pieces which it's made up of so when I started on this modular system I created a number of test modules which serve different purposes uh like one would be Shields another power generation and in a lot of ways their functionality is similar to ships but the difference being on satellites all of these uh systems will be autom it was important when designing these that uh the Silhouettes of the modules were distinctive from one another what's what this means is as a player when you're arriving at a satellite you can take a quick look at it and instantly

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   grasp what it does what uh what modules it's made up of and what its purposes in the universe when these individual modules get damaged that specific functionality uh will fall out of the satellite so if it Shields then Shields will be down and then a player will have to Eva over to those modules to fix them and bring that module back online other interesting things could be stealing data from a satellite and this data could be breadcrumbs that lead to AEM Mission uh the size and the shape of the satellites themselves will be influenced by where they are in the universe for instance a satellite very close to a sun will need a lot of shielding it'll need some kind of liquid cooling all these systems to be able to dissipate the heat

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   into space you can see it's easy to swap in and out the different modules of the satellit the Hub in the middle is the backbone from which all of the other modules Branch out the type of power generation will be dependent on the purpose of the satellite how much power it needs to pull and also for instance a military satellites will not want to have solar panels because they're liable to get damage each of the modules you can see here has six connection points this allows the the satellite to be built out in every different axis and uh when the art team have got a hold of them uh they'll look a lot more attractive and in keeping with the rest of the art style of Star Citizen thanks for listening guys bye hi my name is Tobias yome I'm part of the

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   level design here at founder 42 in Frankfurt I have been working on a modular system for small planetary locations for 3.0 uh humans have always wanted to inhabit new locations when we find them and it's the same space so for this first iteration we're just going to have small camps and research facilities that are placed on planets for humans to live and stay um and now I'm going to show you this how the system is going to work in rough edges here in crying behind me so with the system that I've designed so far is we're going to build uh locations in components pretty much and we start by picking an exterior as you can see here I just have a small one as I told you this is what we're aiming for in 3.0 uh after you have picked an exterior

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   you go inside and you're going to be able to switch between different Interiors depending on what you want the location to be like um so as you can see here I'm switching between different rooms that we're just going to be able to scroll through fairly quickly um after deciding what we want the location to be or the building uh we can also add some exterior assets to it to make it more extin and recognisable from far away um this is all used to help help the game play and everything that this is built around so they so we can populate planets faster inhabit planets faster um and as like that is just what we're aiming for now but as you can see this as well can be scaled up to larger buildings which more slots this is also a building with just one slot and here

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    we have one that has three room slots where we should be able to switch all the rooms between as we want to uh for 3.0 however this is more what it's going to look like here where it's these small camps with just one or two of these U smaller buildings and a corridor connecting them so you don't have to go through an air loock every time you walk between buildings um and here we have another one that just three slots used y as you saw in that presentation you see get an understanding for how we can faster build Out locations that we're going to place on planets we still have to place this manually uh however this system is going to make it faster so we can fill up the world making it feel more alive and add more gameplay for you guys um that's all for me this time and thank you thanks guys look forward to seeing

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    all the variants you guys can put together and how we'll eventually encounter them as you jump from planet to planet uh for the rest of team they're incredibly busy and we look forward to showing off more work from other disciplines in the very near future um but for now that wraps us up from Frankfurt appreciate you guys watching and thank you so much for the support thanks Brian um so those reworked uh weapons were looking really good they were they're looking very cool I feel like we've talked about modular sets a lot on ATV uh well you know it's one of those uh systems that you have to have when you're making a game in the scale of Star Citizen cool so in the spectrum between completely custom locales where everything is uh handcrafted and the opposite end of the Spectrum which is procedurally generated locations where would these modular systems fall okay so hopefully Best of

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    Both Worlds the modular set modular sets allow us to build out the different locations really rapidly and then we dress them up with props and Banners and different art to give them sort of an individual feel and character nice so next update let's check in with Tyler Witkin for this week's Community update hey everyone Tyler Witkin Community manager in the Austin Texas Studio here to bring you this week's Community update last week the Vanguard Warden won the title of Galactic tours combat ship of the Year landing at a spot on our pledge store for one week and that sale will end tomorrow fast forward to this week and the battle continues this time between the agis Retaliator and the Anvil Gladiator competing for the coveted title of Galactic tours bomber of the year it's looking to be a very

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    close finish so make sure to log into our website cast your vote and we'll post the results tomorrow now I said it last week I'm going to say it again the bar citizen fever is spreading around the globe last Saturday I had the privilege to attend the bar citizen event in Orlando Florida and let me tell you it is an unforgettable experience uh we have some upcoming events one in Denver one in New York and even one in France you can find out all the details about those events and more at tinyurl.com bar citizen now it's convention season citizen con is right around the corner but first TW twitchcon Alexis Ben Jared and myself will be present wandering the show floor so hopefully we'll run into some of you guys while we're there last week also brought us a new issue of jump point for subscribers packed with awesome content and even a fun infiction piece that's

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    definitely worth checking out now it's time for this week's MVP award a huge congratulations to uth O'Reilly for his talented efforts in creating some fan Star Citizen music browsing through his YouTube channel piece after piece continued to blow my mind so congratulations utho you're this week's MVP and lastly the week would not be complete without reverse the verse we will be broadcasting live at twitch.tv/ Community tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight time so make sure to tune in to catch all the talk about everything that you saw in today's episode thanks again everyone for your support and we'll see you in the verse thanks Tyler so love the passion and creativity from this community I mean they do amazing stuff all the time they do amazing stuff stuff in last week's newsletter the sneak peek was a

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    video demonstrating changes to our vision stabilization system yes so as a firstperson universe the transitions between flight and groundbased gameplay obviously the player's perspective is an essential element to get that right so you have it to feel both smooth and realistic without the motion sickness uh yes that too uh so anyway it's been an ongoing uh process of trial and error to get it right very cool so here's Evo HK to explain the tech and the improvements that we've made hi I'm Evo hat lead animation engineer at cig and today I want to talk about the experiments we did to get the camera stable in the first person view the first person mode we have in Star Citizen is a bit unusual because it's

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    unified with the third person body and it's also driven by the animations of the third person body and it took quite a while to get this kind of setup to work if you just take a camera and put it at a point between the eyes of the third person model and move around then it's pretty crazy what you get on the screen so that's how it looks with a camera attached to the head as soon as you start to move you get this crazy camera shake and it almost looks like the camera is randomly bouncing around so this is nothing we can use in the game and it's certainly not how humans perceive motions in real life but the funny thing is this is actually the real motion of the Hat this is all part of the Moab data if you take a GoPro camera attach it to your forehead and move around then it looks exactly like this so This Means head motions can be pretty

17. 00:13:06

    extreme and it also means that our eyes and our brain are doing a pretty good job to compensate it that's why we're not even aware that this issue exists in real life and the first thing we did to improve this was eye stabilization and that's something we humans do all the time it's basically a counter rotation of the eyeballs to compensate for the movements of the head and and this is pretty easy to implement all you need is a camera with a focus point and that's just a point in the distance you can control with the mouse when you're aiming so that's how it looks with eye stabilization when I move around Everything feels much smoother than before and the image is not perfectly aligned with the Horizon and by using this Focus point we are actually trying to emulate the biological principle that keeps the image stable on the retina of our eyes

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    but instead of counter rotating both eyes we only count rotate the head camera in the direction of the focus point and with this simple trick we can eliminate about 80% of all the camera noise but if you look now on the screen that you can see the image is still not perfectly smooth and that's because eye stabilization only works well if you move forward in an open environment and focus at a point in the distance it doesn't really work when you move close to walls and it's something you can't avoid in narrow corridors and we have lots of them on a space station it also doesn't work when you strafe in front of walls and straing is something we do all the time in a first person game and it looks pretty terrible with all the stop and start motions that we have so when you

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    start to run and stop directly in front of an object then you get this bounce back effect so all this is nothing new we already had it in PTU 2.0 and nobody was really happy with the result mainly because of all the camera noise and a head bobbing and then some people started to complain about motion sickness and for many it was just an immersion killer and not realistic at all and this all makes sense because eye stabilization if you look at it as an isolated feature it can only compensate the rotations of the hat and that's it it doesn't help much with the translations of the hat but that's why we still have all the trouble with the camera now the interesting thing is these head translations they happen all the time in real life and it's never a problem when I walk into the kitchen to

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    get a coffee then my whole body and my head is moving of course but the whole motion feels more like floating through the corridor and maybe that's what we expect to get on the screen but if I repeat the same experiment with a camera attached to the head and even if I use exactly the same moch data the result on the screen looks more like an earth quake so this issue was keeping us busy for a while and we spent some time trying to understand how humans are doing Vision stabilization but it turned out it's a pretty complex mental process and there wasn't a practical way to get that into um first person camera so that was a dead end and all the techniques to stabilize handheld cameras they don't work in our case because our camera is attached to the head and driven by a

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    human body so we had to find something else and we found something it was just a bit unexpected we learned that birds or at least most types of birds they have a pretty interesting problem they can't roll the eyes around the way humans can and that makes it a bit hard for them to keep the vision stable and move the body at the same time if you can keep your vision stable by moving your eyes well then the next logical step is to try to do the opposite and just keep the Hat stable and that's what they do birds have a long neck so they just counter translate all the body motions it's kind of a camera stabilizer invented by Nature but the really cool thing is that this one operates only on joints and that means we have a pretty good candidate for an implementation

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    into an animation system now to get all this to work with a human rig in the game we designed the full body ik system to control the hands the legs and the head independently and we also use a special ik only for the hands in first person and what we see here is a combination of eye stabilization with head stabilization and um stabilization it's self happens mainly on the head camera and only for a few extreme motions we distribute the rest over the entire body and the adjustments on the body are only a couple of cenm but as you can see this is already enough to keep the image perfectly stable on the screen I heard something I definitely heard something the unified trick is not the only unusual thing in this shooter

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    another pretty big difference is how we spawn the bullets in a typical shooter they come from from the center of the camera and go to the center of the screen which means you're actually shooting with your eyes and the gun in your hands has no practical purpose but in Star Citizen we spawn the bullets directly from the gun barrel and it changes a few rules for example iron sights and Scopes don't Point directly at the Target so you always need to aim a little bit higher maybe two or 3 cm and because now all body motions have a direct impact on the gun barrel running and shooting doesn't work so well there's way too much bullet spread going on and the same goes for recoil when you're firing too fast while the gun is recoiling then it's very hard to hit something and as a player when you're

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    moving around in a shooter you always have this gun in front of you and most of the time you're not even aware that there actually is a body and you only notice your own body when you look down at the ground and see your own shadow and how the feet are moving and that's the moment you you realize that the recoil all the hand animations all the body animations every single frame is actually identical in the shadow because it's one single rig and all the animations are shared swear I heard something what was that noise firing firing

25. 00:20:24

    fireing moving in space may be lonely but you don't have to be save on resources and expenses join the ship share program today and fly together Crusader Industries the universe's leading producer of commercial class

26. 00:21:13

    starliners is proud to welcome you aboard fort oisa thanks Evo so he mentioned in the beginning that most games have different animation sets between first and third person perspectives why was it important for you to unify them uh okay so staris is a multiplayer game it's very important to ensure that what you see in first person and what your friend standing next to you sees is the same thing so we do a lot of things like for instance if we um you know where our gun is pointing is exactly where we're going to shoot as opposed to most firstperson G where where the center of the screen is where you're going to shoot so

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    actually in a lot of first person games your gun will Point not exactly in the same direction as where your bullets will fly um so that's a problem uh but also when you're uh sitting next to it and I do something you'll see exactly me doing that thing and if you wanted to shoot me not that I hopefully you I would want you to shoot me um that you would be able to where I think my body is is where it actually is and where you can hit it and there's a lot of like games that uh that doesn't happen because they sort of fake the first person view it's different than where the actual physical body is so sometimes you can be playing a first person game and you can be hiding behind cover and then get hit where you w thought you would have been hit that's because your first person view is actually slightly different than way your body really is so for us because we're a multiplayer game and because there's going to be so many interactions your friends are going to be next to you uh you know say flying a ship like a Connie or something or

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    you'll be seeing people do stuff that we needed to unify it so whatever the character was actually doing they were doing but it was also what you were seeing in first person and then the problem is if you place say a GoPro on someone's head then and you run around and you look at that footage the footage goes like this and it's really sort of B inducing it's sort of the Blair Witch um uh you know issue that you solve this the sort of found camera footage stuff uh so the vision stabilization system basically is mimicking what our brain does when we're bringing in the imagery stuff because if you run around you'll notice your Visions quite stable and so we spent a lot of time to do that so we can have one unified set of animation and character assets whether it's first and third person it just works and the view that you have uh is you know great and and nice and smooth and feels more

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    akin to what you do in in real life so uh not many in fact almost no games have done this I think arm is one of the few games that have managed to do it we're very proud of what we've done it's taken a lot of work uh most people don't try as hard if we were just doing Squadron 42 we probably wouldn't have done it because that's a single player game but because star isn't such a multiplayer game it's super super important so we're very proud and Evo and the rest of the team doing that did an awesome job very cool I look forward to trying that out that is it for this week's around the verse as always we'd like to thank our subscribers whose monthly contributions allow us to make this extra Community content yeah thank you guys and also to all our backers and supporters out there who got us here in the first place thank you very very much guys yes thank you and be sure to check in to reverse the verse tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. Pacific 3:00 p.m. GMT or 4 p.m. Frankfurt time where

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    Brian Chambers will be chatting with Ben Dare and Evo H from this week's episode as well as revealing some exclusive new footage cool uh so on next week's around the verse we'll explain some of the changes to the flight model that you'll see in 2.6 so make sure you check it out definitely and thanks for watching everyone we'll see you around the the [Applause] thank you for watching so if you want to

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    keep up with the latest and greatest and Star Citizen of Squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon I