Star Citizen Live: Designing Levels

15 May 202001:02:471,776 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:03
Hi everybody. Welcome to another edition of Star Citizen Live designing levels. That's a very clever title we came up with. This week's show focuses on level design for the persistent universe and joining us on the show this week is a collection of persistent universe level designers from all aspects of the persistent universe. So we've got a lot of questions to get through. Let's start with our introductions here. Let's start immediately to my what is this? The right? Tobias, who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? Hello. My name is Tobias. I'm a senior level designer for the PU the persistent universe of Star Citizen and I think I've been here now for 4 years and a month, I believe. Really?
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Yeah, I think so. I'm trying to remember when I started. Think it's 2016 middle of 2016. So yeah. And what are some of what are some of the things that that you've worked on for the persistent universe? Um so I've been part of quite a lot of things. It's random here and there but the big things that are released that is the surface outpost was a major thing for me. It was one of the first things I worked on. I helped out with Area 18. Um and also a little bit with the rest stops in the beginning before they turned into the modular tool. Um for Citizen Con I've also helped out with like the jump points that we showed and stuff like that. Um I think that's the major ones. Cool. I compliment you on your choice of location today. You're in one of the surface outposts. I like that one. Thank you.
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All right. We'll just continue counterclockwise. Frederick, who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? Hi, I'm Frederick. Everybody just calls me Freddo. I am the principal level designer on the PU level design team and yeah, I joined shortly after Toby uh, in 2016. And since then I've been working on quite a few locations, uh, but mostly on Lorville and New Babbage. Um, also worked on smaller things like hangars and security checkpoints and a little bit on the caves. But, yeah, mostly those flagship landing zones. Cool. And I'm just going to call you Fred from now on because I just realized I've been murdering your name and I apologize. It's fine.
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It wouldn't It wouldn't It wouldn't be an SCL without me murdering somebody's name. Uh, and then uh, continuing our journey counterclockwise, uh, to buy uh, Andreas. He's above me. Uh, who are you Well, my name is Andreas. I am the lead level designer for the persistent universe. Um, I've been here for quite some time. Been here for 5 years now, I think. Um, I mostly oversee the team, take part of the initial planning, uh, review work. But, I also actually did the white box for Area 18. Okay. So, uh, level design as a whole, one one of the things one of the reasons I'm glad we can do the show like this is, uh, when we often talk we talk about our environments a lot on shows like, uh, Inside Star Citizen, Around the Verse before that, stuff like that. And
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because those are very visual shows, we often we often tend to focus on the visuals. Uh, it was real important to me to get an opportunity to sit down and explore what level design is in like in Star Citizen because we don't have like game levels in the traditional sense, you know, like here's stage one, here's stage two, here's stage three, kind of in a traditional game. But, we still refer to it as level design. Uh, so, uh, for today's show we're taking questions uh, related to level design. Uh, as usual, we put up a thread up on Spectrum at the beginning of the week where folks were able to submit their questions and vote up which ones they wanted to see answered most. Uh, we've pulled the ones that are appropriate for uh, this team. Obviously, when questions or whatnot, these guys aren't the ones who decide when things come out or our priority prioritizations are when when
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are you going to do this versus this and stuff like that. But, as far as the process and work involved in creating our environments in the places that players can walk through uh in their player character, these are the guys. So, we're going to jump into the questions. Now, as usual, if you're watching live on Twitch, you can submit your questions with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets. That's going to help our our fantastic community management team uh pull these questions out and send them to me so I can focus on the conversations going on here. So, right off the bat, uh I'm starting with a question that I had personally. So, it it's this is just first because I'm like, "Yes, I want to know." Uh please, can we have maps signposts in the modular space stations? It's very easy to get lost in them since they all have similar looks but different
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layouts. Yes. So, I mean, the space stations we have at the moment is really just the first version of the kind of new larger interiors that we have with the larger exteriors. Um the layouts themselves are pretty much just the first version. So, we will be reworking the stations over and over again. We'll have many iterations as we move along. We're going to reorganize the way it's connected together. Um we knew from very early on that we also needed signs inside the stations for the players to orient themselves, but it is a procedural station and we don't want to to go in and kind of hand place the signs. We want the tool to do that. So, rather than doing that, we are waiting for the tools to become available for us to uh automatically seed uh various boards in inside the
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stations with uh whatever content is coming down the corridor or whatever it might be. And um as far as I know, if actually have an early prototype of this working already. Yeah, I was actually talking to I was talking to Todd about this a couple weeks ago actually about you basically the tool that would generate the signage automatically in in maps like this because again with with the way the Star Citizen is built in the scale that we're attempting you want to try to limit as much of that by hand stuff as possible where where where tools can come in Yeah, I mean the the entire thing with like signs and stuff is is is a big thing in the game even if you look at like flags and landing zones for example. I know that a lot of people are kind of racing you know, oh we can only see the train train times when we have to train. We want something earlier, you know, like in the level
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somewhere where we can oh the train is coming in about a minute. I'm going to go to the train station. Now we want to do that. The problem is there's a radius from the train station on how far we can actually broadcast that information. That's why this is not the sign is not actually further away, right? And this is also something that we want to look into so we can have boards in the city that says you know next shuttle to spaceport in 30 seconds. So it's time to get moving. So Until then can we tell people that you will be logging in and just directing traffic personally in your office? for sure. Monday to Friday 8:00 to 5:00. Yeah, it's like going to be a guide that's walking around. Um next question do you have uh some kind of long-term goal in mind for each of the landing zones, additional areas, gameplay POIs, etc. or are you going to improve them as you go
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with whatever comes to mind? Um well we when we design these locations we always try to think about the the long-term plan. So um we already put things into our landing zones even when the systems that they rely on are not online yet. For example, hospitals in Louisville for example, you have the like the facade of a hospital and you cannot enter it yet, but we have that real estate already reserved for when the hospital the medical game play could becomes online because otherwise you know, we will have the system, but we won't have the space and we will have to somehow awkwardly squeeze it in somewhere and it won't wouldn't do it justice.
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Um so yeah, definitely I mean we also security checkpoints customs. I mean we have that in every one of our landing zones and people always pass through them and at the moment you're not getting scanned yet, but as soon as we can you know, we have that functionality. We can implement that and it's yeah, it is there. So um yeah, it's definitely something you know, stuff that we think about when we concept these these layouts when we build these locations. So we don't run into that kind of trouble down the line. Must be hard to uh include the things that you know are coming and then make preparations where possible for the things that are being considered and stuff like this. It's it's building for building for tomorrow as well as today
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is I guess what I'm getting at. Yeah, absolutely and uh we have to talk to a lot of different people on different departments to you know, ask them about how you how do you envision this is going to work and in some cases we have very concrete information on how that's going to work. In some cases it's educated guesses I would say and we might have to do adjustments later on, but we always try to do our best in order to prepare for what's coming coming down down the the pipe later on. Uh the next question is about ground transportation says will we have ground transportation between cities like railroads? Yes and no. It's like we don't have
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tools yet to do stuff with If you think about Loreville that has tracks that you follow. We don't have any tools to do that except by doing it by hand which as we already said in this chat that you know that's on this scale that's impossible to do everything by hand so as we're looking right now we don't have plans to add that to our existing locations but we don't know what the tools you know could do in the future. Um and I would say so definitely maybe. Fair enough. Uh let's see uh I mean it would be fun to do the you know Firefly railway heist kind of thing you know across the countryside of Loreville but Yeah. Do you have any input into ship
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interiors? And if so uh how do you balance all the ship design for practicality or is it a function between FPS and space? I guess does level design ever uh level designers ever No. That's that's the ship team. Next. So we'll we'll do a show where you get to critique the the layouts of ships I'll just I'll just be in the corner and just for my Just analyze of each ship we have in game. Yep. will there be a more hostile dungeon type area in the future that are larger and more complex than the existing ones used for missions like the Evict Illegal Illegal Occupants? My friends and I really enjoy these sorts of FPS missions right now but they are so small and short. Uh it's possible. Um
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we're kind of hint hinting at I guess we call them POIs right like in Area 18 for example where we have rooftop landings and we have other things around as well. But um right now you can just land there. You can't do anything, right? Um the the long-term plan has always been to have a lot more of these POIs in the games where you could, for example, land on a rooftop. There's an entrance, maybe there's like an entire habitation block that's been converted into an illegal drug lab, and you have to go in there, and you have to clean the floors with your bodies and find your way down to whatever this lab is and take it out. Um there's a lot of stuff like this we can do. Um also with caves, we can add content in caves to expand them expand them even further. as well with, for example, the
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underground facilities, which are quite limited at the moment, have also quite extensive kind of expansion possibilities in the future. So, at the moment we're sometimes our content seems a bit flat, but that's because we're trying to go wide, you know, we want to we want to build a representation of everything that we want to have in the game first. We could spend 5 years building out our corp, but this would be our corp citizen, then it wouldn't be Star Citizen, right? So, we want to go wide, and we want to put all the content in before we start focusing too much on individual items and build on the depth, right? It's It's kind of like how you how how how you paint you you you paint a house. You start with the broad strokes. You start with the broad strokes and and cover everything in a foundation first, and then you go back and you start doing
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the the details, and you know, the the detail touch-ups, and then finally the the fine you know, stenciling work and stuff that that really focuses down. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it also helps us to identify where we have missing bits of the puzzles, if you want to call that, right? You know, this size of X Y Z is missing. We should have that type of content on a planet or in space somewhere, so that's why it's important to get this kind of map down to identify all the different possibilities that we have before we add the content depth. You mentioned caves. The next question says, "Will we see expansion and more diversity in caves in the future? Uh for example, ones that are wide enough to drive a small vehicle into, ones with underground lakes, uh ones made by ice or crystals?" This person's got a lot of ideas here. I mean, Fred, you worked on caves,
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Yeah, back when? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of Yeah, there is a lot basically that we already white boxed and prototyped and um we already had we had fun ideas like like that like steam geysers and lava pools and uh Yeah, all these these nice things that could could add more variations to them. And uh I I I believe these are, you know, definitely not off the table. Uh we haven't gotten around to implement them yet. Um uh it's again, it's it depends on the the the reliant I mean, it's there's certain systems um abilities for the player to I don't know like go down, slide down slopes, uh to climb steep walls, um to be able to swim for for a start. Um
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all these things that first need to be implemented to yeah, to to add more traversal mechanics, for example, to the caves so we have more interesting layouts and traversal challenges in there. And then more features for the actor status system so we can add hazards like said, lava pools and that that that sort of thing. Um Yeah, so we definitely have have ideas on that and some prototypes and um Yeah, we just we just need to to implement them for real. Yeah. It's it's always One of our approaches is So, one of our approaches as well is is we try to make stuff modular as well. So, even with these um traversal challenges uh that Fred did, they're also modular. We can combine them and they can have different components interchangeable right in the
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white box. And this is what we want to do across the board, right? Because hand building something very specific and playing it once is pretty boring. But if you you see something, but you never really know exactly what it's going to be. Mhm. And you have to analyze the environment to see what's the best kind of approaches. You know, that's where it becomes interesting, especially exploration in like dark caves with limited visibility and you have to bring your own light and stuff, you know, that's it's it can be quite interesting once we get the opportunity to do that. Uh like with all things, it's it kind of just comes down to priorities and what what you said before, Andreas, it's making the the wide-sweeping foundational approaches, the tier zero of as many things before we go back into your ones and then go back into your twos and stuff like that. Instead of just
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focusing on one thing at the exclusion of everything else. Right. Uh will we see locations in Louisville which will allow players to work within cities? For example, the ability to work within an underground mine within the Louisville city limits. This would allow you to get And then they go into like, "Yeah, we can make profit inside the cities." Uh that we we have we have There are many things people want. Mhm. But working within a city, what do you think? Yeah, no, it's a it's a fair fair request. More things to do around our landing zones. I think um personally, you know, once you make the world the trip down to one of these big cities and you're inside it and we would like, you know, there should be
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more stuff for you, more jobs for you to do. Be it you know, getting a job at the MicroTech Planetary Services to run errands for them or in Louisville like it was, you know, suggested there that you get a permission to get involved in in mining, you know, first-person mining beneath the city of Louisville or something like that. Um I think that's that's a good ideas and they are also definitely something that we would like to see we would like to to add. It's making me think of Beneath the Planet of the Apes right now. All right, here here's another Louisville question. Uh whatever happened to the secret entrance to Louisville? Yeah, might as well take that one, too. Um the
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secret entrance um yeah, I think we we started uh white boxing that one and um then it got deprioritized, but I mean there's also a reason for it. Um we don't have the uh sort of smuggling gameplay yet. So, as soon as we have we expand on the on the law system that certain goods are not allowed within the city limits of Louisville, for example, um and basically you cannot get through customs with them. You cannot carry them inside. Exactly. Um by that point then it would make sense for us to add some of these secret entrances to the city. Right now, it would just be another entrance and there would wouldn't be much of a
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gameplay consequence to it, I guess. So, so as soon as we have that such a secret entrance would get um you know a whole you know more important kind of priority. I tell you I I want to say Yeah, I guess it doesn't make sense to to spend time working on back doors when at the moment you can walk through the front door with just about anything. I mean this applies across the board as well with kind of any element like Fred mentioned the beginning, you know, we have the hospital facade for Louisville, right? And other locations. We probably not going to do anything about that until actual death system comes online. Cuz otherwise we would just build something without knowing how it's going to work and that would be inefficient. let's see. Now that we have New Babbage Oh, it's actually it's another Loreville question. Now that we have New Babbage, will places like Loreville be upgraded
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to New Babbage standards such as a no fly zone removal, textures, layouts, etc. Like New Babbage, can we expect to see more fluid movement between landing zones, the planet surface, and ships? Toby, you want to take that one or Uh sure. Sure, I can take it. Um I mean we have that we want we want to we want to go, you know, and update several of our landing zones like when we get new systems like has been mentioned here several times. Removal of the no fly zone and stuff like that is a bit more tricky. It's like we're always going to have the no fly zone for all locations. New Babbage also has it. It's not, you know, not there. It's just not as
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How do you call it? Intrusive. Yeah, exactly. In your face as it is in like Area 18. For example, it's a you know, big example where like the whole planet is pretty much covered on that. So, yeah. I mean the the simple answer is yes. We will go back to locations. We will update them. Um We also obviously see and hear feedback from players when we have released the location. It's really good to like get the feedback in and then we can like, "Oh, we want to expand this." Or we get time to expand it then it's like, "What should we focus on?" And then maybe we heard, you know, that this and this is the stuff that players find most interesting in this location. Yeah, then we'll make sure to focus on that first. So, it's Yeah, I mean it's a yes and no question. It's like it will we will go back, but
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we won't do we don't plan on making like a you know, complete rework of an old location as it looks. Uh yeah, yeah, that just just to to add to that, I mean, they are they are there's a lot of updates actually that are going in into existing locations that are sometimes not that obvious to to players. I mean, like remember when elevators just were were just traveling between two end points and you know, you would have to go to specific elevator to get to reach a certain hanger. Now, you know, transit system 2.0, we can change that around. There are performance optimizations. a lot went into 3.9 actually. Um we we split interiors and exteriors um for performance reasons.
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We I mean, a colleague of ours is working uh on the restricted area with the with that feature team that that that's that's developing that. So, that is being improved and previously released locations are benefiting benefiting from that as well. Um it's just when comes to tearing the entire layout apart or you know, reworking large libraries of assets, that's substantially more work. again, like not to dismiss what Tony said, you know, we are listening to player feedback and we definitely let that influence which locations and we also try to improve existing ones.
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but I mean, there are also certain things you know, Lorville's layout is just a you know, the nature of the location, it is different from New Babbage. It is more of that, you know, big chunky industrial low-tech mega city that's in the middle of the desert just, you know, Judge Dredd style. New Babbage is a little more intricate with the domes and that are connected but more like little islands. there there's just some things that that we won't change, but hey, no. Then this lore obviously comes in a bit to it as well, you know, like Loreville is a harsh location compared to you know, other areas we have. our direction to of course. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
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That makes sense. It's not every location is meant to be all things to everybody. Like New Babbage was designed for the worker experience to engender a positive experience for its workers. So yeah, things would be a little easier to get around to. It's like that Loreville is less concerned with the well-being of the people that inhabit inhabit it I suppose. So you would say a dystopian paradise, right? Dystopian paradise. Is that a sure that'll work. We'll go with that. Fred is a brave man who brings up elevators. Kudos. Oh. The number one killer I think we're going to we're going to regret that. The silent killer. I think we all aged about five years in that year we built worked on the transit. It's a hard times.
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Indeed. So what is the current status of development on secondary locations and structures? Like the ones we showed off at at CitizenCon 2017 around Loreville. With things like uh basically that the second the smaller outposts that are supposed to surround the bigger ones I suppose. Is what they're getting at if I remember CitizenCon 2017. Suburbs. I mean when it comes to as we mentioned before, right? We were we're looking at the broad spectrum of kind of what we need to populate our planets and the universe in general with content, right? So on planets we want to go from the very small which is surface outposts to the very big which is our big flagship cities. And we also need to fill that entire
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spectrum in between with villages and towns and all this kind of stuff, right? So, this is something that is still very much a thing and something that we will be looking into. but it's a bit early right now to talk about those things, but we do we do plan on adding a lot more in general to our planets because they are they're not going to be a city and 12 surface outpost. Let me put it that way. Um when it's finding locations do you where do you start? Do you start with a do you start drawing the thing out on paper? Do you start with a formal like 2D design? Or do you do you start with a three 3D concepting like white boxing like a like a ship? Where do you start?
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I think everyone each one of us can give a little bit of an input on that because I think every level designer might work a bit different in how they start. For example, some people like to do paper. Some people just go into the editor. And some people will just maybe like to write down a little basic story based on what they get from lore for example to just identify it. So, I'm not the person who generally draws a layout. I more do a flow chart of how I want the location to flow and then I go into the editor and works in the kind of 3D environment. That's what I do at least. Yeah, that's that's kind of how I start with a with a document of course that describes every detail of the location to the tiniest screw and the Yeah, I think I think one thing that we all you know, please disagree with me Fred if you don't, but we always start with the document,
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right? Which also has the requirements we get from you know, the directors like what is this location? What's the main purpose of that location, etc. And then it's what Andrea said, then we work a little bit differently like I also go into a flow chart as the second step, but I usually start with paper after that and I don't go into the editor until I have a few paper-based designs that I'm feeling fairly good about. Then I start implementing them for myself, that is. No, I I I agree. Um I starting off with the document is is is super important important just to uh get an overview of, you know, what what the contents of the landing zone are, what are the requirements from the different departments, you know, like, "Hey, you know, we definitely need spots
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for these two mission givers or these are, you know, certain shops that we absolutely need here." Um what's generally like maybe the art style and and and all that. So, uh I mean, that that's basically the foundation and and uh 2D layout, whether it's on paper or whether you use a Microsoft Visio uh or something like that um to to create a, yeah, flowchart um or a very rough layout of where what is located. Um I mean, that's that's what I would do. Um again, you can go into more detail um drawing top-down layouts in 2D. But um I think it with the tools that we have to quickly sketch in 3D, basically in our in our editor is what we call these designer solids is that we use.
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Um we can quickly, yeah, draw in 3D these types of environments and get a feel for them and jump into game and uh yeah, walk through them and see see if they work. Can you think of a time when the proposed art style ch- influenced your layout design? Like, you you were you were originally thinking wha- you know, one thing, you know, like, sharp right turns, stuff like that, and then you saw the art style and you're like, "Oh, no, we want to open this up a bit more. It's uh How does art influence your design?" I mean, it's a it's a You want to Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay, I mean it's it's a very organic process, I would say, between art and design. We work very, very closely
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together in in general. If you look at our kind of larger flagship locations, they tend to start with a concept. So, we kind of always know what the deal is, right? If you look at the place like Area 18 compared to like Louisville, where Louisville is this dystopian paradise. Uh exactly. Um versus Area 18 being a bit more, you know, Blade Runner, cyberpunk-y kind of thing, you know? It's it's it's it's a different approach to how we do the level design as well, you know? Because we have to part of level design is to shape the kind of flow and the feeling that the player gets in a location already before we have any fancy lights and beautiful textures, right? It's just boxes gray with with grids, right? depending on the location, the white box will kind of adhere to to whatever is
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required. Um but we tend to always start from a concept that kind of shows us a snapshot of what that location is supposed to be about, and that gives us a good kind of inkling. And of course, then we do a lot of research, you know? Like with Louisville, we research brutalism and all this kind of um big architectural style, you know? And it it it influences uh just the kind of what we move forward uh with quite extensively. But um we do work closely with art departments. We we don't usually just go off into corners as level designers then emerge 2 weeks later with the 10 Commandments, you know? That's not what we're doing. We we tend to start a little bit by ourselves to do the documentation, and then we kind of emerge with the environment artists, then we start working on the layout and kind of try to adhere to the wishes of both
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departments, the the fun and the beauty. Chad is asking, "Is his shirt pink? Whose? Fred's or Tobias's?" Fred's is like a salmon color, the other. Salmon? It's It's salmon. Very comfortable with my sexuality and I'm rocking a pink shirt. I was I mean, it's salmon. I don't know. All right. Whatever you call that. I think Toby's a bit burgundy. It's my I don't know. Burgundy red-ish. Uh another from the where are they now files. Uh what's happened to the ice caves from the from the citizen gone demo? The current cave caves on MicroTech are uh seem to be copy pasted from other moons. Uh I mean, that goes back to what we talked about before going broader than going deep. Um
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a variation of caves is of course something that's going to happen. Um but at the moment we are focusing on other content just to fill this entire spectra of the things that we need. So, we will we will live with we'll have to live with uh a bit less variation in the content until we've kind of filled out the entire palette of what we want to build. So, Uh would the roofs on ArcCorp make it possible to land small ships in area 18 and take an elevator down instead of having to go through the tram or or stuff like that? You want People want to land on the on on on all those landing platforms on top of the things and take elevators down. Uh well, I mean, right now we would be kind of forcing people to land in the spaceport because we want them to go
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through customs and do that entire thing. Uh we don't have them smuggling uh and kind of security custom gameplay yet, but it's there. so, I mean, there's a reason why why why we're landing in those areas at the moment. When we get those gameplay elements, then it is possible possible that we add uh additional ways into the city both legal and illegal. but we will have to investigate that a bit further exactly how we're going to do it because it's not quite as easy as as as it sounds. It everything when it comes to designing involves probably like 20 more steps than what most people realize. Uh considerations that has to be taken and dependencies and all these things and the interplay between different systems, how one affect another and how that is represented in the game world. it it's it's it's not an easy answer.
00:33:02
Yeah, I I I don't think anybody who watches our programming for any length of time is under the impression that any any system is developed in a vacuum. Uh it's it's the interplay between the interplay between the different teams and the different game systems are at the heart of all game design game development. Star Citizen is no exception. It's an interesting question from the chat. I'm trying to get out of rephrase a little bit, but what ideas can you share about encouraging the use of ground vehicles in gameplay over ships? Star Citizen obviously has a lot of ships uh and and and fewer vehicles, but you know, a growing collection of ground vehicles. Is there something level design can do to encourage the use of ground vehicles? It
00:33:52
this comes down a little bit to what we have mentioned and talked a little bit about with you know, how we we add more stuff to our planets, right? We add more content to our planets and that obviously will help with this in general as well cuz you could you know, in in the future then we could have for example caves where you can drive in, you know, but you can't fly for example and stuff like that. And that obviously is a help for like where you would be like, oh, I need to buy a this ground vehicle because then I can visit this place without danger, you know, cuz it could be something where you can't access with your vehicle, but you can't access it without cuz then you would freeze or depending on the location, you know, per queue. Um So, that is obviously something and that's It comes back to again what Andreas also mentioned just now where
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it's like we're trying to figure out how to fill all of this and that's why we don't have as much variation at the moment rather than, you know, we have like a few different caves that we place and stuff like that and in the future we want to add more other sort of caves like ice caves and uh all those stuff. But, until we do that we obviously first need to figure out how to actually fill a universe, right? I don't It's quite difficult. It's a big challenge at all fill a universe. Just like It's fair. as a level designer. And I mean, it's also also for example, you can look at This is not necessarily Uh I I think I'm maybe speaking a little bit behalf of other departments, but when you have things like weather effects and planter effects, you can have electric electric storms and things on a planet that basically grounds every
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flying thing for the next 500 km, but you still want to go in there, right? Then you have to get in a vehicle and you have to drive there, right? That's not necessarily a level design, but these are kind of the interplay of different departments and different kind of elements of of the development that can help to kind of create like a unified experience, you know, where we could provide the location where the player has to go to, but the only way to get there is by the interplay of like atmospheric systems and weather fronts moving in for example, so There's stuff like that. And local tunnels that of course like caves, you know, we want to go into a cave and you can't fly in there. walking might be too dangerous cuz it's full of dangerous gas or heat or temperature or whatever, so you get in your rover and you can drive in for X amount of distance. Um carrying all your equipment with you
00:36:16
for example, so Yeah, or or heavily fortified base uh on the planet surface uh that has tons of anti-air missile batteries. So, um you are either Yeah, very very heavily protected against that in your ship or you drive in with a tank, which probably makes more sense. some interesting ideas there. Besides the refinery, cargo, and commercial stations, uh what can we expect as far as other kinds of stations or orbital structures? Um we plan to have quite a few. I mean, as mentioned, refinery, rest stops, cargo. We will potentially have manufacturing
00:37:05
plants, security outposts, pirate hideouts, kind of everything that we kind of fit in a universe. So, really anything that kind of has a gameplay element is a possibility to be turned into the function of a space station somewhere as well. you won't just see a universe of rest stops. That's not really what the intention is. It'll be a bit more. Tobias, hard time now. Why do all the bunkers look exactly the same with the same layout inside? Yeah, what the hell's going on? What the hell, Toby? Well, the the I guess I didn't build those. Yeah, I was going to say. I'm like, "Hmm."
00:37:52
Uh I I mean, the simple answer the answer that we have mentioned already quite a few times, it's we built one or two to do a proof of concept and also see, you know, is this something worth moving forward with? You know, if if we build something and players would instantly hate it, that might also, you know, affect how we do stuff. so, it's I mean, the easy answer is that that we built one as a proof of concept and in the future we're going to expand and add variations and I mean our tools are also developing. Our modular tool will help with like for example the bunkers in the future when we add more of those. I also think that um the underground facilities they go through the planet's surface. And that was actually if I remember
00:38:40
correctly kind of an early test on how to make caves go through the planet's surface. So cuz we were limited at some point in the past on having very very few cuts or holes made into kind of the surface of planet. We had like three on a planet. That's not much. so sometimes we add we add things to the game as well just as a proof of concept of not necessarily a location but also some other tech that is happening in the background that might not be extremely obvious at first glance. I keep going back I keep going back to the answer you gave earlier the the getting going as wide and as broad as we can and developing as many tier zeros of features as possible that the different aspects that we want to add to Star Citizen and then going back as tech develops
00:39:29
further as more resources become available as as more lessons are learned over the course of game development that we can go back then and iterate on on all the things that have come before. I mean we also have in mind like the size of the the PU level design team is is fairly small. There's five levels on it plus me. That's it you know. We're six about five people building location and one person looking on from the side to me. So I mean it's it's What are you doing? today I had a coffee. I did something else that I don't remember. The views and opinions expressed by Andreas Johansson do not represent those of Cloud Imperium Games or Roberts Space Industries or its subsidiaries. Now but it it it it it does bring up a
00:40:17
good point though that even with the even with a a staff several hundred deep, there are still always going to be finite resources. There are simply just always going to be only so many things you can work on at any given time. But also like you said Sorry, go on. No, no. After you, sir. Uh it's also, you know, all the We're one team. We're also a small team like Andrew said, but there's also, you know, you know you don't work in a vacuum like you said. So, even if we could in theory white box stuff faster, we still need, you know, all the other departments as well. Like you need sound, you need art, you need VFX, you need, you know, everything like that. it's still like all the teams needs to get a, you know, their stuff in
00:41:05
of interdependencies, yeah, for sure. Here's another service locations. What density in service locations are we shooting for in the in the final product? Uh right now we have giant moons and planets with maybe a dozen or so places to visit each making for miles and miles of land completely unused and mostly unexplored by players. I will take that. I mean the Yeah, it's go ahead. I mean, I don't mind. Um As I said before, like the the the current density of of content is a no way representative of the final product of Star Citizen. Now, but when when you when you think of a planet, we
00:41:51
we want to as I said I think about 20 times that we want to go broad right now and add all the content in, right? And we also want to depending on the planet, of course, we want to leave certain areas empty for exploration, for expansion by player built structures, for example, right? So, the content will for sure increase significantly. But, we need to first identify all the different types of content that we need to add. So, yeah. They are it's pretty sparse at the moment. Let me put it that way. And ideally, we would you know, hundreds if not a thousand caves on a planet. And you know, It's also, once again, tech. You know, we got OC streaming, you know, recently that that already helps
00:42:41
to be able to add more. You all When we started with the service outposts, we had the hard number. I don't remember the hard number at the moment in my head, but it was like this many you can fit on a moon, then you know, the performance can't handle it. Uh And then, you know, we got SOCS, and we're working on even more performance stuff. That always also gives us the ability to like, okay, we can double this, or we can, you know, add more and stuff like that. Um So, it's always going to be that as a big thing. That's a that's a good point, Toby, to bring up that, you know, before the era of SOCS and and streaming stuff like that, it's there was there there was a resource cost to covering these planets. Uh so, we had to we had to we we had to work within limits. So. This next question is about procedural
00:43:29
tools and how they apply to major landing zones. Uh I guess the first question is, do they Do Do we use procedural tools when developing the the major landing zones? Um not for the main areas. So, the difference obviously between like a rest stop and a major landing zone is that a major landing zone is hand-built to the biggest degree. Uh it's still built We're trying out to build with like modular art pieces in a sense. So, we still work faster cuz obviously, they're big. And having to create unique pieces for everything is I I you need I don't know how many people you would need to actually do that for every location we need to add to this game. but they don't use the modular tool for that. It's still hand built by us and
00:44:17
then artist placing those modular pieces together and deciding how we want it to be and flow. However, we might use the modular tool for side areas and maybe like if we add an underground you know similar cave system to our location we could in theory obviously use the modular tool and that's part of a major landing zone but it's a different part so to say. Since it was brought up I just keep thinking about beneath the planet of the apes. I really want to go under underneath Louisville now and I don't I don't know why. I just I want to I want a whole underground cave system under Louisville now. There's a reason for all those fake doors so Yeah, send send up all the GR please. Hey, I can make GRs. Don't don't don't don't tempt me.
00:45:06
It's learning. becoming sentient. Are there plans to adjust hangars so the openings aren't so tight or a more variety of ship parking like runways or multi-story car parks or even communal hangars? Uh one of the great uh basically they're looking for more ways to uh store the ships than just uh just just the boxes and the landing pads that we have now. And why are the boxes so tight? Yeah, so we we we've come up um with these different kinds of metrics for the differently sized hangars. and the thing is the ships team keeps building ships basically what are the best The ships just keep getting bigger.
00:45:56
Shout out to John Crew and his gang. Now um Now um basically I mean what is supposed to land where is is not up to us. Um one thing that we have suggested is to add, for example, uh an auto landing area that goes on top of the hangar. Um so, you players who would like to be on the safe side and engage autopilot sooner than, you know, bef- bef- you know, before being actually inside the hangar, that they could do it already on the on the outside, which would make things a lot easier. Uh I don't know, this was was a proposal by by me, and I think also the life design team like that, and it just needs to now be
00:46:45
prioritized and be implemented. Um yep. Well, I also think that we're looking at improving kind of the general UI experience. You have a bit more helpers when it comes to landing hangars. So. I mean, in the end, you know, if I'm going to break the fourth wall, is that, you know, hangars are used for spawning and despawning ships. And that's why we also kind of single out ships into one per hangar, because seeing ships popping out of in and out of existence all around you isn't fantastic. And I do want to add that we are we were poking some fun at the ship team, but but by no means every- everybody knows, you know, the the work like with with the Carrick. Remember how how the Carrick changed sizes multiple times? I A bigger ship does not automatically will better for a number of reasons. This this is just one of
00:47:32
them. So. the size of the ship, it's the motion of the ocean. Once again, the views and opinions expressed by Which one of you said it? Andreas Johannes do not represent those Okay. Um Let's see. Um Will we see a return of AI traffic landing at landing zones? Well, yes, of course. Um I don't actually remember why that went away, but we did have air traffic at some point, right? But I think it's had to be disabled for some reason or another. Um in general, all our landing zones are a bit bit dead at the moment, you know, there's not a lot of stuff going on.
00:48:19
But we do plan on adding everything from, you know, AI traffic to moving background objects and all that kind of stuff. So, Yeah. I know some part of it was related to the to the physics rework uh that was necessary because they they needed a smarter way to simulate them without killing everybody's physics. When you when you just dump that many ships in. let's see. Um we talked a little bit earlier about uh considerations made for the future uh when you're building stuff for right now. Uh this question is literally what consider what considerations do you make uh for a PU that will eventually have more than 50 players? Well, I mean, we we try to play plan and build our locations for the for the long-term, right? We I mean, even 50 players is a lot more
00:49:07
than we had when we released the first one of our locations, right? So, that's even quite quite an increase. I mean, just looking at our spaceport, you know, some spaceports have slots for up to 50 hangars, you know, and 50 hangars can handle a lot of simultaneous traffic going in and out. Um our cities are expandable. Uh looking at, for example, in the future, for example, with the with Area 18, we have all the alleyways in the city um that are basically modular caps. They're little L-shaped alleyways. They don't really do much right now, but we can expand on them in the future and add alleyway networks. So, habitation is another thing that's very easily scalable, you know, we have so many Looking at Area 18 again, for example, there's so many towers and skyscrapers around. It's very easy to fit the amount of player accommodation that is required.
00:49:55
So, we do try to plan in the long term. I mean, how many people are going to end up on the server real time in the future? I don't know. We'll see. from a level design perspective, what gameplay features are you most looking forward to? And what and what what what are you waiting for to really to to to open you up to possibilities? Smuggling for me personally, cuz that means we can start adding those secret paths and stuff like that the players need to find to get into a city without, you know, getting caught. Um that's something But that's just for me personally and That's what I mean. I mean, for you personally. For each one each one of you personally. it's definitely smuggling on my side. I'm not sure if it counts, but I'll go
00:50:43
ahead, Fred. Please. probably the same for me, but maybe I can think of something more creative while you answer the question. All right, Andreas. Well, I'm not sure if it really counts, but for me it would be being able to build my own place somewhere in the universe, you know, setting up a little outpost somewhere and shoot at fly bars with my shotgun and tell them to get off my land, you know, that kind of thing. That's what I'm looking forward to. Exploration as well. Exploration and outpost building, that's that's my thing. You call yourself a pioneer. Perhaps. All right. Fred, you got any other thoughts? No, I think it would also be smuggling
00:51:29
for me. Uh additions to the law system basically, and um yeah, that would be Everything it's just in general a cool thing that, you know, we talk about. So, it's not you know, it's the easy answer in this situation as well. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's good to be first. You start by, you know, creating all the ways that things are supposed to work and then you go and then as these more additional systems come on then it's finding all the ways to circumvent So, I think that's one of the reasons a lot of folks are looking forward to things like the Mercury because of its, you know, the the the the the the passages underneath the the smuggling compartments and stuff. Uh it definitely uh stirs the imagination. Why are there often trains between the habs in our spaceships? I find it quite tedious and would have and would love to
00:52:17
have a landing zone where I wake up next to a hanger. That's that's it that's the question. This person doesn't want to ride in trains. This person doesn't like trains. How can you not like trains? Trains are great. They're saying have you have you considered just putting an apartment complex like right off of a hanger? Well, So, it's right there. Yeah, I mean, um the the apartments that you can you do you have your pod in um I mean, apartments are probably going to just going to be in the city center on other parts, not directly in you know, next to the airport or {slash} spaceport in this case. Um I mean, what we could foresee is the option to maybe rent uh rent something like a hotel or or
00:53:06
something like that that's closer to the spaceport for convenience. I think permanent habitation is always going to be part of the city. but I I think that there's maybe some some compromises, you know, with temporary housing that that that could be made. Uh from the chat here, what's been your favorite area to work on so far? Uh difficult question. That's why everyone is thinking, I think. Um for me that's a I I talk too much about it cuz it's a future location. Uh but to mention one that I really enjoyed working on, that was also the service outposts. Um it was the first thing I really got to work on when I started here. Um and I quite enjoy that like building
00:53:54
those small just areas to figure out what they could be, how they could work, with mostly for experience. It was a really fun experience building those like the team with the team and everything like that. Who's next? Yeah, for me it's was probably uh New Babbage. Um basically building upon the stuff that we learned when developing Louisville. and having that, you know, influence at that new landing zone. And, you know, you know, coming coming out of the low-tech industrial streets of Louisville into something a little more shiny. So, it was also very very cool. And yeah, it's I don't know, it's a it's I think a nice landing zone. So, I like how it's come together. And
00:54:43
yeah, just it was fun working on it. Fred? Well, I mean, I don't have a website. That's good. You look the same. I No, I've just we've been doing this Continue. We're almost done. Oh, yeah. Well, it's it's a shame. Um I don't get a chance to work on many locations. Uh but I did work at Grim Hex way back when and Area 18. And I do still have a thing for Area 18 because I I do like Blade Runner. I do like kind of cyberpunk. it's just that the neon and the the the grit and the dirt and the seedy elements of a city, that's what's kind of appeals to me. let's talk about Jump Town.
00:55:38
How did Jump Town come about? And and how did Jump Town come about? And what are our thoughts on another Jump Is there Is there a Jump Town 2 in our Mr. Fred, do you know? Uh I'm not sure. I think I think that was not something that that was uh spawned, do you know, from the level design department. Um I think that No, I think you might have to ask the level designers about that. What do you What do Do you agree, Andreas? It's possible. I I hardly even remember, to be honest, but uh yeah. It's not really something that we were heavily involved with, but um that type of content will of course
00:56:25
be something that's uh we would be eager to work on. Um we're almost out, so let's do some rapid-fire questions. See if we can get through some of these last remaining questions here. Um Can you implement movement in the cranes in Louisville? I think we talked about that already. They did move at one point, I think, but they stopped, so we just have to whip the workers to get them working again. Uh will the food vending machines have functionality and video game machines have operational mini-games? Yes. Yes. Uh will refinery decks and cargo decks be present at all rest stops? No. No. Uh do you plan on adding secret unmapped locations, rest stops, or stations in
00:57:14
deep space? Yeah, of course. 100%. So so so some some in the chat when when when when Tobias was like, "I can't talk about it." They're like, "What about open development?" I'm like, "What about surprises? WHAT ABOUT DISCOVERY? WHAT what what what what about things we want you to find for yourselves. Uh let's see. Uh uh Number 27. Will planets that are inhabited eventually be populated with smaller procedurally generated cities and other facilities and missions missions beyond box deliveries instead of just minor outposts? Okay, that was a bit longer than a short question. Um will locations that are currently static have damage states if they're attacked or degradation if there's not enough if there's not any maintenance
00:58:02
done to them? As I know, there's plans to make wear and tear and various states depending on different types of interaction that might occur hostile or non-hostile with set outpost. Yeah, and and just think about I mean all these systems that are come online later like power and you know atmosphere that could be disabled and enabled. Actually, this might even be something that I'm might be more excited about than smuggling or about as excited. You know, yeah, messing you know with the space station and seeing the effects of things that's going to be cool. I mean that's also something I know this is quick fire, but I said I have when you look at the content that we want to do on the planets as well, we do plan to add everything from you know power to
00:58:49
resource transfers to oxygen atmospheres, you know, so when we build all this content from the very tiny to the very big, we want to make sure that this also works across the board, right? Because you want to have this interactive environment and not just a static world that a player floats through some kind of bubble, you know, so Roads. Where we're going, will we need roads? Where we So roads are a I mean I don't know if we need them, but we will have them. Just waiting for tools. Last but certainly not least, will there still be a replacement for Port Olisar? And if so, will the old Port Olisar be left in game as a derelict station? Like what Can you tell
00:59:37
us anything about Port Olisar? Port Olisar. Uh, friend is friend is doing the the the cut off motion right now. Cancel mission. Cancel mission. Like like knife in the power supply of the computer. No. Who knows? the the yeah, you know, Port Port Olisar will is is is a thing. It's a thing in the universe that will remain a thing in the universe someway or another. Um We shall see. What? The It's the bastard child that we didn't want but no, we wanted it but I just Shh. Yeah, you're right. If I can cut off Once again for the cheap seats, the views and opinions of Andreas Johansson do not represent those of Cloud Imperium Games, Roberts Space Industries, or its subsidiaries. Guys, you did it. You made it through uh your your first
01:00:25
so far. Star Citizen Live. Yes, three disclaimers is it is it is a record. Congratulations, Andreas Johansson, three disclaimers in one show uh is our record. Uh guys, thank you so much for taking the time uh to be here on the on the show with us. Uh we wanted wanted to do this for a while, so I appreciate you making the time for us at the towards the end of our Friday. Um I was going to say now you can all go home, but you're already there. You're home. Um you know, last week last week we did a we did we did a hosting. Uh last week we we we we we hosted um Bob Nagus, if I remember correctly. And if I not remembering correctly, I'm an ass. Uh we liked it so much last week, we're going to do it again. This time our our our we're we're going to raid uh Zovanemir. Let's I let's hope I'm pronouncing that right. Zovanemir, uh he's one of our he's one of our French
01:01:12
streamers uh who had who works with uh Gout Slayer, if I remember correctly. And they do a lot of the translations for the for the French community, uh which is a terrific community. So we are going to go ahead and see if we can we can host uh Zvanimir, if I can remember how to spell his name, right? Uh for uh for those wondering uh why we're picking some others and not others, uh we're going to do this from now on. So, we're going to make this a thing. So, if if if you're if you're not if you're not being hosted uh right now, uh just uh keep doing what you're doing we'll uh eventually, you know, work your way through. Uh talk to the community team. Uh that's it that is a that is Tyler and Olf and Molly. And I left off Christian last week and I felt like an ass afterwards. I like second I went off and went, "Oh, man, I forgot Christian." Whatever. So, Christian, uh talk to them
01:02:01
uh if you're interested in being hosted after a after an SCL. Um so, we've got almost 1,300 people. So, when you go there, uh when you jump into Zvanimir's channel, uh tell them Olf says hi. Uh for Star Citizen, I'm Jared. That was Andreas. That was Tobias. That was Fred That was Fred. And uh we'll see you next week, everybody.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.