Star Citizen: Around the Verse 3.15 - UK

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hey everyone and welcome to around the verse our regular in-depth look behind the scenes of Star Citizen I'm your host Sandy Gardner and joining me today is technical director Sean Tracy hi thanks for joining us Sean of course I'm happy to step in while Chris is a vis isting found you 42 yes he is and this past week saw the intergalactic Aerospace Expo draw to a close it was great being able to share those clips from Galactic tour what started off as a just a fun idea really grew into something special thanks to the team and their hard work yeah it was a really tight schedule uh but it was impressive to see what they were able to keep tweaking as the week went on and on uh even though it was one of our really older facial rigs they were able to polish it up uh a bit more with each video that we released very cool and the other big announce ment this week is that the 2.6 alpha build has officially gone out to the evocati

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   yay jazz hands in yeah in addition to testing starmarine and new ships like the heral 85x and the caterpillar uh they're also going to be helping test the web version of spectrum there are lots of Kinks to work out still but so far they've already done a lot to help us find and Tackle new bugs mhm and we will keep on patching to the evocati until it's stable enough to roll out to the PTU and then eventually live to you all to keep track of all the latest updates make sure to check out the 2.6 production schedule on the website to find out more about some of the tech going into 2.6 let's go now to the UK for the studio update welcome back to the UK I'm Mick Oliva QA tester here to give you this week's Studio update now over to Ally and Luke to talk about asteroids asteroids in our game

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   previously were all hand-placed uh painstaking for the designers and the artists to position them um and obviously had a practical limit of how many we could actually place by manual process so with the new request from design was so they could place hundreds or even millions of asteroids so the new system was designed to be able to cope with any scale that we can come up with so uh each asteroid field we only have a the client has a few basic properties of how the asteroid field should look so what type of asteroids it should be what type of density what color things like this some really basic information and then from that it's able to Seed where every single asteroid in the entire asteroid belt will be from that small bat of information and the benefit of that is that every client doesn't really need to communicate with

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   the server and they can on their own decide exactly what they need to render and what they need to simulate per frame this is from our design document on how we design the asteroids and how we want them to work for the designers so um we we produce a texture that has uh four different channels to control the four different main properties of the asteroid field uh or the four properties that they want to change per asteroid field um so to achieve something like Saturn's rings like this we would have textures like this where we Define the height of it uh the offset is type of like how um if it was going to wiggle up and down which for satin rings they're perfectly flat so that's a flat color uh the variation is to handle like different colors different materials uh made of different composits Metals whatever we might find and then a

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   density control as well and if go to another example this is from Oblivion they have this destroyed Moon which is a bit like a broken Moon example we might have something like this where we have a lot more interesting variations so we have a pattern in the height it's going to have some verticality in it from this offset uh it's going to have some variation and then the density has a nice fever off on it and it should be really easy for the artists to go through or the designers to go through and quickly make interesting asteroid fields or quick changes to them which um they don't have to spend an eternity coming up so um what I want to show you today is how we're going to use a new asteroid Tech in practice um first what I want to do is show you how we used to have to create asteroid Fields because you'll see um this new tech just makes it so much easier and looks so much better so

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   this here as you probably recognize is yellow um it's the moon with the asteroid ring around it that we put in um in our first iteration 2.0 this here's the current density that you'll see in uh 2.5 that's the old Tech turn that off here's we new as you can see generating the way it generates that is it um we have say about nine or 10 asteroids Unique Kind of asteroid models in there and it goes through and it makes them one at a time layers them on top of each other as you can see there the density the depth just for sheer amount as you can see these things are rotating very subtly obviously the point is very subtly but I can show you this

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   kind of um to the extreme just very quickly there you go what's going to happen is for smaller ones will rotate much faster than the larger ones to the point where the largest don't rotate at all because we'd be putting bases on there these you know these kind of things so for instance in yellow there are these um these locations here that are full of pirates you know there's gameplay involved and we've actually crafted those things what we've put around here is an exclusion Zone um which prevents all the other asteroids from spawning in there the the dynamic asteroids so as you can see all all of this combined we're going to end up with a really you know much more cinematic asteroid

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   experience you can imagine flying through here it's going to be really exciting and we finally getting the kind of density and movement that we've been aiming for there's literally no limit on the scale we can have them millions of millions of miles wide the asteroid fields and we can all have them moving as well and you will never find the same pattern twice every single asteroid will be positioned uniquely so I think that's quite exciting for the game play that you literally every single place you go in this after field will be unique thanks guys this will give us richer more detailed environments and really help the development process when designing new systems now over to Steve who will us through the new camera options last time around we um kind of did a bit of a brief overview of the camera system and what tools our community are going to have to play with and today I'm just going to go a bit more in depth with that um show you what

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   exactly is you're going to be able to play around with and also give you a bit of an overview of how the spectator mode is going to work as well going forward um in 2.6 All Ships and vehicles will have their default firstperson cameras which you're all familiar with we have the third person flight uh which we commonly call a Chase camera um we have our orbit cam which as the name suggests allows you to orbit around the ship from all different angles and then the passenger orbit so you can basically focus in on your pilot and manipulate the camera around him so just to give you a bit of a rundown on how the controls work we've decided to build more upon what our players already know with the little camera control that they've had previously so we've always keybound everything to the F4 key so you just cycle through views by pressing F4

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    and they just go in order so we'll built on that by using F4 as what we call a modifier so basically in order to operate the camera so you just hold down F4 and then plus and minus will change the lens size to a preset one so you can go to an angle like that where it zooms in close plans out the view or you can pull right back and like I say it's changing your depth F fied with all the camera features I'm about to show you we have a nice quick reset key um simply because if you're wanted to change things on the fly or you've done something that you're not happy with and you want to go back to the start you simply hold F4 press the star key and that'll reset exactly where you were previously so that's your lens sizes um the other new control I want to show you is the target offset and that basically just allows you to move the position that the camera is pointing out so

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    rather than focusing bang on the center of the ship you want to look a bit to the side bit above bit below you can do that as well so just like before hold F4 and to manipulate the offset use your arrow keys primarily so left Arrow will move you left in the x-axis right in the x-axis forward and back in y is your up and down arrows and if I just reset that I can show you F4 page up strafe up page down we strafe down in the Zed axis as well so now if I changeed to the orbit camera which I mentioned before um what we've basically done is very very similar to what our players have had before but by pressing Zed is a toggle it toggles on the orbit controls so this will allow you to move around the ship you can

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    still in this mode change offsets and lens sizes and then you can reset them at the touch of a button all of the controls that I described before such as lens size changes Target offsets orbit all that is included but we've also gone the extra mile and added a few additional features in here which we think our community will make a real good use of so um just to give you a bit of an overview this is basically the screen that you'll see when you die and if you're anything like me this is going to happen regularly so um when you're in a team deathmatch mode when you die you'll automatically be um you'll automatically start viewing your uh teammates um so the camera will lock onto those and you can cycle through any teammates who are still alive uh during the game by using the mouse buttons from here um by default the orbit controls are unlocked because you're not

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    controlling the player we can just get those ready to go straight away so you can manipulate the orbit as they're running around the level and will track the player as they go probably what I think is the most exciting thing for our community is that we've also included a free cam function so because our orbit controls are live all the time in spectator mode you can use the Z key instead to detach the camera from the player so this enables you to basically move the camera wherever you want in the level and in addition to this you can make use of the save Lo system so if you're making cinematics you can cut to different cameras on the Fly that you've set up in advance so I can just give you an example of that now so I like that shot there I can save that to slot one so holding F4 holding it the one key on the number pad I like this one as well just getting all different angles that you can't normally reach while you're playing the game so real high up angle

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    there save that and then in addition to this we'll do a nice closeup on of player and let's go ahead and change the lens size so we can see I up close to seal that detail so I'll save that to slot three so while the game's going on you can literally just change the is on the fly so I can go right that camera one that I saved is there back to camera 3 over to camera two for that high angle shot the tools have kind of been designed in mind for not just using gameplay so you will be able to create new views and bespoke camera angles for while you're actually playing the game but we've also kind of gearing this towards people who want to make their own content their own cinematics and their own screenshots and all that manner of thing that people are doing now but we're just giving them the tools to make it easier and give better results at the end of the day as well that's awesome Steve that's already

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    really helped me in my character testing and I can't wait to see all the screenshots and the videos that you guys post to show off our beautiful game I'm a big fan of these updates because they're going to make my job a lot easier and that's all for our studio update so back over to La thanks Mickey that asteroid Tech is really going to help the designers a lot when Tech like this comes online it can drastically reduce how long it takes to implement things which will allow for new content to be added faster in the future I'm really excited to see what the art artist and designers will come up with for players to explore as cool as the asteroids were I'm really excited about the new camera system our community was already creating some amazing videos and I can't wait for them to get their hands on these new tools uh speaking of community uh let's go now to Tyler for the

16. 00:12:21

    latest hey everyone Tyler whiten Community manager in the Austin Texas Studio here to bring you this week's Community update The Intergalactic Aerospace Expo has concluded and we hope you enjoyed the galactic tour videos as much as we did making them in other news throughout the month of December we're going to be making the MK freelancer flyable to all subscribers so if you're a subscriber and you've been wanting to fly the freelancer now is your chance and now it's time for this week's MVP award a huge congratulations to the nub ofier for his detailed efforts in creating a video called the birth of a Starship now this video outlines the ship development pipeline here at cig and has a lot of interesting tidbits and I encourage you to check it out for yourself over at our community Hub lastly the week would not be complete without reverse the verse so make sure to tune in live tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time at

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    twitch.tv/ Community where we're going to be talking about everything that you saw on today's episode thanks for all the support everyone and we'll see you in the verse newfire that was a really great walkthrough a really great explanation of all the massively complex elements that go into building a ship mhm yeah it was really solid although to be honest this week's a little light on weird Gifts of me yeah we can maybe fix that sorry Sean maybe they need some fresh material good call make some extreme Expressions as fodder it says for our next behind the scenes feature the audio team walks us through all the work they've been doing to get star Marine ready to play overall Sam Hall coder and I we spent a lot of time first of all unifying the music Across the game cuz

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    Star Citizen is so huge and there's so different aspects of it that um we were working very hard in these different areas but it was it was all getting very compartmentalized we've managed to bring it all back into this one whole global system um that's given us really nice foundation for Star Marine now we have this great clarity we we know how to build these systems and get the best out of them um while we have the music logic system for for the Pu and for squadron 42 for Star Marine the the conditions that you're involved in and the the way the game plays out is a little more set which is a luxury we don't have when you know you have the more open world situation of people could be doing anything anywhere so we're able to be a little bit more kind of authored and bespoke in the flow of it which is nice so we have um we obviously have the game

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    rules for the different uh star Marine game modes and that gives us the foundation that we work from so uh we kind of got a nice cinematic flow that we've built that that just picks up pace as the game progresses here we have it's six layers of music and this is the main sort of bed of the music during the game mode uh from the start of the match this is all actually active but it'll be completely quiet because the uh the two parameters that feed into this at this point are both on zero the two parameters we have are control and time limit so the first one is a parameter that feeds into the main body of the music and as that number Rises up as you as you get more and more successful in the game the music will slow slowly start fading in and we use a lot of low Pass High Pass filters volume effects etc etc so that these three

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    stages of Music are quite subtle as they start edging in so I'll take it up to about 25% and here it comes so as you're playing the game you're doing well you'll start to hear this little gentle bubbling of electronic music now if we take it up to just over 50% you can really hear it starting to pick up now and you know you're about 50% successful this Point you're starting to feel the energy it's getting exciting we take it up again see these three layers of Music are starting to build up now take that to here and this boy is really starting to pick up its pace and we can take that all the way up to 100% and now it's big sort of full spectrum music you get a real sense of excitement

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    what we really wanted to do is make sure it wasn't too too jarring and and too obviously tied into um uh you know uh events in the game it is but we want to um to make that a a slow you know evolving sound as opposed to oh You' you've done X so now y has happened that yeah that's a really old old style of game mechanic that we're avoiding so while information is being fed into the music system uh it's rising very slowly and we have uh sort of a lock on the speed it's allowed to progress through its various stages so you don't get this bam bam bam bam of increased steps of intensity you get this lovely cinematic flow upwards that gets more and more tense and um there's kind of two different elements of play as well there's a gameplay element that's the

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    main factor of how the music progresses and gets more dramatic but there's also a time element that that's independent from the other one and although it works as one piece of music uh that the uh the time element controls like the percussion and and that'll start coming in as time Runs Out regardless of where we are in that that uh overall intensity layer so I'm associate producer for the audio team my my role is to communicate with all the other Studios and with all the other producers all over the world so in Germany and la and Austin um I have to to make sure that my team gets the right information and right in time so we can actually work on the highest Priority First and make sure everything's just good in the game and has a proper sound and proper music and dialogue and we looking forward to see Stu into the game um because it's we have so many features that are coming in from the audio side as well we have the

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    pressurizing and a deep pressurizing state so when you're outside in deep pressurized area everything sounds muffled and you know actually that you are outside and all sounds sound like this the other way around when you're inside the pressure inside everything is it's just normal but the people that are outside actually have the muffled sound so you know there are some people outside and not that loud um we also have the music logic system which is reacting to the state and the game where you are so am I losing am I winning is the beginning of the match is it the end of the match so it's very reactive and gives you a lot of audio feedback at where you are and on top of that we have the dialogue edits so we have the announcer which is a female announcer I'm very proud of um because she's giving like the rules of the game so she's playing the game mode she's telling you when the match started and when the match ends so she actually rules the game um but additionally to

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    that we have the leaders from the Marine side and from The Outlaw side that is a bit like the music logic system so it gives you feedback depending on where you are in the game so when you have to hack more control points in the control game mode for example um it gives you the advice and tells you that you have to do that and I'm really looking forward to St when I was thinking about creating the atmospheric sounds one thing that I kind of uh thought about a lot was whether it should be more subtle or more kind of in your face and very you know uh intense and dense um because obviously the focus is on the first person Weaponry you know the shooting and the action and that kind of thing and and the other players um but I kind of decided actually not to be too subtle with the ambience and and try to push

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    more of the character of the space into the into the mix of the audio so so this is um part of the engineering area of echo1 um it's quite a kind of industrial dark sounding uh space there's a lot of uh Steam and and rattles and uh groans of metal you know Contracting and stuff like that um it's it's quite ominous it's supposed to be quite dense and quite kind of um heavy I think um uh all of these these little uh spots here are are placed audio um that are kind of emitting a one specific sound um and uh yeah it it they all work together to build up um a sound of the level um a

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    sound of the the room uh in kind of one area this is uh some kind of like pipy type things um and uh you can hear the kind of hopefully you can hear the you know water and stuff like that moving through the pipes and uh uh yeah there's Steam and things that come emit from the floor um and occasionally you'll get like bursts of steam and air and stuff like that both like that in the audio uh and Visually um yeah there's uh a little bit here that I'm quite proud of it's a a vent that you can kind of crawl through and get into another area um but I spent quite a lot of time trying to uh make it sound very encased and very um isolated and small um so it's got things like um

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    it's got the same kind of metal rattles but with very tight Reverb on them so it feels like you're really in this tiny little crawling space another thing we're looking at doing in this first iteration of starmarine is um creating uh sounds that react in the re environment to to to Weaponry so uh if you're in like a particularly junky room and it's especially some of the maps that we're putting out um for Star Marine soon uh it's got a lot of you know bits and Bobs and junk and stuff like that um so when you shoot your gun in this room it will Rattle and and resonate uh and some of the big metal objects like pipes and stuff like that as well if you get close to them and shoot you'll hear that that resonance um which is really cool and it really um I think it's very engaging it it really

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    immerses you in the experience of being in that world you know firing your guns and everything reacting around it the dynamic music system is another example of a new tool that will really help uh let our creative team shine to be able to have the game adjust the music on the Fly depending on what's going on is going to add a lot of Dimension to the game experience we go now from gunfights to dog fights with a look at all the work that has gone into balancing the ships for 2.6 so we're going to talk about changes to the flight balance today I tried to avoid saying flight model because the flight model fundamentally is still the same as it was it's still the same uh simulated system that John Pritcher and Chris really want in there uh this is more uh iteration on how the values we

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    put in and get out have changed that changed the way you fly not not the fundamentals of flying we've had some feedback from the community on what they've heard about the changes what some of the ocari have tested we had some ideas that what we thought people would like what they wouldn't like so we were looking to do some more changes and the community feedback just sort of solidified that so we're going to talk about what's changed from a month ago when you were talking last time us the F the first thing we were doing obviously everyone will know about is is the SC speed change where we kind of halfed those speeds from what they were to try and increase the closeness of combat and make it feel a bit more engaging in that sense and that was it just had to be

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    addressed in some way and that I guess leads us to demonstrate um how cruise is no more and how we've adapted After Burner to to fill that Gap to to reach those speeds here we go this is me now using After Burner and as you can see I'm hitting Cruise speeds here and I'm just holding the shift key to get there then when I release uh the current plan is to once you After Burner you will stay at the velocity you've hit once you release the key and you'll stay in what we're terming like an an afterburner active or After Burner primed mode where you'll continue at this velocity your after bur or hydrogen fuel will start creeping down slowly but you've used a lot of it

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    to burn up to this velocity in the first place and I've gone out of bounds whilst we have reduced the sem speed uh the afterburn speeds get push you back up there but the fuel consumption has had a complete overhaul so you can maintain those faster speeds for longer um you'll be able to maintain it at that at that velocity and use less fuel pretty much as we show here but there will be a higher burn cost for getting up to that velocity want to point that out there will be um the penalty of using After Burner quickly you have to wait a little bit but if you're using it to get overr distances you're burning up fast you'll then truck on as you are consuming very little but it's it's those moments where you have to quickly engage it in a combat situation that might cost you in terms of fuel use but if people are

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    familiar with how boost works it's essentially shortening acceleration times on all of your your directional vectors so that you can maneuver a lot faster and that's what boost been used to if you're sliding off course you hit the Boost key and you get back on course much quicker than you would have done but at the cost of the fuel so you will you lose a penalty to that once you trigger the After Burner you become a lot less maneuverable much like you do in Cruise I'm demonstrating here this is me at full afterburn I've got the restricted maneuvering um this is entirely based on where your throttle is once you enter the mode so the lower the throttle is the more maneuverable you are while it's after burning I'm suppos trying to change your course quickly you decouple you spin round you hit After Burner

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    to get those main engines to change direction as quickly as possible as you can see by that if you want an After Burner into six you just press shift and hold it and that's that's all you need to do there's no tap and hold anymore it's the same key that it was on other input devices like we've just moved boost away from that key yeah so so boost now being on X uh it means you can you can after bur and boost at the same time which opens up another level of complexity to the gameplay using the phase turbo like we did before uh it over overpowers over thrusts all your secondary thrusters I think is the correct term for it so that's all your maneuvering thrusters your retro thrusters not your main thrusters so it gives you increased thrust output to all

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    those ones so when you're boosting you can arrest your slides quicker you can stop quicker so you can combine that now with After Burner to do a bit of both or use it independently so after burn in let go of the After Burner hit boost do a tight turn something that's going to be really useful for racing yeah so racing um everyone was super worried that sem speeds were cutting half they thought it was going to be super slow uh and it's not because you've got all these new ways of boosting so for example is Andy tries to fly whilst I'm talking through him through it um you can use the afterburn down the straighter sections uh and obviously you can modulate that with your throttle to sort of decide how much after Burn Speed

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    you want uh he can absolutely bom it down the straights and then back off hit boost put all the power to his maneuvering and retro thrusters to do tight turns we've been doing a lot of testing of this with QA uh and the designers here and we're getting pretty pretty good times with by no means the Fantastic races but where we're getting some pretty comparative times to some of the the fastest ever ones that have been set on the leaderboards uh so I'm sure in the hands of the backers that we're going to have some pretty good new new records um this really creates this balance of afterburn and boost at the same time I mean you switching between one and the other are both at the same time try and

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    get the fastest laps when it comes to a straight line I'm after burning I'm trying to line my ship up as straight as possible hit the After Burner for the main engine boost and and speed increase obviously it restricts your maneuverability as well whilst you're after burning at Full Throttle you have to be careful of that that's that's another thing that's changed like a lot of racing at the moment is simply throttle to 100% uh and way you go with this actually managing your throttle can give some quite big improvements to it um the M50 uh handles quite differently to the 350r not just a case of linear acceleration or turning speed now uh a lot of the ships

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    have favorable axes so they can turn better when they're angled One Way versus another so how you do a really fast lap in M50 is not going to be how you do that fast lap in a 350r you're going to have to learn how your ship Works what's the the strongest aess of thrust on your ships and sort of customize that I think it's a lot of fun now this with these changes especially when you hit the afterburn and it kind of locks you into a straight line into the wall yeah good fun and it it also changes dog fighting as well um those SC speeds have brought in the combat massively and another thing that we haven't really talked about is all the weapons have had a complete rebalance as well gone and actually ground up across the

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    board all the ships have had their tuning changed all the weapons have had their tuning changed the shields have had their tuning changed the health points of the ships have had their the values changed um so it's really sort of not a clean slate because we had for a lot of the ships we knew where we wanted them to be and they were they were getting there but it was sort of Peace meal every now and then we' we tweak one and that's fine but it was out of whack with the others so now they've all had the same pass together so it's more comparative of the game as a whole where where everything's going to sit we'll talk a bit about how these changes affect combat so we're in dying star Vandal swarm now in a saber Comet so Andy's using the new after burn to really close a distance quickly bit too quickly he's done it then he use

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    presumably the Boost there to you stop yourself get right on the tail of this side and then hopefully do some damage as you can see everything sort of much closer in your face looks looks much more dramatic than it it was or is in 25 where everything always so far away everyone's flying really fast and that's one of the things we really wanted to to tackle with this was to get the combat in close in your face yeah you don't you still got the advanced skill of pilot can use After Burner their advantage they still have it you know as much fuel as they've got they can use it to their advantage and still combat at high speed if they're if they're good enough to do

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    it around tight spaces and around these asteroid belts for example those who want to push themselves with Advanced tactics skills and mechanics can still do that and they've got new challenges to learn we also got the missile camera as well which is in there oh yeah let's do that all right let's pick our victim go going though yeah still going works really nicely with the uh some of the bigger Torpedoes that we have in the game like on the Retaliator it's just seeing these Torpedoes go for 10 kilometers into something so that's the new flight model changes that we're working on uh still lots of iterations to go um got a lot of certainly UI elements to to help help

41. 00:32:58

    improve there uh hopefully that clears up some concerns that people had uh makes people happy uh that's that's all for us thanks bye missile Camp's pretty cool yeah it's a great way to see beautiful explosions up close and who doesn't like explosions yeah uh I know there's been some concern with cruise mode going away but I think one backers get a chance to test the new adjustments for themselves uh they'll see that all of these changes we are giving them actually a lot more options uh with the weapon component balancing along with after burn and boost working in conjunction it can provide players with a lot more flexibility while flying and fighting very cool and I wonder what the new race laap time will be yeah it's probably going to be way better than something I can do but of course it's not only about the new times now that there's going to be all those new ships

42. 00:33:45

    uh to try out too true we will have to see how the heral and the 85x do against the old favorites but speaking of crossing the Finishing Line that's all we have for today's show uh we'd like to thank our subscribers who help us produce extra content like this and Bug Smashers and lore makers and all our behind the-scenes shows yes we do and a special thanks to all of our backers new and old um who have made Star Citizen possible and we could not do this without all of your support to find out more about some of the features we highlighted make sure to tune in tomorrow at 8: a.m. Pacific time oh for reverse verse with Nick Elms in the UK the UK thanks and until then we will see you around around the verse Oh you do this around the verse way oh this way around the verse it's okay we're all good

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    [Music] thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest and Star Citizen of Squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon