Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Building Lorville

9 November 201800:58:071,344 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of reverse the verse live this week building Louisville on the show this week we have two guests - first-timers - are itv1 you Europe you're actually - you're probably aware of by if you've watched our citizen compounds that were represented it's isn't on 21:48 we've got star citizen art director mr. Ian Leland again how you doing I'm doing wonderful thank you jar didn't you I'm doing alright it's another bright and bushy Friday morning you know the weeks almost done mmm dr. Rendon and then of course another first-timer to our TBS woven DJ Jake we've got a the one veteran environment artist one how're you doing then hi pretty great how are you I'm gonna ask her usual I'm after
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once and then I'm gonna say I'm gonna get my default answer this time it's another day in paradise oh all right so because this is your first time on our TV because you know most this is probably somebody's first RTV it always is every single week I like to get things started my talk by talking a little bit about who you are and what you do specifically for star citizen and the one will start with you okay I'm an environment artist I make a lot of the hard surface elements of the game because that's mostly what we do here in the UK so this is anything from the exterior of truck stops or parts of Louisville like the transit system the Habs the star marine maps echo 11 Damien so it's a lot of building assets set-dressing a little bit of lighting
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all kinds of different aspects for the environment and Ian you are the star citizen art director I have to imagine that covers a broad range of topics and tells who you are and what you do so yep I'm the art director on star citizen so my job is to make sure that Chris's vision translates into the game - a visual standard that is happy with so it tends to cover quite a lot of teams most teams in the company all the way from right at the beginning with law through design through code through art through lighting and then QA and then making sure that we can validate what goes into
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the game is to the standard so yet usually the process takes quite a long time but yes my responsibility is making sure that right from the first conversation to the content being delivered anything artistically I'm involved with so let's talk a little bit about that we always like to talk a little bit about the the work that you guys do before we go to the live question the answer Siri portion it'll help our backers who are watching understand what types of questions you guys can actually speak to for instance opt in on the show we get a lot of design questions how will this work how will we being able to do that we are we are fortunate enough to finally have star citizen's art director on the show so today's questions focus question
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focus will be mostly on on process in the art of star citizen for lack of a better term so if you're looking for shows about how does this work or how are we gonna be able to do this in the game those are other our TVs this one is about a process and making making the visuals of this very visually compelling if I'm allowed to say so game come to life now your standard process starts at the beginning with the Lord team and I want to start there when when we began the process of Louisville when it was decided okay Laurel is going to be our first fully fleshed out landing zone cuz we played with art Corp before we used to have the area 18 were a module that the social module as it was called was first introduced but Laura ville was going to be the first ian universe in in the persistent universe landing zone
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when those conversations started how involved were you in in figuring out the the scale and the scope of what that would entail sure so it happened some time ago it was what we call when something's in pre-production usually that can be visual development we through concept art on like a very loose design brief so we've had concepts for areas of lovel for some time and we've just been waiting to really get our teeth into it you know you know before then obviously we're scaling up between you know doing things like outposts or space stations
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you know there's Grimm hexes in the game you know let's keys in the game the next one who is gonna tackle was was level so you know visual direction was it it's been around for a while so when we started that process there was always a few lines from the law team that really stood out and it was you know the having just even a paragraph I think even before I started working at CI G and I think there was a paragraph must have been from Dave just one paragraph and read I just from read in that I wanted to make that location I I can't even remember what it was now it described a backwater landing zone with some dude who worked there didn't like his job but
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something as simple as a few lines of text can inspire so much so from the low side of things we had quite a lot to go on yeah now one of the signature elements of lower bullet I think maybe the first thing that most people notice and I don't I don't know how you would notice anything else first was that is that massive structure that's in the center so I'm just going to I'm gonna come at this from the perspective which is the first things I noticed and take us through was that was that what do you know what that building is called we call it the HD the Hurston showcase main building we had two funny enough one of the things we had to do when making lava we had to really figure out what makes a city work so we had to do our city
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planning research and as generally those areas are called CBD central business district so internally we call it the HD CBD very very very catchy yeah what was obviously it's huge how do you go about figuring out the scale of something like that was was was was something that big was that in the brief that you got from from the Laura team and if it was did you just like shake your head with what how big it was a lot smaller mmm used to be a lot smaller used to be smaller so it was called out by the law team of being this very dominant presence within the location so it's something that within like the work is district although the
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workers within Laval it would be this constant presence this constant overlooked in presence so we needed something that would be dominant on their on their skyline but also you know dominant within the landscape and I think I covered this a little bit during the panel mm-hmm I wanted something that was visible from quite some distance away you know it was like this monolithic shape that you could see and then you see it looming over you know some of these old strip lines so we knew wanted to be big we just didn't necessarily know at the time how big it was going to be but then you know if I was gonna buy a planet and you know have a company my building would probably be the biggest one on the
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planet for quite quite something I definitely wanna see from space yeah but you know we did we did play around with the scale and to see what would feel right and we we scaled it up by a fair amount but then you know threw some backwards and forwards with crest we got to something that would feel really quite impressive particularly because it was designed so that the executive level or the family level would be right at the top you know above the kind of the smog line and when you're an engine you look down it kind of feels it feels right for the space you know when you're looking down across the city from above and then when you're down in the workers district looking up well I think we found an interesting balance I didn't I didn't realize that that is
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that is awesomely the executive level if the building is just high enough that the executives can live above the smog line yes we we well we wanted it so that that that pollution level would would start to dissipate so that you know it's just not like Gardens or anything up there but it is way above the bad stuff down below I think that speaks to something low on you actually talked about a little in your panel which was about the Mod Squad look for the building of perhaps and that's storytelling in environmental art and you touched on a little bit but I'd like to like to hear your words on it Ian how important is storytelling in your environment or did you when you create something like that do you do you
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go through and flush out this entire backstory on your own it's I know you get some things from the Lord team but when you're and you're figuring out what a giant building like that looks like or whatever it is do you find yourself creating an internal logic a history a story of your own when designing these things so it's as I'd say almost all environment artists we do it we whatever location we built you build internal monologues and storylines who lives here how would they interact with this space it just gives way more depth to the location and you see it you know you can play a game you think wow they've someone's really thought about this you know you can really get that depth it's a little bit different with our game
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because you know because it's an MMO you know we have to be very specific and we can't do certain dressing things but every artist working on that location would have been you know really thinking about things the type of people that work there but what's really cool is when when Dave comes to visit oh you have a have a a conversation with tableware like that and you hear them go through and you hear the perceptions or ideas of those and ideas just really start you know rolling through so that's that's probably one of the most fun parts of being an environment artist is is is doing that storytelling because it's it's like a creative itch that you can't find anywhere else yeah and you know it
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goes from like the large scale to the small scale you're thinking about what this world is but you're also thinking about this guy placed a coffee mug here and left a stain right it's all of that together helps to tell the story of what this place is you mentioned I'm glad you mentioned that it goes down to the small scale because one of the things I mean going all the way back to when 2.0 was first introduced and you add port olisar and this first version of the player Habs I remember watching you could turn into any star citizen streamer and they'd spawn in their little hab and you they just sit there like what the hell happened in here and then you in as they spawn in each different one everybody would take minutes to try to figure out like what was going on in this room and it was funny to watch them try to
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determine that backstory especially if you got that and some of them were perhaps more embarrassing than others like if you got the one that had like six rolls of toilet paper it's like it's like no I got this almost like getting a whammy like oh I got the toilet paper it's like that but yeah it's it's the ability to tell stories subtly in that regard you know it's a there's a term called X formation I really like there's the information which is you know what you're reading the quest text and what a what an NPC will tell you outright and then there's the X formation the stuff that you can infer from your environment and from the things that are happening around you and I think I think you guys if I'm allowed to have an opinion thing you guys do a really good job at refusing the world with all kinds of explanation and it definitely lends us up to a real living breathing universe
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that said I do have to this is my segue into a question that I get from the community quite often I got to put it to you why are the Claire hats always so messy so anybody live cleanly organized oh she only it's a it's it's a valid question ultimately we're trying to create something that has a little bit of depth to it nothing squeaky-clean it's a lived in a universe so I think going back to your 2.0 section we we we wanted to give it a bit of personality because when we made the Habs I'm like okay the the architecture feels interesting but I want to see I want to
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see a little bit of personality within there and the props that we had at the time we liked right I think we can do something quite interesting I have the same conversation we've taught poppy quite a lot but and then when we moved on to something specific like lovel novels you know we're talking about a workers district on a very very disgruntled workforce so it's not going to be butterflies and rainbows but there's plenty of locations in the future where it will be much more of akut you know much more classy and we're kind of looking forward to doing some interesting things there as far as the player halves and you know and employers will get there first players will get their chance to really explore Laurel on their own when 3:35 hits the PTU
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but as far as the the player halves do you know off the top of your head how many different variations there are in 3:35 variations in terms of dressing yeah it turns a dressing like like how many different types of rooms well so there's a couple of different variations there's a three variants in terms of actual dressing variation they're not drastically different there the layout of the room is certainly different one has the bed in the middle when is the bed of the back one has slightly more stuff on the fridge one has you know one's a little bit more messy with some clothes on the ground or whatever but there's also variance in lighting there's something cooler there's some warmer lighting it's not is incredibly broad like oh we have ten
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different variations you're gonna spawn in a completely different place because you know we only have so much time to work on these things but it certainly is you know you might see a couple different different places when you spawn what's the deal with that green toothpaste I remember in your in your your presentation the lime you're going through all stop on green toothpaste remember like I went to the after party and somebody actually asked me about the green toothpaste at the after party and I'm like but that's interesting because the reason I called it out of my presentation is because I had never seen a green before I think what it was it was just some sort of a effect or something going on with the graphics that just made it green I'd actually like to dig out the prop and see if it's actually green because if it is I have a couple of questions about why it's green as well actually just to briefly talk on
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dressing it's actually quite an interest in topic right now because usually what we do is we go through and we set dress the environment appropriate to the location but as you can see with a lot of the pickup inspector that you starting to see now mm-hmm suddenly you're looking at this static dressing within the locations and you're like wait a minute why can't I pick that up why can't I pick that up so we're actually talking very seriously about the how to dress these locations going forward because if if I'm on this table here and I'm like hey I can pick up this mouse that's great but then there's somebody else on the table too some of the floor and I can't pick it up breaks
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immersion we we have to be very consistent otherwise it you it quite it would be quite frustrating for the player so going forwards one of the most important things for me is to achieve the same level of storytelling but we can have that level of interaction so going forwards that's something that's quite important was internally right now now during the on go back to Louisville on a more macro scale during your presentation you talked about the city tile set and the visit have you had to do with it with the tier 1 and the tier 2 and the tier 3 and then the decision to actually go into some levels and not just build up but actually build down how many how many layers did we ultimately end up
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with like how far down the rabbit hole do you go with that within the visual development stage we go quite far because it's about the more we do in that stage the more you really think about the location when it actually when the ad she goes to being time for full production so you have to pick and choose how far you go ultimately what we did was with inside the playable area is try and figure out those slices or those levels between the workers and the gods and the architecture and then you've got the stuff down below so hopefully when you know players are walking around don't just look round and and start to see those cues now Laurel is made up of a bunch of different areas we got the
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the player have area and the spaceport and the hangars we haven't actually seen like a list of everything that's involved in Laurel and I'm not gonna ask you to sit here and list off everything but what are what are off the top of your head what are some of the the key areas if you were describing Laurel to somebody that's it because that's exactly what I'm gonna ask you to do how many different areas are we talking about here I know there was the there was the workers the workers district which you started calling l19 if I remember correctly sure there what else do we got going on so the main focus for the initial sprint was obviously on l19 okay one thing that made this landing zone different he briefly mentioned on it as it wasn't necessarily just a case
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of making a landing zone that landing zone is sprinkled with what we call common elements so there's things that are very specific to that location and there's things that we can reuse much more I've gone down then there was within the law they they can call out many different locations there was some interest in like factory zones and things like that and then obviously you've got the the CBD which which were pushing on right now right the seemingly the big building one of the one of the questions that has come in from the live chat is are you actually developing the interior of that big giant CBD sure it's a very large interior so how much of that we're going to explore initially would be quite limited but it gives us a chance to show that the flip side of
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what people are would see inside the workers district so we're trying out some quite new things in terms of architecture look and feel and obviously you've got some shops in that you know reasons to go there so we're hoping that together when when you walk around the workers area and you walk around the CBD you you should get a very good idea of the narrative and the imbalance between you know the the executives and the family and and then and then this this workforce imagine so that's the HD CBD and that's all I'm gonna call it from now on you've got that in my head no the agent you've got to say very quickly three times h d cv d HD CB d HD CB d fantastic I can't pronounce words but I can say letters alright so in a city that big I mean even though we're
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focused on on L 19 L 19 is still pretty vast you talked a bit about in your presentation about getting lost the very real concern of getting lost in the city and of course you're building those you know the bigs the big signs and whatnot and any other tell you this is this way and everything are there other besides just putting signs everywhere are there other visual cues things that you can build into a place to really any little not just horrible to help players know where they are where they're going to always kind of find their way yeah it's it's actually quite a deep conversation playing navigation many people have talked about it over many presentations really interesting stuff for me ultimately goes down to the impact is team pocketed understood the exact same
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thing you know when you're in one part of the theme park you need to look over some rails and think oh hey you know that's over there or that's over there otherwise you'd just be lost and we try to employ some similar cues inside something as small as l19 specifically when you're in one location on you get the Vista shot you should get an idea of hey if I go that way I'll probably get two halves or if I go that way I'll probably get to the transit network for example that's it the transit network I'm glad you brought that up the the the the the the train that goes through the city it's I'm gonna speak purely for myself right now Louisville's an amazing accomplishment it really has it seen the size and scope
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and whatnot for me as just a viewer as a bystander I'm not involved in the development anything laura ville didn't become a like a real breathing place for me until i saw it through the window of the train like i needed an experience that i could relate to in real life and what there's quite something it's so weird it's seeing it through the window like i had to put something between me and Lauren ville before I really saw Lauren though that's the thing right you're you're an editor and you're just a you're flying around the camera around larva and you're like heck oh yeah that looks nice and you're inside the transit network whatever and then that was this one day it was quite early on you're still a little bit white-box but those is one day where we just saw this this camera inside the train just going past and you just saw this boom the HD building there
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and at that point I was quite like okay wow that's quite exciting that's that's when I was kind of really sold on the believability of a larval as a city Chris was very very specific with regards to the transit his physical trains physical transmission would wrench and he was a hundred percent right because it would it involved a lot of it added a lot of complexity on their teams but you know when you see it you're like like you say you know oh okay I understand it now so it was it was something that Chris was very very very specific with and you know you see it in game and you you write on it it all makes sense I think you correct me if I'm wrong I'm not the artist here but
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I think it's also great in the sense of it being a connective element between so many things not just in the literal sense it helps you get from one area to another but you talked - you talked a lot about the bar now the the recess bar that had the windows and you could see the train go through you know I think the idea that you could be in multiple places of the city but see the same train go go through it helps connect of the the desperate areas I'm a place here no no no you're right one thing I was interested in I don't think many of us had ever done a physical train before or physical transit network before and what was interested in as we was doing I I think it was the demo playthrough a few
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hours before the event as we was as we was taking off and was flying off we just looked down and there was this train just you know shuttling to to the space-boat and all of us there were just that's pretty cool that's pretty cool yeah it's it I want to say simple it's simple not in the the making it a reality because having to connect all the other track pieces make sure they all line up and they must have been a nightmare but simple in the in the sensory sense it's such a it's a simple way to make something seem real and relate to - what relatable world which brings me to my next question the game is nine hundred years in the future nine hundred and forty years in
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the future when you're building things a train the props that go inside a hab there's this idea that things have to evolve you know you have to show almost a millennium evolution how will trains change in a thousand years how will microwaves in the hab change how a bed change in we have people doing standing desks and standing desks what we're Ludacris just 20 20 years ago and now half the audience's after the office here is in standing desks when you have to think about how these things must evolve a millennia from now how does that work with this desire to you always you also have to keep things grounded in what we know today so that we can relate to them very very good question so I I studied an industrial design and
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part of that training to be an industrial designers to design products spaces understanding what came before with trying to design something 900 years in the future does this concept called most advanced yet relatable so Jarrod I could design you a train that is looks like a space whale you know butterflies kind of come out of it when it flies and I say that's that's a training 100 years in the future you it would be too advanced for you to relate to it it would be so far gone you know to use similar techniques you know in other other sci-fi genres and games and
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things like that there's there's only so far you can actually go so that's one part of it the second part is we're trying to describe some of the older parts of our universe you know we the the whole kind of timeline of the star system has been mapped out and throughout that time period we define different art styles so what we're seeing right now is all pretty much utilitarianism and if we go to advanced too early you know we haven't really got any kind of wiggle room so what was shown is like the oldest thing in in the universe so for for us you know having a quite a relatable train design right now it felt right for lovel felt felt right for the time period but that's
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to say in the future what we've already got some interesting ideas for cleansing networks that were working on it in I think I said I have to imagine micro textures the imagination a little bit no I'm talking about I'll cook but I'm just trying some ideas some but anyway we'll just leave it there as a father from the live chat to that is as do you ever do on-site studies to learn about environments before you work on them in the in the dumps in the presentation your presentations is gone you mentioned the transit station had some inspiration from like the London Underground at how the outside the New Deal you had the the m50 there because you always see a car out in Manchester Airport you ever do give is it just personal experience or
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you actually ever actually go out and do environmental studies like that also another good question as artists we rely massively on our internal reference library an example would be a if I asked you Jared to draw a castle on a post-it note and then I asked someone who'd had more of a classic art training to draw a castle they would probably I'm not saying you write out real injured but I'm saying that he would look very different because the calling from the the reference lab their internal reference libraries so like I said is joining us yes it's going to be so good
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so basically what we need to do is constantly explore or expose ourselves to new things be it architecture or design so when we're talking about the the transit areas I remember going through the London Underground about six months ago and I was I was just taking pictures of walls ceilings I was getting some very strange looks from the security you always guess but did I mean you can actually buy like you know reference but like photography packs of cables which you know we would look at and go as a great that's a great that's a great cable so yet actually
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doing research on a location is critical and you know you see other game studios or of film production studios when they do pre-production they go to the location they they they feel what that environment is or they experience it how it how it smells how it looks how it sounds because you need to expose yourself that to try and translate that digitally still drew on the castle yeah it's going to be amazing guys and so it sometimes it's slightly harder for us because we can't go to the moon just yet ya know so wherever we can wherever we can we try and base it on real-world locations or designs that have already been figured out so just just to bring it back to the transit you know the
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London Grant I mean just next time you're on the London and Grant just just look up look up at the cattles that's one of the things I did definitely and because when I was dressing and making the transit station I had just gone to Paris and I got see the sort of Paris metro system you know what the name of it is but I took a lot of inspiration from there and everything was very there's a lot of grandiose to the architecture there's a lot of you know I would look up and I see all these pipes and everybody would give your looks because you're just there like okay like all that pipe works and I like how all these things are working with one another and you can see the history of this place and how things were made and those are the things that you're constantly trying to develop as an artist it's just like Ian said this visual library which just comes comes
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over time you start to remember how environments that you've been to looked and you kind of try to pull from this library in your head and try to construct something believable that's something I definitely did whilst I was doing the transit it was just big going to train stations and taking pictures of really random things and you tried to do it in a bit of a subtle way so you take your phone now and you go what a yeah it's quite important to sort of understand what the environment that you're making is when I'm traveling with my family I have two photo albums one with the family and one without the family and that's a great shot guys that's a great shot does the castle then yeah let's see it fair enough fair enough
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I'm not going to show you my castle ah I can see it looks kind of like a monster I don't know I don't know it's I started getting too modular into the bricks everything I know but but here's the thing just just hold it okay so what you're thinking about there is Battlement design construction with those blocks drawbridge design I see a face yeah when you're thinking about that you're you're probably recalling back to a film or a castle but if you've never been to a castle you would struggle so that reference library is so crucial you know my reference library is Castle Grayskull from he men and masters in the universe that's a good record I didn't have a green marker this would
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have been green that's great so we bet we've had a couple questions from the live chat about the modular tile sets its I'm going to try to combine a couple these here how important is it for you to for you to work in in modular tile sets do that do they do they free you up I imagine after you make them it makes things more efficient to iterate and stuff but you ever find them stifle increate creatively do they do they do they help you do they hurt you is it something struggle against is something you're you're glad exists is it a complicated relationship both it's a complicated relationship it's a bit of both you know you have you have this set that will help you like we're making a
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modular game we're trying to make something that can expand and you're not gonna get that by making as I said on the panel I touched on on this you know gonna get that by making custom pieces for everything otherwise you'll be here for centuries so you got a you got to break the environment down in a modular way but also you have to create enough variance in these pieces so that you can try to break up that you know that constant I don't know what the right word is here but you also use like the dressing and the lighting to make those different areas feel different though you might be looking at the same wall here and there the dressing and the
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lighting is gonna help you understand these are different places I'm sure you have much more to develop on that sure ultimately yeah the ones right we are modular game unless you have a lot of tile sets within a tile set those many different components until you've really fleshed those out you're going to see you're going to see repetition so because our engine is really good and it's all real time we can build out locations fairly quickly you know straight to metric and and get to that but then when you start to look at it and you see that reputation that repetition that's when you start combining okay this guy's going to be
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unique let's do something unique for there on a on a location we we run to the role of like you know 70/30 or something you know 70% of that location is going to be modular 30% is going to be unique because it doesn't matter how good your modular set is unless you you're going to see that fatigue you're going to see that repetition probably more important for me is even just outside of a singular location if if I had a two to three hour play experience with instances and I've gone to this location I've gone to this location I've gone to this location it's very important I'm not going from one module occasion to another man you know we have to find ways to break that up some may be more modular than others
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some may be more customers it just depends on what that location is so it's it's absolutely essential part of our pipeline but we have to try and squeeze in as much time as we can to get in those unique areas otherwise if if the players saying oh that's the same one that's at same one breaks immersion that's not really what we we want to get to and that happens at the start of an environment as well because when you lay out the architecture the first time around is all the same wall piece and you know you the more you look at that the more it's you just you just want to start breaking it up but that's when you start seeing certain areas like for example in the transit when I light everything
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everything was like two and four meter pieces trip and he looked pretty hideous and then I saw you know this is a chance for me to do something interesting with the wall here so then I took that and I tried to find different different tile sets or different wall pieces that might make that area feel a little bit nicer and I would even like go as far as maybe create if there's a 12 meter area and it's all broken up with these lines and you wanna you want to create something more interesting more bespoke you and you have some time you certainly go in and you try to create a new piece that not only could be used here but it could be used by someone else later down the line elsewhere but that that's you know these style sets are ever-evolving you always add a little bit here a little bit there we create a new location and suddenly we have a you know a few more
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pieces or we you know we go back and we touch up a couple of other pieces to make it you know it's all about this variation that you kind of just get with time and then going back to just just the odd styles within the game we've got some great art styles that we will really want to get into but the investment of time into a new building set is quite a lot so we have to be very measured when we when we do that process right speaking of measuring how that process we've had a couple questions from the chat about these environments something like Laurel doesn't exist in in a vacuum you know you don't just get to make the city and then decorate it and light it for for one kind of state it's not it's like
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like in a lot of games in the past you know you see these wonderful environments but you only ever saw it at you know in the middle of the night you know there's plenty of game environments you never see in the daytime or daytime environments you never see in the night let's talk about that the challenge of having to lay this stuff out and you know you you get something that looks great in the at night or whatever and then as the Sun rotates or the planet rotates and everything moves and suddenly this building casts a terrible shadow that you hate or when hour or something doesn't work in other situations is there a constant back and forth or is it is it constantly just like rearranging puzzle pieces yeah we with Louisville right now just we had to
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create or find a way to give it the actual so rewind traditionally you have a standard time at time add a slider you can change that curve so you can validate specifically what that cycle is going to be we can't do that also known as a is a fixed thing so we just moved the planet around to get the right I specifically wanted sunset to be over the spaceport from locking in hubs so we had to physically move the planet to validate that time of day and then we're like right okay how's it looking you know two o'clock or was it looking at one o'clock so we do like these internal time lapses I had a video I was going to show it it says was gone it was just
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that the presentation was already too long so I took it out but it it just shows and you know we usually put some music too because the right time of day will add so much to it you know if if the sun's in the wrong angle like you say it would wash out the scene it doesn't create the feel one of the things we very civically wanted to do with lovel is we've walking around it and if there's some was on the and a workers area just didn't feel right it's like why isn't this feel right because if I'm in a sunny location it has a certain feel into it so I was like let's raise those walls that let's push that land zone down so the feeling that Sun never or maybe in some places but the Sun just
00:42:33
just can't touch so if you're a worker in in l19 you you you're rarely going to get the Sun on your face and I thought that was going to be quite interesting so throughout the from straight from white box it's something that we're trying to consider and going forwards how that city or how that location changes as as that tomato changes and it's when you look at a cityscape as that Sun Goes Down you see those time lapses the city kind of wakes up and as that Sun Goes Down like start to come on magic starts happening this is something that we're talking about internally as I want I want when that Sun Goes Down the city kind of changes so that imagine I'm a player and I come to Louisville for the first time it was night - if I was a
00:43:21
play and I came in the daytime if the one and I had those conversations I want I want that experience to be quite different and then that feet into the AI and so all sorts of really interesting things starts that starts to happen when you start to think about the possibilities of what we can do why do you want the Sun to rise over the spaceport from the player HAP's I wanted it to go down yet so it goes and I just I just wanted that very specific mister and then previously I'd say the one was lighting it London light it I'd go him and Sun there boom boom done but then you know I was talking with Chris lead light an artist and I'm like Chris I want that son there and he was like I don't I don't think this
00:44:11
one's going to go there so then we had to really think about so thinking about day/night cycles on a on a planetary scale this is quite quite complex it's fine for we can't we can't necessarily validate it for like an outpost or a module location but when we're trying to build something like a major land zone I think it's very important to really understand what it feels like at those different times a day because we're trying to say to the player hey you know spend some time here a couple comments and add make your own asking your question do all cities look better at night than they do in the day all everything looks better at sunset sunset fair enough you know it's quite interesting in our game like you know saying usually
00:45:00
traditionally you have like a time of a slider at age and you can see things different times in ours if you want to see it a different time of day you grab the Sun and you move it down which is quite insane right when you think about it but sometimes I'm just like I'll be working on something in larval and I'll just zoom out and I'm like I'm just looking at the city and I go right that's of them down a bit and then I lower the field of view and it's okay here we are then I put some music hall and then you start to field the city and you start to really kind of get inspired and it's it's everything looks better sunset really you know it's it's I mean I've lived my entire life in Southern California and everybody knows Disneyland is better at night than it is during the day yeah it looks great during the day but there's just something about it how it comes to life with all those the the city lights and the different types of lights and stuff like that a lot of questions about weather effects and what and whether you
00:45:49
obviously we've talked about you know in the future we want a variety of weather effects and stuff in sources and I do those plet dude there's the future of mother airplane to your design of something like horrible today have you ever thought have you thought about what the city is gonna look like under rain or under like a sandstorm or something I just I just wanted to rain in re 18 that's that's my biggest dream because if you think about you know deep metropolis you know neon light rain sunset I'll be happy that day last year we put everything but specifically talking about whether it much larger conversation and it's not
00:46:38
like hate just you know put a rain entity or you know make it make it rain press to make it rain button it's on a much larger conversation because if I if I'm approaching Hurston and I see a weather volume and I fly down into there the the weather effects needs to be contextual to you know to that location so it's something that we are looking into but it's a it's it's not a small undertaking but when we do it we do it right right let's talk a little bit about the hangers because hangers have been a part of star citizen's development since the beginning that the very first version of star citizen that anybody got to download under the computer was the hanger module back in
00:47:26
the day and that player hangers as they know that we've gone through a number of changes over the years Laura ville has I think what are you correct me if I'm wrong the biggest hangers that we've developed so far what was a did anything from the previous hangers and form your decisions about the the new hangers is are these new hangers and development just from scratch well in a whole new day whole new direction what can you tell us about the hanger development so these hangers had to run that that was there was like so when we when we were when we were developed in we were like okay figuring out the complexity of the lenses were like okay we're gonna needs a space but we're gonna need we're gonna need hangers you know figuring out exactly
00:48:13
what we need with their hangers we will you know design critters the specification you know small medium large extra-large and we were thinking right how BIG's the extra-large and well like right it needs to fit a reclaimer and I'm gonna like right okay that's gonna be a big hangar so we obviously did some visual design and at the end of the day we had a box to play with you know we got a box from from levels and right right what can we do to make this blocks interest in and make it run so we are a lot of the work that we put into it not was just artistically but was getting something that we could you know run very efficiently without going into you know the details just how we altered
00:49:03
the meshes even even how we altered the master material and the arrangement of the IDs so when the engine you know tried to render it like all the ideas were optimal so for example if the painted metal was ID 16 mm-hmm if it was ID 5 we got a little bit of a pompom same so everything about it we had to make sure that we could you know hit our modular goals to hit the different hangar sizes but it had to run when I had to run you know very fast so that was critical because the the star of the show is the ship so we need to make sure that all of the all of that surrounding is focused on the on the product so you
00:49:53
say so all of the or most of the lighting budget went on to on to making the ship look good we tried to make the space feel detailed feel to get that scale but it needs to be cheap so that we cut more budget for the ship and then what happens is because it's not necessarily just a closed box when that door opens we've got to draw whatever is on the outside of it and when when what's on the outside Louisville it just needs to be even more efficient so yeah that's one of the biggest things when you're making say the the lots for the hangar or anything like that one of the things we did we would put it under rest stop and we go all the way out to say as far as I think ship would come in from quantum you open those doors and then
00:50:43
you have to balance the performance you have to go okay how far away am I sing this from how how expensive can I make the or rather cheap can I make the mesh what can I do to really save on performance here and I think we've done a pretty good job with the hangars in terms of performance of things we're not getting shout to that but yeah ya know to be honest with you performance is a something that we are actively drilling into every day and you know understanding exactly how the GPU processes the content we give it is a very deep conversation and then when you make a modular game you have like it's
00:51:32
it's very different because you're giving it loads of individual chunks so then you know finding out the most efficient way to author those assets it's still we're trying to understand the best way to to feed that right well we are almost out of time I got only got a couple more questions for you let's talk about the exterior of Laurel the big wall the gates what in the in your presentation you talked about you know not just wanting a giant flat wall of course and having there are six gates to enter exit Laurel and wanting them all to have a personality or a unique experience at each gate so when people were at it when people were entering the
00:52:20
city from each gate that they got a different sensation or feeling what can you can you go into more detail about that the the gates and the wall caused or just required a lot of thinking and you know could we could we do more or improve that in a future sure if you think about if you look at a city a city just doesn't end no city translates into something else you know trying to we had a very specific deadline to head with logos so we had to make some technical and creative decisions to validate that critical path because if we took away at that wall and just have the city it would just get so complicated to figure out okay where can
00:53:09
the player go work on T go so we had to find that right balance between something that look good but also played good because we tried some designs where it was very complex and then I was talking with Todd about it and he's like dude find your way to that gate because it was it was like me being on the outskirts of London and saying was you know if I find you know find this area it's an impossibility so it's again it's a I would consider like it's it's one of our first steps into making a city we've got plenty of ideas or what the things that we want to try in the future so yeah watch this place Laura bill is or Boehner and Hurston are
00:53:59
coming to star siddhappa three through five - Pete you hopefully you know very soon are you excited to finally see players experiencing in the city and lots of screenshots screenshots YouTube videos John read it and you see you know I sometimes I'm taking a couple of screenshots around and then I'll go on Reddit and there's just this one guy to take screenshots and he took the screenshot of the hangar and I was like I thought that's one of the best shots I've ever seen the screenshots the community comes up with is it's quite inspiring you know it you see that and it's just you see everything come alive and everybody discussing like the things they're happening in that screenshot or you know everybody gets quite excited and that's that's that's what gets me really excited by 3:35 it's just seeing
00:54:47
people taking screenshots are horrible I think I think internally we all there's very specific people that we fall we call mention any names but as one guy plays it and he plays the game how I see it in my head I mean like in like cinematic mode and so you know motion up at night I'm just watching I'm like alright that's cool yeah and it's the amount of time we've spent on on the blood sweat and tears that have gone into Hurston and lovel and the moons I think I can speak for everyone were just we're just really looking forward to seeing how its received and and how peep we'll play it and because you know we we put all of our creative energy we put everything into this project it's a
00:55:36
passion project so yeah when when we put it out we get the it we get that nervous twitch and we're like no but then we you know we're it's always great seen it because that's that's for me is one of the coolest part of working on stoicism is you know we don't we don't develop behind closed doors for years and years and then a publisher puts it out it's like we work on something we and you know before too long we'll put it out and you're watching someone playing it and you like a minion you found it you found that but you know it's like the first viewer when 300 went out and these time-lapses started coming out of like Yela and and sellin and whatever and it it just completely made you like like yes that this is this is why we're doing
00:56:28
this like this is this is what's so exciting to us and it's it's it's quite nice that is exciting for other people say wow thank you so much that's it our TV building marvel you made it to the end was it everything I said it would be it was everything at mo Jarrett all right well thank you I I know we've been trying to get you on the show for a while Ian thank you so much for taking the time out of what has to be an incredibly busy schedule over singing the art direction for all of star citizen and you on two years later after meeting in the the corporate we're finally here we're finally doing it yeah you say use naked when you serve it yes so like I walked in that now are you just like a hand held with them and
00:57:21
that's it I have I have no housekeeping have no announcements I have none of the normal things I have to end the show so I'm just gonna say that's a and that's luan I'm Jared and we'll see you next week everybody you thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at

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