Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Arrival at Alpha 3.5 | 3.4 Ep. 12

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:24

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm Eric Kiron Davis and I'm Sean Tracy you just saw a quick look around area 18 the main Landing zone of the planet AR Corp it's coming in Alpha 3.5 but it's just one of the many cool features making their way to the persistent Universe in this patch yeah there's a lot of stuff coming in 3.5 like the playable female character our moons Lia and Walla the allnew flight experience Pacho the new Mission Giver new flyable ships new FPS weapons performance optimizations and more and more in today's episode we're focusing on some of the more aren't we Sean yeah we definitely are and in fact on an ATV first the host is actually featured in one of our segments it's not me is it not this time so let's get things started by taking a look at some of the upcoming improvements to the starmarine

2. 00:01:12

   game mode in Alpha 3.5 okay well let's go to Sean Tracy to find out more so a lot of the fixes that I'm going to talk about are actually apply to Star Marine as well as Arena commander and that's kind of a nice thing and what's really nice about making something of these fixes within here is they benefit Star Citizen and Squadron 42 just the same because we're all within the same code base so some of the exciting changes to Star Marine that have come within 3.5 are some improvements to the game mode one of the game modes that we've improved is the elimination game mode so it's basically our Deathmatch type game mode so what we've done within there is we've added some spawning logic that actually does some checks for uh players around you so there's a visibility check and a range check so you basically don't get any unfortunate spawns where you've just spawned and somebody can get you right in the back of the head and you don't

3. 00:01:58

   even have a chance so we've also added a new map and we're calling that map Damian comms and basically it's a reduced version of Damian that doesn't have the destructible glass and it makes it so that it's a little more tight over an environment so that when there is only four or eight or 12 players um it's actually still very exciting and there is a lot of combat going on with the Last Stand game mode we've also made improvements there and one of the big changes that we' made is actually some refinements to the control point or the capture Point mechanic so now it's actually much more visible to the players so that they know who's capturing it if it's contested if it's neutral um whether they should really uh run to help their team with it or if they have to approach that a little bit slowly because an enemy team is actually taking it over also um you no longer have to be locked in to the uh laptop to

4. 00:02:47

   do the captures um you start the capture with that but you no longer have to stay connected to it and you can have your friends around you um that will help the catcher so this just makes the game mode flow a little bit better and it makes a little more challenging for the teams together one of the main intents with some of the updates within Arena commander and starmarine uh were to make kills a little more rewarding and a little more feedback for those kills so actually over the last couple releases we've had a couple things broken within our UI so it had to do with kill notifications and scoring all the kill notifications are unified between Arena commander and star Marine now as well as the scoring mechanic so um it's all very clear exactly what you're getting a score for when you've killed a guy and then additionally to that point uh we had an interesting bug that every time somebody would be killed uh they would go toot for a few frames and then rag doll now this made kills really unrewarding and

5. 00:03:34

   you actually didn't know if you got the guy so we've completely fixed that uh and it definitely makes kills a little more rewarding so really excited to roll these updates out to you guys um I better get back to hosting though so see you in a bit welcome back thanks buddy let's hope that's the last time you have to do that yeah I hope so uh what's next well Alpha 3.5 isn't just new place to go and new ships to fly there's also an extension to the missions and perils available to players throughout the Stanton system well anything that adds more gameplay as an exciting proposition so here's Luke Presley with more the gameplay features we've been working on um for the next coming releases are mostly to do with the law system and expanding that what this means is that we'll have

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   kind of content spread out throughout Stanton a lot more evenly than was currently the case like you mostly you'd find the majority of missions in Crusader but from now on like the the law they chase you everywhere and you'll be finding missions in those locations too we are kind of moving The Wanted levels up so that level one is where you start getting attacked for committing crimes rather than where it is now at that point you'll start to get security forces kind of interdicting you and then if you keep m behaving the advocacy will turn up and finally the Navy will turn up kind of in a hammerhead and you know various other ships there are bounty hunters out after you as well so they'll

7. 00:05:10

   start appearing at certain levels it's going to be a lot of fun for the players we can't let them get away what we're going to do now at Bounty missions you'll be coming up against like you'll have the intro Mission as usual and you'll have easy medium hard kind of missions hard missions where you may have to team up with people to take down the target cuz it's a big ship we have a new Mission Giver for fre five um she's found on artor and her name's twitch PCO I'm Tisha Pico but people call me Twitch our focus is always on trying to make rather than just making one Mission making like missions that play together it's always more fun when players meet now obviously you don't want to always throw them together because certain players don't like PVP but where there's a chance of PVP players come away with

8. 00:06:00

   you know stories rather than just you know I fought the AI I picked up a box and moved on the other thing we've been working on is making sure that all the content that you find in Crusader is also found in Hurston and arore missions like Miss in person and anything that used a derel only worked in Crusader we've had to do a lot of like making the mission more modular and scalable now what we do is we just kind of tag up the Rex for derix and then the mission system finds them wherever we put them um and can make a mission there well it looks like there are some fun times ahead for the persistent universe but we're not done yet that's right so one of the things I'm most excited about is the new facial customization feature it's been awesome seeing everyone in the PTU creating

9. 00:06:48

   really unique faces that represent their characters much more effectively this feels like a leadup to a segment your ATV Foo is strong Eric guess who's in this one it's you isn't it two in one so baby let's throw it over to technical director of content and handsomest developer at C second handsomest developer at C Sean Tracy nice first try all right so what I want to show you guys today is our facial customization system and it's actually not just for you guys the players but the developers also use this to propagate all the hundreds of thousands of NPCs that we need to put all over the universe so I'll just show you in the editor here let's go ahead and get started so here we are on AR Corp in Area 18 and you guys will get access to this in 3.5 so what I wanted to show you real

10. 00:07:36

    quick was how our designers actually work with this facial customization system and generally uh this got to be rolled out on all the NPCs in 3.5 and we've slowly been doing it kind of behind the scenes um as the system was a lot more uh involved than just kind of getting a player customization kind of system it was an entire conversion of our facial animation system as well as the facial rigging system uh and right now this is the mass average of every single head that we have in the engine right now so this is the protos mail all the way across so this is what we start with now from here we have a whole ton of different heads that are actually contained in this and really interesting to note is that now with all of these heads in this singular file um it's still cheaper and and is better performance um than any single one face was before and the other point of that

11. 00:08:23

    is that it's now using GPU skinning uh which is much much faster and we can have way more of these characters on screen um anyways uh what the designers do here is that they'll select from a whole set of different Source heads basically um to organize our Target and we show you the preview as you go through and you can really see the range of humans um but a real big and important point of this is what that we don't allow heads to go outside of the human range so here I'm just going to select a couple you know of the more sort of obvious shapes that we have so we've got Tannon who is a squadron character uh then we have a navigator um who is also from Squadron who's got some pretty pretty um obvious sort of features and then uh maybe use this Gunnery guy here uh our Gunnery officer who has some really really obvious ears and a really really pronounced uh nasal fold there so now that we've actually

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    selected them you've seen that it's just gone back to the average but what I'll do is I'll set a little bit of blend for every one of those heads so first I bring some Tannon in and uh he's the only one in here so he's the most blend so let's say we want sort of 25% of Tannon and then we want 75% of the Navigator so you can see we've kind of got an amalgamation of the two but if we go back to 0% and we go 100% Tannon and then let's say 100% Gallery officer we're about a 50/50 blend so it takes a weighted average between the two but you can see that it's such a dramatic shift in in a lot of cases going towards these different heads now these aren't just blend shapes that we get a different shape they're actually whole different rigs that are being Blended in between that keep their own corrective blend shapes and what that means is that all of the animation um stays uh together so here I've got some eart animations uh that I can play just from the Pu and as

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    these play I can even blend while he's playing so he's talking away and I can give him a little more tanon we can switch over to that look and Sticky Lips continues to work all the wrinkle Maps continue to work all the corrective blend shapes continue to work all our tangent updates continue to work and these were the challenges to retain that really uh you know the likeness Fidelity that we got um from these facial rigs whilst giving you some sort of customization within it but not sacrificing on the quality because we're going to have DNA heads basically talking to these t0 heads so I keep blending in between them and we can do it now um at a simple level like I'm doing right now just these just these four Blends or these three Blends between these heads or we can get into the actual U per region sort of features and we've got 12 different regions if we

14. 00:10:49

    think of them in asymmetrical ways right now I'm operating in symmetry so uh a good example is like we might take the ears uh from the Gunnery officer so I really like the the ear for example of that Gunnery officer and I'll take away tannins and I'll take away uh The Navigators so you see that we end up with a full blend of what that ear looks like or we could go to tannin ears 100% and take this one away and one of the things to note is that even the position is changing and this is not something that you'll typically do in these kind of customization systems you'll try to get some landmarks like the eyes or the nose or the especially the ear positions because you want to make attachments around them but what we've done is we've also made updates to attachment system so those also update in in in suit um on top of this we can do some randomization within here so these are just really

15. 00:11:38

    really small random sort of things that we can do to these particular heads now this isn't just for males so this is called the protos female um so let me just get in here a little bit so you can see this in action so she's actually playing one of P's animations right now so that's a new Mission Giver that you'll see in area u in Area 18 okay so in terms of performance and how this all works in multiplayer is you know you as the client will customize and maybe us as developers we'll make a whole bunch of heads but we can't store these all um just as their models or just as the r it would be far too large so Evo herang and silven came up with a really great way to basically save what we call the face customization Matrix um to represent this and basically what it is it's like a set of instructions that get sent to the client um or the remote client rather to be able to rebuild these particular faces it has all that information and all those Blends that I

16. 00:12:25

    was talking about so let's let's stare into the matrix real quick and show you what that actually looks like in terms of a data set so here's that set of rules basically that get sent between the clients and that's all it is um that's actually not that much memory and it's a far less data than textures or rigs or anything like that and really you know for us the longer you work with it the less you sort of see the RAM and more you kind of just see blonde you see brunette you see redhead you know within that Matrix but um anyways let's go ahead and show you what this looks like for players in the player facing um character customizer in the client okay so here we are in the client and as you click Universe if you haven't created a character yet you're presented with our brand new character customization interface and here you select your gender so you either select a male or a female so we're going to go ahead and

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    select the female here and uh just as in the editor we have a sort of simple Blend or an advanced blend um now not to go too much more into detail on that you pick some Source heads and then uh you remove other source heads and then you start blending between them so here of just a 100% blend of that given head and you can see we can cycle through and you can select ones and if you're happy at that point you can just click accept and go ahead and jump in the verse right away but uh we wanted to give you guys the ability of course to blend so now um we're not trying to be cheeky and come up with you know Reinventing the wheel or uh trying to put uh a totally new spin on character customization but the way the system kind of works um we wanted it to be intuitive for the players to kind of use so basically what you're doing is you're blending between these ones and this even works a little bit different than

18. 00:13:59

    the editor because it doesn't take a weighted average it's just a full blend of one or the other um but that's where the locks actually come into play and just to give you an idea that you can do this on Advanced and simple too but you can add a third head within here um so let's just add her and now we can actually blend between all three but as you can see those first two heads are actually being removed or added to equally so what I can do is I can lock that so that I want to keep that a 42.1% blend and now I can sort of Juggle the other ones within there and you can see that our results are a little bit different so if you basically get to a place that you want it to be you can lock that up um and then start blending the other areas so we'll go ahead and we'll remove these and now we'll move into the advanced mode and that's kind of the same idea uh where you've actually added a a source head and how I like to work

19. 00:14:47

    with this is maybe I'll select a different region so let's say ears and I'll start cycling through these different heads and all the different ears that we have access to with those different heads so you can see that that's switching up so again you could take that as a whole if you want or you can take it in part so there's the ears maybe we could do this with the nose real quick and we'll just sort of change the profile here a little bit just to give you an idea of the different ranges that you have access to so again a lot of people have different noses and what's the really important thing about this system is again we couldn't give you you the sort of big small kind of really typical character sliders uh but what we wanted to keep it in the range of actual humans and it all comes from our pool of assets uh that we've scanned and and and and done a lot of work on so as you can see we might be able to blend you know this kind of nose here and then we'll add another source head

20. 00:15:35

    here and we'll just sort of blend in between the two of them so then the next step is idony now I didn't even know what this word meant um and one of our designers explained it to me that basically Anatomy is everything on the inside and ionomy is everything on the outside so things on the outside are things like skin tone as you can see and we just select different skin tones here so here I'll just do a quick cycle through as you guys can explore this as you get access to this 3.5 so I kind of like this skin tone here and what we'll do is we'll change the eye color maybe we'll make it something a little more exotic hey we can go purple if we want uh that's a little bit too out there let's try a little bit light and sort of Sky kind of blue here then we can change the hair and one of the things to note is that the hair used to be male and used to be female and we've actually unified this and put a system behind it so that we know which geometry and which

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    attachment select so now there's actually basically unisex hairstyles so everybody can share their hair uh For Better or For Worse so let's see we've got one here I kind of like this one so this is looking pretty good um now the next step is just some hair color and uh we've got some pretty nice hair colors in here I I kind of like this kind of Bluey purple one this is nice real exotic kind of look and again if you're not satisfied you can always go back to Advanced or even back to simple but you'll get a quick warning that it's saying that anything that I've done basically with the in within the advanced section might get clobbered as I move back to simple so there we go and we've got a nice resulting phase so in the end you can go to review and you get to review your character and once you're ready click accept and jump in the verse so really excited to hear some feedback on you

22. 00:17:10

    guys this is a data driven system so as we add more um um facial heads or even even facial features for given heads into the pool you'll have access to them and as we add more things to idony so like beards or earrings or anything like that uh you'll see these additions as we go so look forward to seeing what you guys create and uh see you in the verse I know I'm really excited to get these features into everyone's hands and see what they come up with yeah the teams around the world have really put a lot into this patch it's going through its motions on the PTU now and everyone here is laser focused on getting everything ready to go live in fact the weeks leading up to and immediately following a patch release are some of the busiest times for all of our developers and it can make finding time to appear here on ATV a bit challenging

23. 00:17:58

    for some for some Tred doing some segments in one show and hosting no thanks I'll leave that to you yeah to talk to us about some of the challenges how they've affected ATV in the past and how we're addressing them going forward here's Jared hucke our developers are constantly busy so getting time to sit down with them and pick their brains and show off their work isn't always the easiest thing since we've moved development to a quarterly release schedule it's been harder in the last year to pull Developers away from their work now most love to be on the show that's not the issue but the work still has to be their priority still we try to bring backers inside the development process in ways that no other Studio would dare attempt these days development's firing on all thrusters the public road map is in place and ATV

24. 00:18:46

    is about showing you what's coming in the next quarter discussing our development and getting down and dirty into how we tackle the massive effort that is Star Citizen now along with this you may have noticed the first couple episodes of any quarter are a bit lighter than everyone would like so let's talk about this Since switching to a quarterly release schedule the first two to three weeks for a developer after every end of quarter published is generally spent planning and re-evaluating that means lots of meetings lots of spreadsheets and lots of adjusting development schedules for the next quarter based on how the last quarter went for ATV episodes during those weeks suffer and we don't like putting out content that doesn't meet your expectations or even our own so for next quarter we're going to try something a bit

25. 00:19:33

    different and take a short 3-we publishing Hiatus immediately after 3.5 goes live so this isn't going to be less work for us but our thinking here is that we can give our devs a break from us after the end of every quarter so they can focus on the real reasons they're here to make the game we all want as it said the only constant in game development is change so we're going to try this next change in April and see if we can't make things more efficient for our developers and create better content for you now that doesn't mean returning to the 45 minute long episodes that almost killed our development team in 2017 cu the Spectrum threats but still delivering ATVs that will educate and inform in the ways that we'd like them to because we think Star Citizen is worth it and we know our backers are with that see you around the verse That

26. 00:20:23

    Just About Does it for us this week did we miss anything uh actually Sean I may not have been featured in two segments this week but I am appearing at WonderCon this weekend come by at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday in room 211 oh that's pretty cool those are always a lot of fun yeah so if there are any backers in attendance this weekend go give Eric a hug and tell them how much you love Sean Tracy I'm not quite sure how to to respond to that you just agree yeah I agree then yeah and if you can't make it to WonderCon tune in to a very special reverse the verse Friday at 12 Pacific Chris Roberts will be there live to take your questions about all things Alpha 3.5 it's always a good time when Chris FS by that's about it for this week thanks to all the subscribers for making the show possible and thanks to the backers for testing Alpha 3.5 and keep an eye out for the live release any day now yes so until next time we'll see you around the

27. 00:21:13

    [Music] verse is that stupid it's it's the heads up you go I know but I can't there not thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star in a squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www. robertsspaceindustries.com thank you very much for watching