Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Making mobiGlas Matter

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:15

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse our weekly look at star citizen's ongoing development I'm sandy Gardner and I'm controller on today's episode we dive into the moby glass and show off the numerous features and functions you will be using in game yeah we're excited to show you the awesome work the UI team has done but before that it's time for a new segment called burn down in the run-up to 3-0 we're going to provide you at the behind the scenes access to the developers as they battle various bugs and blockers currently affecting the release of 3.0 now let's see what issues made this week's burn down welcome to burn down our new weekly show dedicated to reviewing progress on issues blocking a release of star citizen alpha 3.0 if you saw our update to the public release schedule last

2. 00:01:03

   Friday you should notice that we started this week at ninety must fix issues that we need to complete before we're ready to release to our first round of non CI G testers these 90 issues are our detailed lists with set priorities guiding the close down phase of this release the reason we need priorities is to help us understand which are crucial to be completed first we currently use terms and definitions such as blocker critical high moderate and trivial and identifying these issues I'll start with QA so in QA whenever a new feature comes online testers always look at their shops because these are really gonna be able to do a lot of work we're going to be able to take someone's special baby that they've been working on as a new feature for weeks and weeks and weeks and we basically tell them their baby is ugly when you collect developer tears as we like to call it because we're able to fill the database with new jiriz which

3. 00:01:50

   we may have noticed in the last couple of weeks when we took early looks at it and now the gloves are off and we're finally able to bug up everything done from QA on 3.0 build which has tried to was attempted to be done on friday and also saturday but it seems as a crush on boot on the 3.0 that issue is sat with Gordon at the moment so once I get out of here I'll follow up see how that's going and we didn't from the cover even from the comment on the bug it didn't seem like a very particularly difficult one to fix up so just want to find out where we're up to on that and getting new 2.0 bills kicked off sort of queue I can do a sanity check on it that'll be mostly checking to make sure that all the areas of the games load the business single obvious missing like most the entirety

4. 00:02:39

   of the Stanton map for example or Paula saw some time so we implemented rotating planets it really changed everything that was going on the world the helpers got turned around so what happened was as you would spawn and all this are and you end up going through the geometry of all the star itself because you were waking up backwards instead of coming out of the bed you were going into the bed I fear the more serious open issue right now or memory related issues various client crashes spawning multiple ships simultaneously from the ship spawn terminal causes an undefined error insurance and repair will deduct currency but not actually repair that seems bad we've got so many checklists for the 3.0 release like we've got I mean I've got probably like 10 pages of checklist they're very specific and it's just a case of all the red on pick boxes we just want to get them all green

5. 00:03:28

   primarily we have we have several reviews through the week because obviously we work in several time zones and several studios so they need to be a high level of transparency with what with what every departments doing we're lucky enough to have tech design in the UK with John crew and his team so we pretty much kind of speaking to each other on an hourly basis my guys what's going on there we're testing the dentate designers as a group and even though the building had had absolutely no UI you we still had an amazing time as a group navigating our way around while the asteroid fields trying to find a landing spot on yellow and with no UI you had to do it by communication and just signal so firing flares off firing weapons and listening for where everyone was and that was quite an amazing experience you know we're just sort of neck deep in

6. 00:04:16

   future development right now so you know we've got a lot of stuff but it's it's still kind of rough around the edges today we're working on the rover trying to make sure it's got all the features that it needs to and make sure it's behaving the way it's supposed to like currently we got some areas with the wheels not quite working right we don't have the LEDs hooked up for the tires so it looks like it's driving around on these big boxy wheels I was just like hey I got my rover and I jumped in it started riding around near lefty and I hit a bump and then my hubcaps fell off it just hit so I just hit some collision looks like it oh they're already detaching yeah they're already attaching it it's not very visible this was not as visible as it'll but yeah you can see

7. 00:05:05

   that they're not I see they're not aligned blend anymore yeah so right here and right here they're not aligned anymore but these are still fine and as you can see so it's fun bug like maybe maybe I didn't buy this Rover and a they didn't buy it new lot it's not it's an email to directors saying a person whereas the rover including satellites response it making clear that we do this I didn't to put it there maybe when we do ship test them mm-hmm the way that it's done normally nowadays is a test on one chip to try it with the different manufacturers give gain wide issue or it's just something to do with the manufacturer or very ship specific

8. 00:05:53

   because we've got 50 ships in the game at the moment doing every single ship that just come through a 2.0 conversion is excessive at best so I think all you can kind of hope for the moment basically issues in one by one we hope that they're caught up which is what I've just call that neither support a note that is not recasting comparable to the ships so people find it in another ship you can find that issue and rather than trying to do it over and over and over again later on in the week what we're probably going to be switching up the text animations such as the following animation which have gotten a lot of attention lately has sort of comedic effect where you'd be stuck in a following animation when you're just jumping up you'd immediately go into a following animation when you create a number of different issues depending upon where you were whether if you're in it within a ships physics grid where you were on the station or you want to plan it sometimes you could get stuck in a following animation sometimes

9. 00:06:40

   all the AI would be stuck in a falling animation you'll go through this process of things being kind of broken for an awful long time you kind of work with that it's like the old saying goes if you want to make an omelet you go you've got to scramble some eggs right now we're making solid progress on issues as they clap up but there's still more work to be done we've currently knocked out 32 issues and added 20 leaving 78 remaining as vincent explained you don't always know what's going to happen when you bring features together but as we're completing and polishing features those numbers will change dramatically sometimes higher sometimes lower beyond our JIRA task and our bug count another interesting metric we try to keep a close eye on is our check-ins or change lift into perforce these represent the work our developers are doing and checking into our revision control system now in one week we've checked in

10. 00:07:30

    1892 times across the entire company now the reason that number is so high is because we're all still working in our game dev branch now this branch has everything across both squadron 42 and star citizen now we've already generated our 3.0 branch which has currently 3676 open items which includes the 78 months ticked issues and we will begin shifting our developers over in the very near future then we'll lock the branch down and keep a close eye on what needs to be fixed to make a stable release to burn down now once we've done that you'll see this number dwindle week by week until we're ready to release and with quality as our top priority we're going to keep pushing hard to get this release out as quickly as possible so come back next week to keep up to date on the burn down so I hope you enjoyed that look at some of the issues we're currently facing in 3.0 check back next week see the

11. 00:08:18

    progress we've made what we've managed to burn down and if any new bugs over their head which probably will have done now it's time to lift our arm and open our mull be glass this important device will be your primary access point to many of the game's features including the star map inventory list contract manager and so much more that's right the mobi glass was intended to fill their almost people's smartphones occupy today that came unique set of challenges and a lot of hard work but as you'll see the payoff will be more realistic and immersive game for further details let's check in with UI creative director Shane yen and team so as always there's a plethora of

12. 00:09:08

    features that Bui team has been working on one of those features has been the multi glass and we've been kind of overhauling that over the course of the past few months we had done some preliminary concept work last year working closely with our systems design team to design something that would assume something more can do what you would find in a typical desktop OS however what we really needed was a few key pieces of tech that would really make it worthwhile without us having to write a ton of bespoke code and functionality one of those was what we call the render to texture tech and that's something that the graphics team has been working on and providing us so we are essentially now integrating this tech with all of our UI across the board including the mobile glass so you'll find this eventually in ship displays shopping terminals kiosk and so forth so the key effect that this provides us is that it enables us to

13. 00:09:56

    render a 3d scene whether it's a video comm call feed or an image representation of a item in game but we're able to render that on a either a 2d screen or actually within a 3d hollow volume so in both cases it's actually the same exact display tech being used we don't have to write bespoke code to display a UI or a 3d representation in a 3d volume versus a 2d one so this allows us to have things like 3d holograms of ships and sort of mini maps and the star map and so forth rendered on two screens in game and it looks much more proper than other than it would otherwise you know in our game we have a lot of different environmental archetypes that

14. 00:10:43

    we need to account for when you're traveling across the universe you will come across environments that are more technologically dated and ones that are more technologically progressed so this extends to a lot of different things including you know their style of architecture their style of clothing the devices that they use the goods and so forth and for the UI in particular this affects us and that we need to design our UI based on that archetypes in a more lower tech environment we can just display the UI on flat 2d panel displays so for a more technologically advanced setting that's where we sort of bring in our 3d holographic style of UI and so the mobile glass in particular is manufactured by this corporation called micro Tech and they actually manufacture

15. 00:11:32

    all of the handheld devices in the universe so naturally they're very high-tech so you would find in the mobi glass that is a holographic projection so the mobi glass assumes a very crucial role on the universe and that it serves as the primary access point to all the different game mechanics and transactions player communication and so forth so sort of akin to what we have in smartphones in today's world that's basically what mobile glasses and star citizen that's kind of how we designed it to be on the universe you know you have a home screen which has various widgets which provide you sort of added Gallants information but we have all these dedicated apps which there's very specific purposes in the game world things like managing mission contracts customizing your loadouts viewing maps and so forth and so on it's designed to be this sort of very direct

16. 00:12:22

    link to your player character as well as the surrounding environment so if you wanted to know more information about yourself or the kind of outside environment that's what you infer from the home screen widgets so if you wanted to check what is my current oxygen level or what's the current atmosphere composition outside or the atmospheric pressure is it safe to take off my helmet is it safe to walk around outside without a suit and if not do I have enough oxygen to make it to the next destination or where I'm trying to get to like what is the state of the health of my character am I hurt in any way or what is the state of my mission objectives that I currently have tracked how much money do I have and all of these questions can be answered through the use of the mobile glass because

17. 00:13:10

    we're doing all this new work on the mobi glass and the screens and stuff we really wanted to also upgrade the model of it the mobi glass is essentially a watch and it's a completely different element than any of the screens or any of the buttons that you actually push on it so and we had a little bit of free rein but we also want to make it we knew that we wanted to make it smaller and more dream lines so that it could fit with everything and we didn't have to adjust to many of our other assets but we also didn't want to rein in and constrict ourselves for later too so that's why I've got much smaller the mobis last model you've seen for a long time is getting a little old and we want to update it with not one version but actually two versions because as you've seen in some of the previous character videos before we've been updating our modular system for all our clothes and our armor this meant that the mobi glass is going to have to change as well

18. 00:13:57

    because you have all these different versions of jackets in shirts and things that are going to be able to take on and off and show the undershirt or maybe the over shirt or a jacket or a suit they really need to fit and be kind of an all-in-one solution what we would date is we made the new movie class much thinner and much smaller to accommodate that we didn't want to go through running through any of these weird tech restrictions where maybe you have a jacket that covers the mobi glass and to see that you'd have to pull the sleeve back and that gets just gets really complicated so we want to make sure that the players can see the mobi glass at any time it wasn't that complicated to do it was mostly a little bit of a redesign Jeremiah Lee one of our concept artists here did a 3d concept so we could really easily and quickly see it a civilian mobi glass is the one that you'll be wearing in clothes and then the military version is going to be the

19. 00:14:44

    one that you wear in your under suits and your armor something that's a little bit more rugged and it's going to be for combat use so one of the biggest challenges I'm doing the new movie class was the modular system for clothing in the armor so because the modular system is the main reason that we had to redo the mobi plans we had to go through all the different options of the different types of clothes you're going to be wearing long sleeves and jackets and under suits and that was where we really figured out that's something that was thinner was going to be better than something that was thick and bulky but also where we realized that some of our current assets might have to be just it if we made it really thin and it fit with some assets that was great but other ones might have to be pulled back so you could see it all the time we really want to make sure that's available for access because it's cool to see but also it adds a little bit of level of detail where everybody's

20. 00:15:32

    wearing one and everybody has them often everybody is eventually gonna build a customized to show how much you've spent on your mobile glass or how expensive it is or what brands you got we want to make each application very robust for the specific functionality that it's meant to serve in game but on top of that we want to introduce the ability for players to personalize his or her mobile glass such that it's more contextually relevant to his or her common tasks that another player might not actually care so much about so for instance on the home screen you have all these different widgets that you eventually be able to customize as we start adding more and more functionality in game then we would kind of fit be able to fit on the on the home screen so that's that I kind of idea behind that so fundamentally the mobile glass is a diegetic we projected UI and what this

21. 00:16:21

    means is that the UI is meant to be seen by not just you as the player but also is meant to be visible by your in-game character as well so basically your player character is aware of the UI just as you as a player are aware of it through through your screen and we do this for a couple of reasons one is because the fact that we retain the visual connection between your player character and the UI makes it much more immersive to use because we will be a we are capable game we're kind of forced to project the UI in 3d space because otherwise it just wouldn't work you know in a traditional flat 2d menu you know you just you just want to be able to read it so you need to project it at some sort of distance away for exact should be usable so we sort of do that from the get-go and that's sort of always been our driving paradigm in UI design in general for all the advantages

22. 00:17:10

    that a diegetic we projected UI has we as UI designers sort of lose a bit of control and flexibility in terms of you know being able to adjust the UI you know the UI in general so at the mercy of the display geometries and animations and so forth so if we need to change something it's not necessarily the UV is just adjusting something on our end and calling it resolved we actually need to work really closely with the other departments to ensure that the UI is usable so working with animation working with the art teams working with gameplay engineers to make sure that the user experience isn't hamper negatively so in UI design you can only subvert player expectations so much before they find your UI clunky frustrating or unusable something we absolutely don't want in our game a good rule of thumb we'll use is that you

23. 00:17:59

    should only be focusing on and changing one unique angle of your UI to ensure that the core components of the of the rest of the system remain understandable and within the expectations of the player so what I mean is that the main thing you'll see with the mobi glass that differs from traditional UI systems is that we made it as Dai jeddak as possible making sure it was immersive and stayed grounded in the game world so things like attaching it to your wrist movement tilting it back a little bit and adding visual effects to make it look like a real object in the world and not just something sitting on top of the game world the visual design style and user experience of the interface itself while interesting is fairly straightforward simple line art and shape language basic color schemes and compact information light layouts again this is because we felt we if we created an overly unique visual style coupled with the digestive Miss already it would

24. 00:18:46

    be kind of like sensory overload and would actually inhibit usage and usability and as with all UI especially in gaming that's the goal we're always trying to strive for how can I make something visually interesting and unique fun to use but also make it immediately understandable to a new user putting the UI in the game world comes with a unique set of challenges it's not just the UI sitting in a silo and it's on top of the game and it's an afterthought it's something that needs to be integrated with animation with audio with the VFX team so it's super rewarding to work with all those different teams and be able to build a system together instead of just working with the UI team alone what we do in terms of audio is obviously not trying to break the immersion that deep different artists that put in the work but instead we try to and that's that play experience by addressing them

25. 00:19:36

    sonically so one of the first things we did was basically sitting down with Zane and we went through different concepts that were done for the MOBA class as well as is listening to different references as well as music as we wanted to create a soundscape whenever bring the mobis us up so that we could emerge to play in a more soothing stage what came out of them that we wanted to keep the player not just the feeling of using sci-fi to like suffer a sci-fi futuristic tool but we also want to give the player the feeling of using an actual electronic device so you know visually we would have the screen flickering or different images distorting as well every now and then so in order to address that we use coil pickup microphone and what's really

26. 00:20:25

    particular about this microphones is that they do not reduce sun waves into its own electric signals but instead we're able to capture those electromagnetic fields created by electric devices so you can actually hear our disk of our computer working or you killed you can basically hear like your mobile phone working under the hood and things of that and that really helped us to bring that extra layers of reality when adding them to more cynthy tones one of those challenges basically trying to emerge the player into a different state so usually you know like usually when you are in a specific area you will have you would hear ambience it would hear like whole different things happening around you but again we also wait to create something like another state like on a soothing moment whenever using the

27. 00:21:13

    mobile glass so creating a soundscape like another role ambiences for that it was something that I've been trying to do and read or reduce you more and more times just to basically trying to make it more interesting and and relaxing [Music]

28. 00:22:39

    so another challenge is that because we are a first-person game we don't necessarily see much of a character and frame except if you're for instance to look down at your feet I mean at the same time we need to be able to make it apparent that your character is aware of the UI so how do we do that and that's one of the reasons why we've always opted to have the arm visible on screen is because that's the visual connection between the UI and the character so the interesting thing about the starmap and where we want to take in the future is that the star map will actually be the same display text being used for the radar and you can sort of think the star map as sort of like a google maps of the star citizen universe it's basically we eventually want to make it whereby you can zoom in far enough and it basically turns into a radar in a ship or your surroundings

29. 00:23:27

    like who's who's around me if I'm when first-person we've initially showed us the star map at Gamescom last year which is was basically to be able to quantum travel to a location but since then we've actually iterated on it heavily we've done a sprint for the star map which involved VFX gameplay engineering audio and so forth to really drive this UI to the next level so we have all kinds of new effects in the star map we've iterated on the user experience of the star map and just made it much more visually impressive than it was you know even just a few weeks prior the star map is the first implementation of the world display system the world display system basically allows us to preview different kinds of data from different kind of sources so these different kind of

30. 00:24:16

    sources could be radar navigational day data could be ships people on your radar could be celestial objects could be all kinds of data and the thing about the world display system is that we can preview it and zoom zoom in on it as a matter of it rotate around it so displayed so that we have like a whole view of whatever we want to show this dar map is a very good implementation of that because it shows planets stars system galaxies you can zoom into stations stuff like that later on we'll be able to show area information minimaps maybe even implement the radar into the same star map so if you zoom in you'll see radar data like blips of

31. 00:25:04

    different vehicles different ships on your radar and if you zoom out you'll be able to see the navigational data of celestial objects of for example a star your planets moons and that's but like that's the basic of the world display system for the star map have been mainly involved in working on the Polish of the star map that involves getting some good navigation inside your star map so if you zoom in zoom out if you rotate yourself use right mouse input feels very smooth and feels like the user experience is right for your star map I've also been working on the animations like little animations when you when the star map pops and like this everything

32. 00:25:54

    zooms in it feels kind of animated it gives a little bit of an extra edge on the star map and the visuals so the visuals i've been working on as well as like adding some kind of backdrop lines and different kind of stuff to make the star Mike look better the biggest code challenge for getting star map to work is kind of translating the positional data of the world so your planets are somewhere in this large universe and these have to be kind of translated into this very small screen it's a very basic game kind of problem but it's kind of hard to get it right I guess because you have to work with transforms and the rotation the translation and the scaling

33. 00:26:44

    of your objects you have to make these big objects and kind of compress them into this small screen you have to structure your code very well in order to get like the results you want that like these big objects are these small things on your display so we've also done a revamp of the emission manager app which we've actually now named the contracts manager and the contracts manager is the mobi glass app which manages all missions between mission givers in the PU as well as eventually player-created missions the app is now split amongst a number of different screen flows the first one being the available contract screen which is where you'll be able to view all available contract opportunities within your particular area view the details of each contract such as the reward and who it was posted by as well as explicitly accept those contracts as

34. 00:27:32

    well we have a pending screen also which displays the particular contracts which have been sent to you directly via the game or in conversation say for instance when you're in a meeting with a mission giver like Mars Eckhart players can then accept or reject these contracts you then also have a particular screen which displays the contracts which you've accepted and from here you'll be able to view all the dynamically generated list of objectives for each particular contract as well as track or abandon those contracts a contract history screen will allow players also to review the ones which you've previously completed or failed later down the line we want to introduce another screen in the app which will allow players the ability to actually create their own contracts and post it on the available contracts board another application

35. 00:28:19

    which will be we will be introducing is the inventory manager which will allow players the ability to view all items that their character has in possession across the stars in universe you know from small antique coins all the way up to something more significant like say a capital a large capital ship so you make it easier to navigate amongst potentially thousands of items players can specify a filter and also items can be sorted and searched amongst another purpose of this app will be to allow the ability for players to transfer items from one cargo box to another or from ship to ship as long as both the origin and destination are in the same relative location this F along with many others like the contracts manager in the star map will play crucial role in aiding the various professions like mining trading transport and so forth so as you can see we have a lot in

36. 00:29:06

    development for the upcoming release a lot of a new apps that we're doing on top of the general overhaul in the mobile glass so what you'll see you is basically a very initial feature set in all of these different apps and we'll be continuing to expand on this going forward you know introducing more robust features and more robust functionality for additional gameplay mechanics that will eventually be introduced I'm kind of excited to get this into the players hands and and seeing what they think of it so in last week's feature we highlighted how we're using the render to texture tech to create holograms and calm calls in real time now you got to see it in use with the mobi glass it just goes to show how all our new features are really coming together ya know they definitely are and one thing I'd like to mention is I saw a few what's so special you can rated the

37. 00:29:54

    texture and lots of engines or even DirectX after we showed the show last week and my answer is yes that is correct if that was all we were doing but the key thing is our ability to open up an arbitrary number of secondary views on to the world and render them to a 2d texture or more importantly holographically into a 3d volume inside the main rendering pipeline and I don't know of any engine that currently supports the second part of what RTT does so lots of people cheat with tricks like placing a character model with a special shader directly into the scene to make it look like a hologram and that's how our movie would achieve the sort of hologram effect we seen something like Star Wars we actually broadcast in 3d to of volumes somewhere in the game and that's super cool so there you go I did graph being able to digest we render the mobile be glass interface inside the world including holographic versions of your character ship or items that have

38. 00:30:42

    simply sending you to a menu screen was a goal of ours from the beginning and I'm really happy that we're getting there is fantastic now say that all backwards super fast that's all for today's episode a big thanks to all of our subscribers your support is what makes shows like a TV bug smashers lawmakers and citizen of the star as possible there's also a new happy hour game dev tomorrow at 12 p.m. Pacific this time members of the lore team joined the show to discuss their process and ask you for help in crafting lore that could appear in a future post cool finally thanks to all our backers making this game has been an incredible journey and still ongoing and one that's only been made possible by your continued feedback and support so thank you very much thank you very much and until next week we will see you around thank you for watching so if you want to

39. 00:32:00

    keep it with the latest and greatest in the star citizen squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon