Wingman's Hangar ep059 . March 5, 2014

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hey everybody welcome back to wingman's hanger an inside look at everything Star Citizen Chris Robert's newest and greatest epic space adventure let's get to it this is episode 59 we have an in-depth look today at damage States we have form feedback with your questions and an interview with David ladyman where we're going to talk a little bit about jump Point look forward to that it's pretty cool stuff so what went on at this week at cig well we had a full performance capture this week now what is full performance capture that's where we capture facial Performance Audio performance and movement at the same time and that is a really really difficult thing it's almost like blocking out a play or a movie and you can do multiple actors at the same time so that when we get the digital images of these characters and we put them into

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   the game the eyelines are going to match up and things are going to look really cool dog fighter servers internal testing yes we are still testing the servers when they are up so as you know that's the one of the biggest risks we have is the backend server support so sometimes we've been able to play each other in multiple Studios most of the time it's crashing but we're working on that we'll get it out you know um or we'll die try so that's the bottom line with anything like this where we're doing servers on the web where they Scale based on you know how many people are in the thing or how instance for instance instance for instance H we will then scale it and and that causes issues and so we're struggling with that right now but we'll get it right we got some really we got top men on it top men all right what else oh next grade Starship episode 1.5 last week really neat they

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   finally got down to the the people that are making it through to the competition and our judges and panels looked it over and Sandy does a great job of Hosting that show and it seems to be getting better and better every week I can't wait to see episode 1.6 I don't understand the 1.6 thing but I'm looking forward to it ooh Hangar patch well we had a couple Hangar patches last week we put out the Oculus Rift support and we put out uh some cutless fixes we'll be patching The Hanger as we go it's a branch separate from the main branch right now in the code base but a lot of that's going to depend on how many people we have to do that right now we have a kind of an all handson deck on dog fighting where as we all know you guys and we guys it's very important that dog fighting is is key so we've got a lot of people embedded in Los Angeles right now helping out and so does Aaron Aaron send a whole crew people over there um everybody is working hard on

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   dog fighting in Austin in Manchester and specifically in Santa Monica those guys are killing it out there so keep it up guys we're all looking forward to it and to bring dog fighting to you it's very crucial that um we make it happen and I know you guys are looking forward to it and we are too uh damage States well what are damage States H we decided to take a little in-depth look and take you through the process of damage States here's Sandy [Music] hi I'm Sandy Gardner here for this week's studor report on damaged States and we're going to talk to some of the team see what they're working on hi there I'm Chris Smith I'm the lead ship modeler so I'm Dan Tracy I'm the senior technical designer here at Cloud Imperium games I'm Casey Robinson I'm the visual effects artist Forest Stefan technical artist at Cloud Imperium games

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   so uh we're going to talk about the my opinion the funnest thing of dog fighting and that is all the effects that happen when you are blowing up your ship and uh taking down your friend in a vicious dog fighting match and it all starts with you right Chris so I start with the modeling of the of the pieces obviously uh we kind of go through little concepting phase of trying out different looks and um you know put put the model together and uh hook it all up and put the little helpers on there for the effects and then uh end up uh working with Dan quite a bit and uh trying to get the look right this is basically the Hornet file as it stands uh has all the damage States visible right now including the pristine States and all these little green boxes that you see are basically an effect that

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   will happen on on uh any given damage State um there will be you know these little helpers will be there for the for the effect Skies you know for Forest uh and then to to add like a little spark or a little uh smoke and and uh explosions and all that kind of stuff so told me that you created around 100 damage dates for the Hornet is that true yes I did uh you know we wanted a lot of fidelity a lot of you know uh kind of you know movie like breakup you know for these ships you know lots of little pieces so definitely yeah uh initially when you shoot at them at the ship you're going to have a lot of pieces flying around so here we have uh I brok I've broken out a section of the uh the tail piece for the Hornet uh each each ship uh will get broken out according to

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   its obvious appendages uh mostly like the cockpit uh you know the wings the tail piece in the midsection um and each of those um individual mod individual modules will go through its damage States um so here you can see I have the pristine version undamaged and here you can see the 25% which you know the paneling starts coming off and you can see the little effect boxes although these on these little panels will go away so this is like a sort of prototype uh stage you know and as we're going uh we're still adjusting things and you know we're we just put effects on everything and and so basically we can try everything out

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   and then take it away afterwards and edit ourselves um but we wanted to First have it all available for the effects artist so they can play around with it and see what looks the best so this this would be the 25% where this paneling comes off and here we would have the 50% where a little bit bigger chunks would come off so you have this little big piece that sort of uh flies off and this little corner that will come off here the 75 basically the the the more you go the further you go into the damn State the bigger chunks just fly off and eventually you land at 100% where it's just a stub of the tail and it's basically unusable and at that point um either you're dead and the ship or your

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   ship's pretty much useless and you're just floating in space farest that gets a giggle because that means a lot of work I'm assuming yeah everything is an effect that happens when you do it so it's good 100 effects to do I try to keep them busy High Fidelity basically our 3D modelers are taking all of our ships and ripping them apart in every which way uh ripping Wings off breaking the halls in half putting holes into the wing and so my job is to go through every aspect that they have broken apart and make sure that there's an effect tag to uh every piece of the ship uh so if a panel gets ripped off you know there's Sparks that come with it um if you shoot the engine you get a nice little explosion uh so visual aspect to kind of go along with the fun gam playay all of our effects are tagged by helpers and then how we

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    know what effect to play with each helper is hand through scripts and uh basically it's a big long text file that's 2200 lines that tags everything together so I have to go through all those and tell it the exact name of the effect that's going to play with the exact name of the helper that's tagged to the part of the ship that gets ripped apart so for example if a panel gets ripped off we put a little helper right where the panel is and then it gives it a name then in the script I say to have take this effect and play it with this helper at this exact moment when it happens in the dog fight here we go there's the body there's the hole canopy nose still going still going oh there's the intake Wing left wing right wing rear panel thanks Chris still going still going another panel another

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    panel still going still going and done that's a lot of code so when I originally get the pieces from forest they have uh temp effects for older effects and I'll go in and specifically create uh very unique Wing explosion effects or cockpit or tail or engine um so just to add more character to the the breaking apart of each spaceship what we have uh for the destruction stuff is a lot of fume effects uh explosions so fume effects is a movie studio used uh program uh what we're doing is we create uh fluid Sims that uh you really only see in a movie for a few frames we're talking maybe 60 frames worth of uh animation and these Sims can take weeks

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    to to create and uh just to just to run through all the different things the the fuel and the burn off and the creating the smoke um but when you see it in a movie it happens in 2 seconds so here's fume effects um we're going to go through kind of a little bit of what it's like working in it so here I have an explosion um all of these points have different information um that's creating the fluid Sim what I see in an output window might look something like this so this is kind of the display and this is what I what I'm going through so I can scrub through here and I can see my fire I can see my smoke I can kind of see how it rises a little bit um and then what I'll this Sim might take a night and I'll come in in the morning render it out and I get

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    something a little bit more like this so this is kind of the the first step of where the explosure might go um what's really nice is I can also I can rotate around this and get different views of my explosion so as I rotate around we might get a completely different explosion just based upon a different camera angle so depending on what we're looking for that might be a better angle um this might work a little bit more uh so one Expos expion can be used many times to get different elements uh and again this is this is something that has fire and smoke so we might do a fire only or we might do a smoke only um and add those together in a later process uh and hopefully if I do my job right the

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    visual effects look fantastic in the video game we're going to have a lot of these pieces uh that have that quality level but you're going to see them over and over over again you're going to see them every single time you blow up a ship blow off a a wing cry engine allows us to really push how much texture space the visual effects are going to have you couldn't do this in uh a video game 5 years ago you couldn't do this in a in a video game two years ago so essentially how many different points on the Hornet can I shoot at right now there's uh currently 10 different parts so we have like the cockpit we have the the two intakes left and right the two main Wings left and right and then the uh rear wings as well uh as well as the tail the engine housing and then the main body so with that we have the uh

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    the engine housing is where your uh kind of main reactor is going to be with uh along with uh your main Thruster so that that's going to be like the critical location if you want to just outright destroy that ship aim for the engines right so then that'll do like a big massive explosion that'll do like a catastrophic uh failure for like the body structure and then this whole thing will just break apart into its own pieces and then you'll see all the these like the cockpit drifting away and then the uh Wings drifting away as well and if you're uh uh careful with that the the the wings on the extremity like you you might be able to actually uh Salvage those uh individual items that that haven't been actually hit by any any damage or any explosion yet so you might be able to go in and recover that stuff uh uh within the persistent universe so inside of the engine here inside of uh

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    sandbox I'm going to jump in we set up a level here right now with uh The Hornet just in its destruction States so we can actually just demo off how we're actually going to be shooting this thing and blowing off all these different pieces so with uh just the weapon Mount that we have uh currently set up I've I got this level where we can actually just rotate the The Hornet to shoot it wherever we want and actually see all the different particle effects that are actually coming off of this thing uh both like on the tail and on all the individual Wings here so with that we can actually see all these individual uh kind of Destruction pieces going from like the 25% damage states to 50% to uh 75% uh from here and how this is all actually uh glued together was all of uh

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    Chris Smith's pieces that they actually modeled out within Max and we had that um all of them separated out into their own kind of uh uh sub parts uh I can actually show you here with this uh quick damage uh part below with each one of these we had a setup where we had like the cockpit be its own piece the left and right intake being their own pieces uh left and right Wings the rear wings and also the tail as well as the main body so the actual main body is the one that's actually causing ship death and from there uh that's actually constitutes an actual uh ship destruction but each one of these parts is actually going to house all of your different items so we can actually start damaging off all the uh different intakes so we can actually blow off like any of your uh any of your hydrogen

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    Scoops that you're actually going to be having or your in uh atmosphere uh kind of setups uh same thing with your wings you have the destruction on your wings you can see there on the left wing that I just blew off you just lost your left gun uh from there which is no longer functional and that's that's all damaged and and gone away you could even lose uh you can see here on underneath the actual wings I have my landing gear if I actually lose those wings I might have to go in for a crash landing now in order to survive the actual Landing um since uh my left uh wing with my landing gear is all gone so I can actually get to the point where all of these uh parts are completely uh destroyed but my ship is still intact so we've actually gone uh Way Beyond like a lot of other games in terms of their uh destruction

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    Fidelity of how many different states this thing is actually going to be broken up into and then when we actually uh destroy the main body here you can actually see Casey's volumetric explosion that he's actually shown you guys already so from there that's uh that just shows off uh like how your your horn is totally going to be blown up and able to be completely destroyed inside of the game and we want to take that same Fidelity uh to the rest of the ships uh throughout the game uh but for now like what we're doing with um with the point stuff for uh dog fight we're actually setting up uh some of the game modes so that you actually have when you're damaging the ship you're actually getting Point values for that blowing up different parts of the ship before you're actually destroying the ship itself uh so then that way it's it's an incentive to actually see and

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    the ship before you actually kill the pilot right so then that'll be like an an additional point value on top of that so you mean I get points for making EXA yes exactly so you actually get slow death so you cut them up first right it's like I want to wow that's hard course there you have it guys see you soon wow that is really really cool thanks to Sandy and the Gang out there for putting that together I hope you guys liked it um there might be more on that later we'll see but 15 minutes of damage dates baby and we'll get the dog fighting module out you'll get to see that in action it's gonna be really really fun uh look who's here hey Rob hey Eric what guess what time it is it's time for feedback feedback exactly time for

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    for feedback let's get right to it from fail Escape in regards to damag States when the ships are returned to the hanger damaged will the damaged state carry over that's kind of a two-part question it kind of is yeah because in dog fighting V1 it's not going to it's it's you're in a simulator so a simulator your ship will be fine we're not going to damage your ships in the making of this dog fighting but then in the persistent Universe it will eventually the damage will stay and over time it will get dirtier and more damaged yeah for showed a little bit of that fix it yeah for showed some that with PBR how it's going to rust or go through over time and and uh yeah as you said it's a simulator it's a dog fighting module you know don't forget you guys are helping us test this thing so that we can you know find out and balance and tune this thing as we go so you know wouldn't do us any good if everybody ship was

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    blowing up left and right we you know we weren't able to get any data out of that I lost my ship I need a new one from graes are there plans to add a spectator mode with multiple viewpoints allowed free floating in ship third person of ship Etc to the dog fighting module and or at some point in the future at some point in the future is a good answer to that yeah we we've definitely talked about that uh being an essential thing as far as people being able to watch other people yeah I think it's crucial but uh not not in V1 um the one thing we will have in V1 is when you eject from your ship you'll be able to kind of hang out in space and watch the battle around you for a while that's kind of cool and duck laser sit there going it's so cold I'm chilly where's my ship cool so you have your own version of gravity from Zack if

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    you are tracking someone that is Wanted Dead or Alive and when you catch up to them they force you to drag back a corpse rather than a prisoner what happens to their ship since you legally killed them do you get to keep their vessel as part of the spoils or do they retain ownership that's a big question let's think about real life for a moment yeah because you know we're all about realism so if you're a bounty hunter and you drag somebody in you don't get to keep the car so in this case no you don't get to keep their ship it's still an act of piracy to steal someone's ship so if you want to be a pirate and a bounty hunter great kill them and take their fair enough so yeah that makes perfect sense from the Illuminati with the indication that the Idis is grown should its class be modified from Corvette to that of frig um technically it is maybe a little

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    bit large compared to the small ships to be a Corvette but it's still a corette um we basically just the the relative scales of the larger ships has just increased to go with them it it all works out perfectly in the scale chart yeah and it's looking sweet and at some point we'll be able to show you guys the new how it's looking and man I think you're going to like it oh this is interesting from Jimmy the space cowboy the character animations are cool but they're a bit on the slow side if I've got to run from Gunner seat to put out a fire down the hall I don't want my avatar taking a sweet time about it where there'll be faster animations in emergency situations I think I'm going to go take care of that fire maybe tomorrow that fire down the hall there so yeah there there is the animations are going to be undergoing

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    constant tweaking so don't expect that everything in there is going to stay the way it is right now um we're not sure if we're going to do like separate contextual faster animations for you know shift the dash out of the seat sort of thing but um they they'll be tweaked to be faster in some cases I'm sure okay that's cool all right from Mox fader will there be AI voices on ships and if so will we be able to customize a voice and personality a lot of lot of uh recorded voice there wouldn't it have customized voices kind of like the think of the GPS system or something like exactly and and you can pick from a handful in the GPS systems and we'll probably do the same thing we'll have more than one eventually but right now bitching Betty is just going to be a single voice bitching Betty that's the military term oh for the per like if somebody's on

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    your six somebody's on your six you're taking damage I'm not sure that the ship would tell you that particular why can't it just be like back rub Betty some a nicer a nicer person you to get some beads for your when you're about out of missiles Dakota please reload ooh those bullets hurt I mean that would be much better I think don't you no right me either from from jaw will there be investigation missions in Star citizens such as investigating a crime or deciphering alien hieroglyphics to unlock an ancient Vault you did a good job on hieroglyphics there I know I I figured you might just trip right over that one yeah that I can do the bigger words it's the Trap jaw ones I have issues with just the names yeah so um initially for the persistent Universe we planed at least to do like

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    some form of Investigation to find people that you're hunting down for bounties um the more advanced content like that it's on our road map for the long term but uh probably won't have that level of mission detail at launch right so Star Citizen CSI in the future from won how was time handled in the verse 1.21 gws gigawatts how is how was time handled in the verse that is some some seriously awesome photoshopping yeah yeah my Doc Brown needs work I think yeah the the voice acting maybe we need to work on Photoshop job was awesome so that sucks um so time that's that's a whole can of worms cuz there's a lot of different pieces big question though all kidding aside it is a big question a very big question now so from a standpoint of time passing on planets yes there are

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    going to be night and day cycles on them from the point of view of time compression we're not sure exactly what that number is yet I think that's going to take a lot of playing around to see what feels comfortable uh we're we're pretty certain there will be compressed time in the game but we're not sure exactly where going to sit that's one of those things that that you know the audience or the people out there that are playing the game the citizens are going to help us with they'll be able to you know if they'll be able to give us feedback as to how long it takes to get from one into the system to the other or standard systems and you know we'll be adjusting as we go so you know you guys will be helping us out on that the other piece of that one then is the standard Earth time which is something we do in our fiction that's a good point um Dave hadek has has we've talked about time a lot and we do keep a standardized Club so that if you're setting something up

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    on your calendar it will be at the same time no matter where you started um but each system also had it has its own local time as well okay well that's cool there's Time in a Bottle oh I supposed to do the corny jokes oh I for man well you know on that note here's Ben Lesnik with this week's MVP hey everyone welcome to MVP most valuable post I'm Ben Lesnar Community manager for star sizon and I'm here to tell you what the best post at the RSI forums was this week this week the honor goes to trilon for his excellent Guide to the new cutless animations he's created this uh cool series of Graphics that shows you exactly how you can interact with the new cutless which we

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    uh recently added to the hanger uh so if you are bored and want toh walk around your cutless and discover some of the interesting stuff we've hidden in there uh check out his guide thanks a lot that's MVP for the week so this week's fan Focus we take a look at some of the people who've done some paintovers on some nose art on some of the ships they were really really cool I particularly like the tiger print take a look at that you got the stripes you got the orange that's really cool always good to see the Flying Tigers with the tiger shark nose there wow really really talented the camouflage one's pretty neat too I like that you know not sure that that camouflage pattern Works in space but it's pretty cool and my favorite is probably the World War II era P-51 look love that very very nice and that's this week's

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    fan Focus really really nice to see and some of the fans are extremely talented and we love to focus that and look who's here how you doing David I'm doing good how about yourself well it's great we usually um at this point Thank subscribers and pledgers for what they've done uh but we've got some info on what they're getting yes we do what do you got there I have here a sample this is a sample sample of the imper imper imperator imperator can I see it imperor Edition look at that let me put this up here we talked to them they said what they wanted was a hard cover Edition that they were happy to pay shipping on this but a hard cover Edition especially for the imperators who have subscribed for at least 12 months in fact what we originally promised was that anyone who had

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    subscribed for at least 12 months by this past July would have access to this and we've extended that so that anyone who has been an imperator for at least 12 months through I think February through about now uh is going to have access to the hard cover version it has every page of jump point that we've done in 2012 2013 uh there's 650 pages of jump point in there 650 Pages now there's kind of a funny story in there that we were what did we originally say like four to six pages we originally promised four to six you originally promised four to I wasn't even oh we we as a company cig uh promise four to six pages per month right uh and now it's about 46 pages per month but uh and in the

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    back in the back of it oh that's right every single person who has subscribed for a month or more uh in 2012 2013 your community moniker is listed here so you you're eted in history and this is really really nice it's it's hardbound um now for for centurions for other folks we will have a paperback version right uh it won't have the big imperator logo on it right uh and the centurions who have subscribed for at least a year will get that at a discount rate at A Cut Rate cool uh and it will be on sale we're hoping by tomorrow wow this is really cool and by tomorrow you mean today cuz we're actually was shooting that today no by tomorrow I mean Thursday well you were so far ahead of me on this game you're right you're right those time dilation things no wait

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    now so that's how time's going to work in the universe well this is really really everybody else will be a day ahead of you at all times yeah that's it's typical my wife is several days ahead of me generally speaking well this is really really cool and and jump Point magazine has been a big hit for for uh the subscribers and it's been a massive Boon for uh for the pledgers because things that go through jump Point early we get a lot of content for the website out of that going forward and you've done an incredible job and and thank you they're average of how many pages now uh they're averaging about 50 pages now we we hit a high Watermark this last issue with the Idis we had 80 some odd Pages 80 Pages 80 pages but we weren't we're not going to do that every time I can't handle 80 80 Pages that's true and then you and you've also joined us uh recently in a more official capacity you're now working with us on the design

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    team yes sir um so tell us a little bit about your background you you're you're a long time game maker uh I and I don't mean long actually he just started just out of college right so um where I have been involved in game design right uh I was working with Steve Jackson games wow uh and and some others but primarily with Steve Jackson games on the gerps role playing system right uh and so I was involved in developing that Steve was the one who designed that I'm not trying to say I designed that thing at all uh and similarly Car Wars Steve design Car Wars but for a while uh I was what they call system Guru and responsible for making sure the systems worked now and you're helping us with the economy um you're helping us which is a really really big part of our game

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    and and your background you're a mathematician sure yes I've uh I've got a degree in mathematics uh and I can't say I know analysis real well but in terms of what we need to do in the game I can handle that well it all boils down to statistics and and we it's good to have you I mean you've been doing an amazing job for us on jump point and and it's been a big hit for us and folks love it um it's going to be having you on the economy is going to be a real big Boon for us too I hope so it's going to be fun I mean I know Chris is looking forward to to getting the actual phys we're doing a simulator of it right now and we're looking forward to getting the the full simulator to where we can turn the gas pipes or turn the the steam pumps and steam wheels and see what happens and what pops out what happens if this crashes here this this there what happens if iron goes up here we're

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    going to be putting that simulator to work so we can get it you know um tested and working well for for the universe so uh listen I appreciate you joining us um and this week coming up this week at uh Cloud this this camera coming up this week at Cloud Imperium games well it's time for episode six of the next great Starship can't wait to see what they come up with

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    next loving what they're up to on the next great Starship uh not sure what we're going to do with Mark Skelton in that gold shirt there's a there's actually a post in the forums about that if you want to get your Viewpoint in there about what we should do with it auction off for charity burn it nuke It Whatever get your thoughts in there we'll figure something out next week's show um the US switches to Daylight savings on Sunday which is spring ahead so next week will be minus5 GMT we'll try to get that right next week and we all know we've had some issues of that in the past coming up next week on wingman's hanger well it's and we're going to be talking to the about the AI sorry I probably shouldn't have told you who that was maybe maybe you'll figure it out but it's coming up next week we got another in-depth look at some cool stuff going on at Cloud Imperium and uh subscribe to

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    our YouTube channel we if you want to be the very first to find out what happens at at Cloud Imperium at Robert Space Industries at all the different offices when weever we post a video you'll be the first one to know I mean we put a video up for uh we broke the mining Colony out of wi men's Hangar to put it up separately last night for the big uh new and if you notice we're now doing a monthly report it seems to be a pretty big deal and that's pretty cool but Chris wanted that in in the monthly report so we pulled it out put it in there separately and within two minutes we're already 300 plus views which is amazing so sub keep subscribing to the YouTube channel that's pretty cool submit your questions to the RSI Forum get your uh whatever Forum feedback questions you want answered put them in there you know if you want to do a video go ahead and put it in there we we have some pretty strict guidelines on how that goes make it short make it cool we'll get it in there um and if you want

40. 00:31:57

    to join wingman's hangover it's 15 minutes after the show it's kind of an informal look and we talk to each other directly and Skype and be on chat roll and just hang out which is kind of where this whole thing started so it's kind of fun to to to keep it at the roots if you know what I mean and remember if you want your stuff featured on wingman's hanger send it in we just might use it where are we going to see him guys in the verse the