Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Talking Ship

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:08

   hey everybody welcome to another episode of calling all devs our question and answer series where we take questions from you the star citizen community impose them directly to our developers on this month's show we are talking ship we have collected a series of ship related ship feature related questions and we're going to post them to our vehicle director director of vehicles mr john crew john how you doing hey i'm good thanks how are you are we all right let's jump right into this because we got we we we got questions we got time uh our first question uh we've seen on isc recently that work has begun on ship to ship docking ship to station docking can you give us an update on both yep i sure can um we sort of think of them in three different ways although the two are sort of under the

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   same umbrella of ship to ship docking so with shipship docking uh there's two aspects we're looking at so there's the direct heart attachment which the prime example is the constellation of merlin and then there's ship to ship docking as a journal which is just any ship with a docking port connecting to another one so first up we're doing the connie and merlin uh hard docking uh that is well underway we've got to the point where the vehicle is attached to each other and you can get in and out and we're now at the point of just sort of dealing with all the quirks of having two vehicles physically joined together intentionally uh which has thrown up some weird physics problems that we're just working through how does that how does that docking work did does the pilot have to pilot it in is there some kind of ar thing they've got to follow

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   completely automatic pilot it's it's not completely automatic so you you communicate to the the target ship and they accept your request to dock because if there if there was no sort of permission system you could have anybody just randomly trying to dock with you but once that's all sorted out you get a docking ui which gives you an idea of how far off on each axis and role you are you line up all the symbols you're in the right place and then the very last few meters it takes over and automatically guides you in so you have to do sort of 99 of the flying into it and that's the very last bit where we have to ensure that you are orientated a very specific way to get like you think about the merlin there is a baked animation sequence to get out

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   the ship so if you are five centimeters off to the left you could end up getting out through the constellation out the other side so we have to ensure you're a very specific position so that's why there's automatic there okay um i'll come back to the bit of shift ship talking uh shift station docking is also well underway we've got a fairly functional prototype at this point uh we're just working out some of the last technical hurdles for that before we enter full production on that so that's you taking your large ships and docking at any of the orbital stations or other places that have these large extended docking tubes that i think you saw in ifc um so that's that's the order of battle there really we're doing the constellation merlin docking first then we're doing ship to station docking and then at some point after that we'll do the ship to ship um purely because there's there's less

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   of a need for that right now um the constellation merlin thing solves some tech problems for ship to station ship to station docking is needed for ships that are coming uh ship to ship is a sort of nice to have that we will do but it's not as important as those other two yeah all right um let's move on to the next question then uh a lot of people asking about the current status of physicalized things like physicalized armor um armor penetration of course uh and then updated sdf shield so the the the tech features that surround vehicles uh what can you tell us yep all those three things are in active production at the moment um they're not just for vehicles uh especially the the physicalized armor and penetration that's also going to be applicable to actors and the

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   fps game so again we've got to a point where we're working on the the initial parameters and tuning them in making sure that they're working as we expect um before we start really putting all hands on it chris has been involved in it a lot of physics guys are doing the work the vehicle and the actor teams are working together to go right we need all these parameters please please make them the the physics guys give us a build back and go sure that that sort of works this bit doesn't work when you're small tuning here so we're definitely working on it right now um how far through that process we are i i it's hard to say until we get something that works across the system um so it sounds like you're you're working on the the prototype the tech itself

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   as opposed to actively converting all the other ships you know yeah okay we have our internal like milestones for this so it would be foolish to work on the tech alongside converting all the ships to it because there's just so many ships so we want to get a very small set of ships working first with it all get them all playing nicely against each other understand the tools we have to balance this now because it moves away completely from weapon does 100 damage ship has a thousand health right 10 shots equals death um whilst we have a lot of that all on paper paper doesn't necessarily translate to fun game play once it's all implemented so yeah all the other teams are working on the physicalized armor and the armor penetration so penetration will be a thing over penetration will be a thing

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   um sdf shields was the last thing there i think so in recent builds all ships have uh sdfs generated for their what will be their shield bubbles uh the build process is now splitting them out for us um you will have seen the atmospheric reentry effect in 310 uses that as the basis so 310 was a sort of precursor for rolling it out on a a slightly simpler problem to solve which is atmospheric entry effects sort of reacting to whatever angle your ship is right shields takes that to the next level so cortec wise it's pretty much there and it's really now working with the vfx team and the vfx engineering team to to make the

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   shields look good because we can't use any of the existing shield effects work we have to recreate that from scratch and that that brings up a lot of uh not tech but sort of visual gameplay how do we make it look good at short range and far range without blinding players and then of course after you make it look good then making it performative like it's finding that balance between you know you can make it look amazing and like if you only had one ship to blow up you were fine but in when it comes to giant melees of multiple ships you need something that can scale you know scale and be performative and stuff so a lot of work to be done there i would imagine yeah certainly the the initial stuff we've seen of the sdf shields internally looks very promising in terms of just how it looks and how it behaves

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    because one of the big things is when you lose a wing the sdf adapts to losing that you don't have this weird bubble floating out so it's going to be a really nice change and we will of course be showing that to the community it's just as soon as we get closer to the more performative model it's one of those things where we you show it now and it could lead to inappropriate expectations about what's going to actually be there so um all right so that's exciting though the physicize armor armor penetration sdf stuff all in active development now uh it's pretty cool um at times throughout star citizen development we've heard about how each ship manufacturer would have its own hud um there would be an aegis hud or an anvil hud or something like that um we have we used to have some version

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    of that and they kind of went away for an homogenization uh is that coming back yep that's coming back uh in fact we're we're actively working i keep saying actively working but it's true um it's it's true uh the the aegis ships or specifically the gladius for squadron reasons is going to be getting a completely fresh hud overall and then we have i think we've also worked on an rsi styling so all the manufacturers will be getting thematically heat themed huds for their ships rather than just being the same hud recoloured and that will apply to the mfds as well so the core functionality of the mfds when they're reworked will be the same but they'll just have a visual styling over it to make it feel like this is a drake mfd versus an aegis mft

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    and this i guess i would imagine this is part of why uh the ship had has been being converted into building blocks in recent patches people have seen aspects of it being converted over and it looks like what they had before but it's being converted so that they can be modular so that we can plug them into the rsi style the aegis style the you know every other manufacturer's style yeah pretty much it's it's uh it looks exactly the same as it did but it is in fact all new uh and now we have the ability to say style it by just applying one style sheet much like uh web css you can change the theme with a very simple change which you can't do with flash you just have to remake the entire asset and then you've got two things to update every time you want to add or change uh so this new uh aegis uh style is it going to be

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    different than we've seen it's going to be very different to what's in game and what people have seen cool well we'll we'll we'll we'll uh hang tight until we can show folks what it looks like um another big popular question when it comes to vehicles or vehicle tech that folks have been waiting for the ability to spawn smaller vehicles inside larger vehicles uh whether that's the whether that's the pisces inside the carrick or the or a rover ursa rover inside a constellation uh any we've been on a good tr trail so far all these things in active development is this an active development uh it's it's sort of semi-active we did some internal tests uh we we got a we got it working um it's important to differentiate some of

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    those things from like connie and merlin docking that's that's almost like an entirely different thing right um anything that is always going to be in a repeatable position every time you spawn the ship or customize the ship like the murder and the connie uh will work um things where you can change it out between multiple ships uh we're looking at this it ultimately it still creates item ports that ships are attached to but it does them dynamically um and for various technical reasons we're sort of waiting for eye cash to be more complete on this certain area certain other areas and then we'll pick that up because if we try and chew on it in now it'll just be throwaway code that icash does out the box for it that makes sense that makes sense we we've run into that situation in a number of features

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    so so all right so that one's not in active development like the other things just waiting on other dependencies yes all right so lastly our last ship feature-related question has to do with the hull c uh we know that work was paused on it some time ago because it was rated uh waiting for other ship related tech like the expandable collapsible physics grids i look at the ship to station docking and i i see similarities there uh are we getting closer to making this thing a reality uh we are um like say the ship station docking uh required uh animatable and multiple physics grids which is what the whole seed requires uh so we now have those uh so that's one thing ticked off the list of whole sea dependencies uh we still have a few more that we need to solve before we can

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    release the ship but we are uh able to actually progress internally now a bit more with it um so we need the ability for rooms to scale like uh physics areas because now you can have gravity in that central spine but there'll be no air so it's sort of equally as problematic for release okay um and that also help all the level designers and the vehicle designers because we want to unify the way all the rooms and shapes are made in the engine um at the moment they're all sort of individual shapes so a design has to go in and mark up a room for the air an audio designer has to go in a marketplace room for the audio volume uh i have to go in and mark up a room for vis areas and portals to stop light coming in so you want to all put them into one single feature that can support scaling and then bam

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    that's the whole c part solved um the two other bits needed are awaiting nicely triggered state machines on vehicles so we sort of fudge it together at the moment by tying state changes into the landing gear deployments uh we need to split that out that's scheduled for one of the vehicle teams um and then the last one is really the cargo system it obviously carries thousands of units of cargo and we only supply cargo in one se boxes at the moment and that system needs to support not doing that it needs to go right you've bought 4 000 units of uh laronite and here's 100 big boxes of it or um because it will just server performance we've seen what happens when people go

18. 00:13:46

    wild with picos this would be a whole lot of a lot worse than that and it's one of those things where the upcoming cargo decks in 311 uh while not the functionality it's in 311 but the cargo decks themselves are a platform for additional features and those will tie into uh being able to offload uh things like the hull c and maybe even load them up to begin with yeah they're the perfectly designed places for that because you don't want to take your whole sea well you can't land with the cargo out so there's very little point taking it down to the surface to land but you will need to drop these off at orbital stations right so a lot of good progress being made uh it's exciting to hear uh it's exciting to hear about things like the physicalized armor and the armor penetration and the sdf shields and the two different versions of ship docking

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    you all in active development you know some we hear so often about you know dependencies and this has to wait for this but to know that these things are actually in active motion now uh the the the hud styling for aegis another big thing uh it's another big part of making these ships feel different and unique and bespoke um lots of exciting stuff um we we blazed through this we got a little time left in what we're allowed so i'm i'm gonna veer a little bit point one on my own in there it's not a ship feature related thing but it's a ship thing my dad when he when when he pledged for star citizen the first ship that brought him in was the was was the redeemer i mean that was

20. 00:15:19

    that was that was his first pledge uh it brought him into star citizen um we've talked about how it was going to be reconcepted re-envisioned you know for for a couple reasons it's been quiet has there been any movement on this yeah so we we talked about this a while back about moving it into a sort of a full gunship role and that that has happened we had a little hollow viewer of it at the fleet week invictus launch week event so if you uh eagle-eyed you will have spotted the redeemer was there in the hollywood and it wasn't quite looking the same as it does in the hangars or it does in the original concept so we have done some work on it and um i can maybe share a few pictures of it before this gets

21. 00:16:08

    okay so yeah a gunship needs lots of guns so um i can't quite remember off the top of my head the the sizings off these um but the the exterior of the redeemer has pretty much been entirely reworked but keeping it in the same style as it we were on the fence about do we just move it to a different manufacturer because it looks so different to aegis but in the end we decide to keep it aegis we'll keep the cracker wings but we'll just do a little massaging of all the shapes here to bring it more into the aegis style so the nose has changed the turret design has changed the tail has changed it's not quite as rounded as it was uh there's some some harsher aegis lines in there uh

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    still got the wheels on the bottom we toyed around with skids but we'll keep it to the original concept you can see here there's there's a lot more aegis right right trying to do my best paul jones impersonation um i think the tales slightly changed as well um so it has a manned turret on the top manta on the bottom that are entirely accessible from within the ship you don't need to go on a little ghost training ride out into outer space to get to the turrets anymore um still has the ramp on the back uh and so not a drastic reinvision no no it's still the redeemer that people you would still look at and go this is the redeemer it's not a complete reimagining of it we try to keep it faithful to the original concept but just bring it up to modern

23. 00:17:43

    standards i don't have any of the interiors here to show but that is that's had much more of a upgrade from uh what was there uh there's the drop seats are gone they've been replaced with space to sort of walk around the ship if people have gotten to the one in the hangar still they'll know it's it's quite compact to move around in there so we've uh enlargened it got access to components you've got access to all the turrets you can freely move around without it being cavernous but yeah you can see there's a there's a lot of turrets there's two at the front one of those is pilot control there's the manned one behind it there's manual on top uh there's the one on the tail as well so yeah this is really designed for for hovering around these nutcrackers will rotate for vtol so you can really go

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    full ac 130 style and engage in ground combat nice uh and this is this is still the this is still the concept mesh we're looking at this this is being actively built in engine right now this isn't being actively worked on by the vehicle team right now this is the the pre-production uh concept for us just like any other ship um we we for ones that have been previously available and are going to go back into production we we treat them as a new ship we take them through the entire concept pipeline um to just vet that everything is there there needs to be there before artists put pen to paper okay well that's that's enough of your surprise treats all right well thank you so much john the redeemer looks like it's in good hands uh i think folks will be really happy to

25. 00:19:21

    have to see that it's uh made some progress here of course when it does go into active production uh we will let the community know and keep an eye on the public roadmap for when you can expect it uh in any live release so john i'll let you go thank you so much man thank you that's been good all right that about does it for this episode of calling all devs a special thanks to john crew for taking time to be here on the show with us for this special talk and ship episode remember you can submit your questions for consideration on each episode up in the thread up on spectrum so for calling all debs i'm jared huckaby until next time take care you