Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Adding Life to Space

16 November 201800:58:121,348 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:07
[Music] hi everybody welcome to another episode of reverse the verse live the only show that's done live and on Fridays man it's I I'm not gonna tell you what kind of morning I've had joining us on the show this week our members from the VFX team over at foundry 42 UK let's go ahead and just get right to the introductions get started starting from what is this my right your my right Ben tell us who you are and what you do for star citizen so I'm a senior member of the graphics team at star citizen I broke on shaders rendering things preventing crashes causing crashes yes in the context of
00:01:00
the gas cloud stuff that we did I've sort of been leading that as I just seem to get into doing anything to do with volumetrics to be honest anything to do with being that guy well I imagine as a programmer you basically every time every time somebody has some crazy harebrained VFX ideas it's got to come across your plate at some point actually we because I I hate the effects terribly when I dealt with particles and stuff so we actually haven't there's another guy that is almost he's almost in your team now isn't he he's a he's still technically annexing yeah Simon is yeah
00:01:48
yeah it's your is your man now yeah but yeah I've been thrust back into into the VFX team fire by gas clouds and bodymetrix exactly that is how it tends to work here it's just when you think you're out of something they as this phrase is this saying is maybe maybe I dragged you into my it really steep sounds like the cart there it's like I think therefore I am let's just talk about the cart for the next hour I'm gonna say yes everything you doubted everything in the world until he realized the only thing he could not doubt was that he doubted bold statement for a person who's called like
00:02:41
a vehicle the car it's been that kind of morning everybody that's been Perry up to over to his left is Mike stone Mike Stone tell us who you are and what you do for stars isn't yes I'm the VFX director I started with cloud Imperium and yeah I direct all the visual effects including the obvious ones explosion spa smoke steam all that kind of thing and yeah I this guy collector right yeah under got a you know got a quite quite a big team actually a VFX artists and programmers and yeah yeah it's a it's a it's a good team is there's lots others we get off sort of fingers in all the pies really don't we in particularly obviously the gas cloud stuff lots of VFX work involved in that yeah oh good
00:03:31
question I think this not 20 definitely not 20 well as well we've got two we've got two artists in frankfurt office so we've got Caleb and Ollie and then we've got Jake Jake Aaron Riley you and I so yeah six yeah six yeah eight so eight is we've got we've got two dedicated gameplay programmers who focused purely on the effects as well we got Simon as Ben mentioned he does although all the amazing particle improvements that's dust down to Simon and we've gotten better QA will you a guy who tests all my stuff and make sure it's all all safe to to put into the game and we've got Ben other band par not been Perry Empire he production presentation so yeah yeah
00:04:26
and we talk to you guys obvious oh yeah you're a bigger yeah that big that was almost like I lost count I know nobody's ever looked at at Jerrod and said that guy's math or simple addition in that matter but somebody somebody will have counted that in the in the in the audience they'll tell us how many people that was last but certainly not least me he'll once you tell us who you are and what you do for star citizen yeah uh uh yeah I'm a co VFX artist and I do whatever Mike tells me to do now basically just particle affects you affects any and a little bit of code and so shady work as well yeah yeah all the interference stuff yeah yeah yeah so a little bit of code but I hate graphics
00:05:15
programming yeah I'm sensing a theme shows up to a great start I mean oh you were one of the few people who had two panels at citizencon yet yet yet a he started your day with it with a panel in the in the smaller second stage and then joined everybody else ever the larger craft in this stage how did you end up doing two pounds what's going on there well I told him to yeah basically I'm doing whatever Mike's tells me to do and he was like okay how about two panels or four panels okay you you almost killed me with the start of your panel when you walked out there and you and you looked at because this panel is called the art digital illusion I guess well yeah I actually did not invent a name so I honestly
00:06:08
could not remember how it was cold but you know I just thought should I should clarify what is it actually about as our digital illusion it kind of doesn't sound like the inflexible so I thought I'll just make it clear when people are you saying you know more than our marketing department but the joking aside it was it was fantastic let me help ya crazy losing their audio today alright here we go yeah alright yes sir I was just saying so it was great that me have got to do that presentation because it's not the
00:06:56
the particle system is something that has improved so so much over the last couple years it's just it's really nice to be able to kind of share with the backers exactly what because a lot of that stuff goes into the game but you know necessarily see what goes into it yeah yeah we have another talk about like the Coryell and such gas cloud but I it was not a single place in which we could show all all the new tech for the VFX all the new content and such so we had this idea to kind of go through all the new stuff well actually have even more than we shown but like yeah within that time slot that we had we was like 20 minutes or so we just wanted to show as much VFX and cool stuff that we could and was a real nice opportunity yeah yeah you bring up a good point that there's obviously a just one or two
00:07:46
panels this isn't on you couldn't talk about everything that makes up VFX and star citizen we put a pet we put a threat up earlier this week where we started collecting questions from backers who maybe couldn't be here live and why not and we discovered through the course of the question collection that a lot of people there are enough people out there that perhaps don't know what is VFX and what is it BFX let's just start things off and with with a real simple kind of place setting question what constitutes B effects with in star citizen like what what is the the I'm going to look at the game when they login at 3:35 and the PG right now what are the things they're looking at that are VFX versus the things that are other art departments or other gameplay departments okay second so again like to state the obvious ones
00:08:34
you've got when the ship explodes you've got that that what we call the death mask you've got that that's all particles that is that is VFX so all of the particle system stuff that's all the effects man there's so many there's so many things the effects isn't just a case of it's not just a case of just adding sparks to a level or that's part of it but there's also there's implementation of you know this gameplay implementation as well using the effects to to kind of give the player readability or on gameplay inputs and things like that but essentially if you're looking at a game and you're thinking whether it's VFX or not probably if it's not a character and it's like kind of like a sprite thingy it's it's like VFX so basically if it's stuff rather if it's stuff but not like
00:09:31
geometry it's probably VFX but at the same time behind all the VFX is some graphics programming involved yeah like even putting a spark on screen that's like it starts with with someone programming all that stuff and then we have a tool that allows us to control all of it and we initially have like a list of parameters to control movement of stuff yeah yeah and that's what we do more or less it's also dynamic as well as note especially in our game like the V effects are dynamically controlled so the thruster effects which is something I've talked about in the past the engine trails fallen off yeah and you know the coil presentation that we did all of that is dynamic the effect so it's it's sometimes used in our game too to add extra detail to environments as well and give life to environment so it kind of touches a lot of things really doesn't
00:10:19
it yeah but one thing that it's not it's not lighting like I see it very often like people think if there is a light its VFX but it's not we have to decay the people to - putting lights on the level so if you're thinking like okay there is too much light there is jobbing that's not the effects we do like fire we do like smoke we do sparks we also do some kind of more systemic effects that show gameplay like what's the boundary of this effect example in like real-time strategy games very often you got very clear visuals like shockwave that ends up this specific region that's that's all coming from the VFX but not like light not didn't of general mood of the room or a space that doesn't come from the effects but the effects do kind of add on the top of it although to out sort of a confusion
00:11:08
we do have lights you know effects but there never is crossover it's never icky like yes we don't cast shadows it's not that precise and yeah you never put so many sparks to lit up a whole room do you think it's fair to say we're kind of somewhere in between the art and design teams yes we're serving both aren't we we're kind of we're trying to make the environments look more alive but equally we're trying to we're trying to sell gameplay as well even for things like a muzzle flash on a gun you know we help the feel of it as well yeah the gun is not always but like dynamics yeah you know I think I think you hit it right there Mike it's bringing bringing an environment to bringing an area of space to life it's
00:11:57
adding adding personality to to to into any obscene or location I think is a great way you you you demonstrated that really well in your in your panel where you basically you showed us the glass cloud with absolutely you should not not that the test level with one with the ladders in the box is oh yeah there's a simple boring nondescript you know collection of items and you showed us how just adding VFX and VFX alone could bring that that a that simple scene to life and make it seem like so much more than it actually was and if I climb a lot to show for you a little bit all right so we are taking so we are taking questions in two places guys this show if you're watching live on twitch at twitch.tv slash star
00:12:45
citizen you can switch your questions in the twitch chat we can preface your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets that will help our community management team pull it out from all the other conversation you can also submit your questions live in spectrum which is our spoke communication platform available in Roberts space industries comm same process there to pull them in they'll send it to us right off the bat let's go to some of the questions that came in from the thread throughout the week as 3:35 went live on PTU this week we are we are we are seeing players experience a planet for the first time in star system we've had moons and as much as much as we see the moons referred to as mine it's quite often we're now actually we now actually have our very first planet in star system and a lot of the discussion especially since
00:13:34
they they turned our planetary rotations on and now they can see day/night cycles and so like that has been about the clouds about about cloud tech is is cloud tech something that falls within the realm of VFX well Terry clouds because we know the presentation was about volumetric clouds our volumetric clouds the same thing as planetary clouds so most of the stuff to do with planets is handled by a distinct team in Frankfort so we've I know that there's something on casting scheduled for like he's got an idea for how to deal with the issue that planets have they tend to have like a cloud deck that extends its extends a really long way away it's sort of it curves with the
00:14:22
surface of the planet and that kind of thing also I think like planetary clouds have a very specific way that they tend to get lit the you have to sort of skew much more closer to reality than we had to for the the space gas cloud I think so he's he's cautious about just saying yeah let's just use the gas cloud tech because if we did that right off the bat it would look pretty terrible they need to be dynamic as well don't known the bond them on the planets you want yeah I mean there's a still room that if if when he's developing it he decides that he wants the nearest area like the nearest so many kilometers to be sort of generated from the same source that his tech is is rendering the rest of the
00:15:10
clouds light suppose they they look great in the distance but when you get close they tend to they start to break down or they don't solve all the problems that you would see if you actually have to see a ship weaving in and out of them if something goes kind of off-key like that at that point I think it would make sense that we could sort of we could generate from his source data like sort of create on the fly some sort of procedurally generated gas cloud stuff and I don't know if it feels like these things should be able to yeah yeah I asked the question because it's another thing I wanted to point out that you know when the question thread was titled the art of space the show I renamed it to bringing life to space you guys work on space the effects see on the gas cloud tag the contrails or ships is like
00:15:59
that because planets are all the rage right now a lot of our questions are assumed to be focused on planets but that is actually not the team that you're not the team that work on planet side-effects well we know we actually are specifically about the yeah might think there's all the all the particle effects on planets so all the kind of dust that you see on the kind of desert biomes and the the pollen that you see in the air on on the I can't think what it's called where all the kind of forests forested part is yeah yeah we do all the effects in my team you know caleb actually in frankfurt does there's a lot of the the planetary effects I guess more watch we get these clouds will have to do yeah thing like clouds is an interesting one
00:16:50
but for me I'm really excited about tackling the weather effects and you can't have rain without clouds so maybe you can but in my head you can yeah we've got you know there's lots and lots of scope for really cool stuff to do with with the folks I think with the weather you know yeah yeah we hope you're gonna get some odd space weather on very odd planets you know acid rain or lightning we've got the means to kind of create those visual settlements oh yeah yeah well you open the door for planet questions on that so I'm gonna do it then will you use the gas cloud technology develops to create weather effects like rain and thunder or win in the sky on planets and moons or and if so will it be a static or a
00:17:40
dynamically driven environment like a wrong question really gas cloud tech has nothing to do with well has but not directly it doesn't directly kind of do weather effects you know because the clouds well yeah the cloud but kind of weather effects are the effects so they don't come from the gas cloud check and if we can drive some of the yeah but we would yeah we can use we can use the same systems like the particle yeah the input crap you know the weather parameters or whatever those promises would be we'll use those parameters to drive visuals for sure I think there's a lot of similarities at least from our side of things and maybe not so much yeah thank you like the all the work we're doing to all sort of
00:18:29
lightning strikes within the cloud as well presumably they work from yeah and that's the point when we make these kind of systems we're trying to make them in such a way that they are we're gonna get maximum usage throughout the the game you know it's not like this can only work with gas clouds as long as it's got the the input whatever they employ is we can we can provide the output yeah yeah yeah like in terms of using the gas cloud for other environmental effects like I don't know if you know if we had dust storms or something yeah well it'll be an interesting one in that the you'd need you'd probably want the gas cloud in some ways because it it's quite good at like sort of filling a space and yeah so that can provide but we don't really have the ability to update every frame
00:19:19
so it couldn't be like boiling away yeah but then when we go back to VFX the outer edge of it you could make it oil this is exactly what we're doing you know with it that's essentially a static thing but we've got we're using velocity feels to kind of push those particles along the surface and yeah you mentioned like a dust storm I know our conversations at the end about that and that's something we could definitely do you know yeah one of the questions that came in from a live chat says that but there was running mention clouds that you were working on that you were showing it Susan time what they'd be affected by passing objects would like what can they swirl if you try to fly through them I think this comes back to that again doesn't mean the actual core gas cloud tech couldn't swell a first start and the voxels of that are quite a lot bigger than a ship
00:20:07
I think I don't think one of them ended up being but it's I remember that you managed to lose a caterpillar you put a caterpillar in the level and then you lost it just by flying away from it wouldn't even see it like we had a test video before we finish the whole kind of trailer and someone asked me I think with you if we can have a derelict and get somewhere you know just to kind of sell the scale and I had like four or five cats they are actually in the video but you don't see them because they're so tiny but the point is like what she's saying that it was single voxel of the gas cloud is way bigger than the vehicle so if that would move you you would essentially get like a Minecraft type of effect
00:20:53
we're in like a blockage it moves and just a very slow fire yeah but at the same time if you put a layer of particles there they yeah then you can kind of virality is whirling them as the ships fly through them are they we do have a gas cloud contrails they were seen in the in the video that's one of the things like gas kilometer itself has a bunch of data than we can use so I don't think think we can I get like swirls but we do have like contrails so that there are visuals and I see something happening with the vehicle as we fly through the gas cloud and possibly when we exit you will still be in that transitioning areas yeah yeah I would has x effect is on particles like physics my effect I don't know some sort of the entities or markup or something
00:21:43
through and it'll yeah well I I don't want to kind of like commit to things that we haven't done yet but I I totally want that we're just looking at a tech demo someone du livre do for that goes like a helicopter yes why use someone made it with like vector fuel somehow like a sail for the helicopter weight and they push in the rack I mean I just come off that okay stay over weekend and Monday morning we'll be finished just this big I've just made a new task for me how well I wanna that's a that's a trident to tried and true reverse the verse
00:22:34
happening that's a people making work for other people to over the course of the show it's like it I can show you in a special folder in my Outlook let's delete that's not that's dedicated specific to emails that come after our TVs like what did you come in as do what did you say we're going to do so we'll just add that one to the list I we talk to Lizzie watches this sorry Simon during the during this compound he talked a lot about how space is actually quite boring you know a lot lots of big lots of lots of areas of nothing between two points how do you go about finding that sweet spot between realism which would be just absolutely nothing and this urge to just fill in every single nook and cranny with yeah that's a really good question I actually I think
00:23:22
yes some people might find it boring and maybe we've used the word boring but there's nothing it's it's actually in our game it's gonna be really nice to have the contrast so there might be I think I might have even said this in the presentation but there might be times when you go into a gas cloud saying you know in the PU one day you might go into a gas garden there's nothing there it's just it's it's just the the VDB as it was and there's nothing wrong with that you know that's just gonna be pretty there's not gonna be any kind of event you know like I've seen people on the internet after seeing the gas cloud demo we've we've shown we were talking that maybe we want to fill every single area with all the stuff which is not entirely true is that what you mentioned like yeah we're on that contrast where you see very dense area like in real life like for example you can have very kind
00:24:12
of rich storm with wind and like the brief lying and wind we wonder but we also want empty places so we can kind of enjoy these areas with all the stuff you know any contrast with you appreciate what you seeing well if you if you're not if you don't have it then it's all same so it's not good let's put pointing out like going to your presentation you've just filled that area with all with the stuff that's not like we're gonna feel like this is all of the cool tools that we've got that's one specific room had so many things we it just felt right to have so many things in one kind of engine room but you would go like the the following corridor it's pretty empty really hmm so need that kind of you know yeah are you one of the images at least
00:25:03
one of the images you use to show when you were showing what real space was was from the osiris-rex asteroid cataloging program and you use for other imagery to say yeah this is space it's kind of boring and whatever I heard from them there are bathrooms there are starters who work for the other I saw that yes I heard from them so I'm here to defend their honor and say that it wasn't boring it's beautiful that's why I'm saying I don't think it was the bear a little bit on there quite boring there like I would bring a book at least one book I would bring yeah could you bring that's not quite my candle because I want to make a joke about losing the screen because of interference oh I
00:25:52
can't find a way to make it work a hole laughs for you a question from the live chat can clouds have mass as in some sort of exploded tank full of gooey stuff in cloud shaped that can clog up your ships intakes or something okay King clouds become obstructions oh yeah we've so that's not come online yeah has it but this the flight model too yes yes yeah I yes - we're not going - yes - oh no no no no we don't have a name it's not called lousy well I put too many to point and when you put too many 2.0 is out there it's not ifcs 2.0 okay flight model next flight model next we
00:26:40
need to come up with a battery we keep going the new flight well anyway my friend we're gonna call it flight model one go through it won't catch on go through my model zero no just give up no okay one model X yeah so we've we've had some discussions in terms of doing the gas cloud in squadron like do we get drag when you fly if you fly too close to a wall does it start to drag we've actually been told that you get drag you get lift like all of the atmospheric flight stuff effectively and that's Titan happen because there's there's data there that says there's atmosphere so I think there's a there's a sort of slider to control to sort of distinguish like how much is there for the visuals versus how much is there physically because they're yeah they're separate
00:27:28
systems yeah so so so the denser is the more the more is going to kind of buff you around and so yeah we should get buffeting and yeah left and so it's theoretically because I guess we could make it so thick that it just chews you up yeah yeah somebody in the Twitter says like so we tell Lando the BFS isn't just closeted the whole thing at the beginning of the show about how VFS wasn't just clouds I can't help that you guys are asking cloud questions I read the questions you guys send me you guys send me cloud questions ivory cloud questions trying to step up to Lando okay here's here's an on Claude question Thank You Chet are there any plans to use VFX for small critters such as insects or fish like like like an electric like an electric eel or something I don't know
00:28:16
yes don't be nice yeah we I mean yeah we've got we've got insects technically in the game I suppose even flies yeah and I know it's been talked about we've we've got I don't know if it's ever been mentioned but there's a Boyd system which technically isn't particles but there'll be I think they'll be some crossover with particles on a much smaller scale and then Boyd's for probably probably not particles electric eels that would be mine so physically flyer I mean you could do it I think that'll get geometry on the GPU barcode system we might do more animals kinda like I've seen us like this example from what was it in famous second son I think hmm they actually had
00:29:06
fish driven by particles and they they did something very simple where they passed on the position of the player to that particle system so whenever you were close to fish kind of fish when you say they were kind of being pushed away and that's not saying we get through it but why not that's the same subject that the same tech that makes the sparks that fall like from the from the Hammerhead engine room when it's damaged and hit the geometry and it bounces off the geometry the same tech but make the fish particle so that they swim around yeah yeah we go over a bunch of different options to do different sorts of movements and I believe we can kind of mimic movement of fish especially
00:29:55
that'll be we've got coral noise which essentially means that no line can never cross each other which means you can spawn a bunch of fish and they never gonna you know go through another fish I can't believe the talk about fish fish has been a part of the star citizen conversations since the very beginning imagine like you're flying cladius and you're hunting a fish would the nose of you cladius like kind of impaling them affogato well you've seen words well they're I think it's a really good idea all right let's talk about shadows there specifically shadows for dynamic objects
00:30:43
this person says that sometimes they let their let down by the image quality any plans to address this or is it too big a technical hurdle basically basically the the shadows that are cast by dynamic yeah so we've we've been we've had discussions about this on and off for years in fact so a lot of the stuff that we've done for for static shadows on that you know we presold we put like a static shadow area around like your hero location or something to to at least get the static shadows on it we've had some kinds of discussions about trying to try to more easily support more of them but then also trying to support like live ones that update yeah so that we can within a certain distance maybe you'd you'd sort
00:31:33
of pick out where you need some dynamic shadows and you draw them over there or well this is one of like a dozen ways that we've sort of talked about trying to claw back some resolution and not spend all the memory on the GPU on it the reason we've not actually got onto it is though that it doesn't unlike a lot of the other things that we work on it doesn't really block any of the other content teams like that nobody's waiting on us to make the shadows nice before they can implement something so it's always it's always something that we could do we could do we could check in and it would just be done so yeah yeah you you you bring up a good point it's folks who follow our development very closely I mean the folks who who watch a TV or watch our TV watch calling all that and stuff you can probably get a
00:32:21
sense over the months since and such about how important priorities are and and and why and how often things shift you know oh I thought you were doing this next and then now we find out that that this isn't next this other thing is next and a lot of times that comes up because of what you just talked about blockers blockers you find out it's like well we were going to move to this thing next but to do that that work is dependent on somebody else finishing their work and their work is not done yet so so things tend to get reprioritize quite often based on dependencies it's the things that free up more people if you could work on this and it allows three teams to do their job once you're done or you can work on this and it allows the one team to do it or you can do this and nobody else is affected by
00:33:07
it makes it a pretty easy decision mm-hmm what you're going to be working on next I mean the static shadows work in theory was was down at that priority it's just I think we reached a certain point where people are putting things in and it did just sort of look terrible and so we were like okay well we can move this up up the priorities just a little bit we can at least get static shadows on a target location just so that I guess partly there is a blocker there though that the art team needs to see what as what their crew they're what they create what they're creating does it look okay in game like does it they can't just put a load of stuff in and say this is gonna look great when shadows finally happen right so being able to see something in the distance
00:33:54
where shadows on it see that it actually does look good I guess that was that was kind of a blocker for them yeah but yeah are things like fire fires it BFX right very much so I chat are asking if there are different types of fires you know like you know you always see five fires you know red fire red flame blue flame yellow flames like that raging small if you how far along are you on fire attack well there's a couple of ways we could answer that we've got really yeah so we've got ask this question to a watchlist okay go ahead answer but we're gonna we're gonna we're adding this person to a watchlist okay so I guess do you want to talk about the textiles so
00:34:44
kind of the first part of the question is kind of what types of fire do we have and we actually do have our internal style guide so we do know that we we should have like classic fire which is all range from red and you get smoke and such but we also got obviously other technology such as you know John fondue or weather and these they do eat the as a race as as a technology that comes from a different kind of source they use different materials and as in real life different materials they do produce different types of colors and flames for example I know you're kind of hob in the kitchen will give you a certain kind of slimy color and if you burn a torch it's gonna give you like
00:35:32
orange stuff so we did we do have different varieties of fire and it's not only about the color but also about the amount of smoke about how quickly this mode dissipates how thick it is how much light do we image what textures do we use so how it looks like how many sparks do we have if any stuff like that yeah we kind of loosely tie that in with the we describe it is like the efficiency of the the thing that's burning so so a low-tech ship would be the oily kind of classic smoky fires me have just described and then you might have liked it there was a high tech equivalent it would be well I mean this kind of sci-fi I think I described it it's like sci-fi blue so far yeah far less smoke in fact no smoke much
00:36:20
more kind of lens flare style so yeah we've got very very clear we know like when we when we start to tackle a specific thing like a specific ship we bet we know that the manufacturer per our internal stock IDs is a certain tech type and that helps us define what those what those visuals look like and even if that's not something that's totally obvious to be playing the game it I think it kind of gives us a bit of a consistent visual language throughout the game and it kind of gives us our initial cues about what this thing is going to look like I think I'm not sorry Jared I think another pilot question I think it's quite interesting because we we're going to be working on hazard zones in the future and that is we're going to be we're going to be looking at the behavior of fire in the game as well so the room system itself if there's oxygen
00:37:08
then it should burn more the the fire itself could contributor to removing oxygen from that room propagating fire I'm not saying that like we'll be able to just set fire to the low in the world because that'd be able to stretch too far but we've got a lot of plans in terms of the functionality of the fire as well yeah what about fire in different environments like like 0g there's the size and shape of a fire change with on on planets or moons with lesser gravity or up in space a ship that has no gravity whatsoever well all our particles are built to work we've got like we've basically got gravity is not something that really defines the kind of shape of fire if you look up the physical properties of a
00:37:58
fire itself like probably there's not oh yeah it doesn't disagree with you on the sure what I mean is there's more to it there's like pressure there's the source and stuff like that yeah I think I think it's having a bit with what you're asking before Jared about the balance between completely realistic and and pure Hollywood I know that there'll be people saying well why did he got a fireball in space because it's not technically possible we we straddle the line between Hollywood and real life deliciously yeah from fire to water is there any do you guys touch Hurston added oceans added water to the game is there any any
00:38:48
bit of that that the VFX team touches splashes sometimes we have we haven't yet I mean people people who you've kind of experienced the water in the game on though that there's no kind of impact effects yet but and that's primarily because again the planet team have kind of worked on that that core course heck and yeah for sure we're going to be leading to our impacts to that probably maybe even a fish fish yes a good idea well splashing figure see how with the fish they go right back to the gas clouds is there been any talk about gas clouds that can damage our ships Wow effects that gas cars can have two ships on your demonstration but yeah I mean
00:39:39
that's that is them really isn't it - we've got a whole bunch of houses we want to put in there I think I think we've sort of skewed away from the gas cloud itself damaging the ship like yeah gas cloud it's watch inside the dust cloud that kills you yeah although we don't have that thing from cellto in there as far as I know we don't know what the thing from the the solar movie big eye I mean I've not checked everywhere around it but we I've never seen it when you guys do show off the planetary cloud tech that's to think on one common thread that has come up over and over and over again has been about crusader and and what it means for
00:40:29
something for it entire like gas cloud planet like crusader what are some of the attempted want art related challenges that that you guys can foresee because I know we're we just showed that we're working on our Corp on on a TV we're also doing some work on micro tech right now when it comes time to work on crusader is the gas cloud tech something that can apply to crusader or are we starting with from something wholly new or at scratch you go on this one i think we have we've had discussions about this we'd really don't want to start an entirely new piece of tech just to do crusader obviously i think that the basic plan for it was literally take take everything that we're doing and throw them all at crusader like I think these are these were sort of very rough plans as far as
00:41:21
I remember them but it was sort of like if we're doing separate like planetary clouds and gas clouds then we could have a layer of Lannister clouds we could have a layer of gas cloud we could have like a sort of palm texture like the the deeper areas maybe that you wouldn't get into we could have a couple of layers of palm textures just sort of moving around to give you give you the sense of all the extra layers you could get the gas cloud layer you could embed the floating platforms and the cities and everything into I guess I think that there would be a lot of X things to solve along the way using gas clouds in atmosphere I think would be an issue at the moment the assorting thing it's not just the sorting thing but people who've done quite nice cloud
00:42:10
demos they have some sort of solution for light coming from outside you know like right the skybox needs to shine through the clouds rich lighting which we don't have to deal with in space as much but yeah it's pretty pretty much just layer up everything that we've got and sort of see where the edge cases are oh well what's still missing and then put VFX over them like oh if you if you if you don't know Crusader Google starts to dissing Crusader Crusader is the plan it's you know everybody's got their favorite planet favorite system whatever crusaders been the one that this line that has been looking forward to for a long long time it's Cloud City maybe I mean it scares the hell out of me it'll be cool it's it's I if you said it
00:43:04
scares the hell of me but honestly in my experience with star system which has been almost five years now the things that scare us tend to be the most impressive it's I think I I think when we when we come at something that's like you see a problem you see a challenge like oh yeah we know how to do that it's like alright you know it's done and it's good it's whatever it's when something scares us when something goes oh how the hell are we gonna do that that's when all the the best creative comes together and I'm always consistently amazed when honestly obviously the cast clouds similar kind of thing in the original it was like wow this is this is technically I could a challenge more for you it was an interesting first task to be given a song that you first time would take me
00:43:55
on a bit of a tour so I could get used to the different engine systems and Ali said he's some concept art for a gas-fired classical yeah just do raw metric clothes that no one has ever done before I should be fine with attempts that we tried and failed don't do those how about during that during your presentation we showed lightning in the gas clouds his lightning is lightning going to do something there's lightning something that will cast shadows yeah actually we did have shadows for lightning lights but I think there was a buck and they didn't work the rink last minute but didn't record it the player did I mean the lights are there sort of there at
00:44:50
the weather lightning comes from and where it hits like we don't have every individual zigzag of it emitting light individually binos yeah you don't even need to have it because we can increase the radius of the sides so in between you still get some shininess and how do you do really care from visual point of view is kind of it's so fast first of all you don't even see that there is light missing in between second of all see kind of impact and kind of destruction happening after so two lights are good enough we've had a number of questions all related to a planetary weather effects what can you tell us about your involvement planetary weather effects and where we're going it's gonna sound like the same answer
00:45:38
really as what's but with the the planet team like those guys these things that they're working on the once there's a couple of things that are going to come in they're going to get done and finished that will then kind of open the floodgates for us to do our thing if that makes sense we've got tons and tons of cool ideas for weather and it's one of the things that actually really excited me about pilots in the first place when I first kind of sort of sort of the guys in Frankfurt I was like oh wow yeah we could we could do tornadoes and dust storms and rain showers and all that kind of thing so we we totally got plans to do all that we're just waiting on a few key things first before we can really really go for it yeah I want to I need rain on a train over Louisville to
00:46:26
really sell get me to that Blade Runner yeah so the thing about that is because it's not purely a particles thing because we could make a rain effect easily we need to we need to have rain affecting how the shade is look you know on the visor and canopy and things like that so it's not something that the VFX team alone are going to be resolved in Italy the graphics though is the complex system really Mike yeah getting to wetness you having like puddles and such getting I don't know maybe even changes to the flight model during rain or storms and possibly if the storms happening next water kind of fish flying out of it I mean not amazed at that like you can do particle rain close-up but there's got to be some point where like if you
00:47:14
if you're looking at a rainstorm coming in on the horizon you can always see that there's rain you can see like this volumetric there was flag of rain and that that eventually turns into actual rain so that so we'd need something to do that that excites me actually being up in space and seeing the rainstorm below you like you go in towards that planet that that's what excites me seeing that that storm happening when you're you're safe in space from it but that doesn't mean that it has to be seamless when we do it well it doesn't okay it's like it's real you know it's like oh that's a storm in the distance but now I'm flown and I'm in the storm so lots of stuff to biking if I can start in orbit and I can come down through the rain clouds and come down to
00:48:03
Louisville and come down to a single person standing on top of a building doing the Roy batty monologue over face over IP in the rain that will be like I'm done at that point that's all I need for the star citizen you give me the accident you land the ship on them and accidentally accidentally let's go from let's go from the planets up to the there's the stars will we see something like coronal mass ejections or solar flares and if so any ideas about how they'll affect gameplay even capable of getting that close to a star well it's definitely on the list of things to do to make the effect that close I mean like I think this is this as well yeah going going
00:48:54
close to a star is a is a huge technical task but sort of doesn't give you a lot of gameplay but I know it's sort of on everyone's it tends to be on people's lists if you regardless of sensor just the Sun the point if you'd the effects themselves yeah it's on it's on are definitely on our backlog and I've chaired briefly it's hot regarding gameplay permutations for that but I'm not gonna speak for Todd I'm not gonna speak for design on what the gameplay implications are but I think you're right like logically you'd think well the game plan vacations are if you go towards it you get so close you die so yeah graphics wise the only issue is that well there are many issues but one of the significant issues is that we tend to treat the Sun as like as like a small ball in the distance that there
00:49:44
are various equations that kind of fairly reasonably approximate what that's going to do to the lighting when you start sort of flying right up to it for a start you have to dim it down because like there are sort of them would you call it the exposure adaptation on the camera isn't able to do the brightness of landing on the Sun so you end up having to sort of dim it down to what photos of the Sun tend to look like yeah but then also you're now landing on the surface of this ball so some of those equations take some shortcuts that don't really handle like something bigger than the earth that you're touching so yeah I was here we can do all that the effects but technically the Sun is so bright you should not be able to see anything
00:50:32
happening on the surface so is it worth it I mean yeah depends on what do we want to hear also if you're lazy you're missing this you leave it so bright that nobody can see and then you just tell them it's all there I know I know I've done all over others there's coronal ejections Sun flares and there's there there's a billion particles going on you just can't see it because it's so bright sorry guys you know that's realism you wanted to realism fire propagation system to distribute the fire on the surface of Sun yeah I think I think I have a write-in answer from Ali on that one that says yes we are doing those effects yes that's basically what I said at the start we're almost out of time we only got time for a couple more questions good job guys mirrors this person says will I ever be
00:51:22
able to see myself in the mirror standing in front of an empty mirror freaks me out this is not this is sent by an Anne Rice yes so mirrors are definitely something we've wanted I think we need them for squadron for a couple of scenes so they're definitely on our roadmap the caveat on that is that they are they're only able to really be used in some sort of controlled environments they do trigger a lot of extra rendering work so if you if you're in the middle of Louisville and you're looking at a you're looking at an advert somewhere and then we just replaced that advert with a mirror you've kind of just probably half the frame rate so your bathrooms is that they tend to be small so we can we can
00:52:10
set up the mirrors in places where we can already afford the frame rate to include the mirror basically yes and then if you don't think if one of them is small enough to be grabbed and moveable like people won't grab mirrors put them in front of mirrors and then yeah the things that people do in an MMO environment with mirrors will see no end so let's see is it possible to use more but we're back to the cloud questions is it possible to use pre simulated velocity fields to create swirling gas clouds that we can fly through or is this scenario limited by something like the signed distance fields that's actually something I asked you not that long time ago what was the answer me yeah the the exact technical reasons for
00:53:05
that being difficult it's to do with how to put it because we did a test that had a similar for different reasons we were trying to break up her sort of like pixel edge detail so when we were a marching obviously we just we have this big texture and we're reading through it making tons and tons of samples if you introduce something where you have to read one thing to offset where you're going to read another thing it introduces a small delay on the GPU and if you do hundreds and hundreds of samples and each one of them has a separate offset that has to be calculated from another texture I think it I think it's it's something ridiculous like it multiplied the the time it took to draw by about five so in theory you could have a sort of assigned
00:53:54
distance not a scientist availed a vector field that sort of each frame we sort of moved along kind of like the the vector field stuff we doing particles it's just probably it's not going to be feasible also things like the shadows that we pre calculate for those wouldn't update so yeah it's more likely that we do something static and then we put particles on the outside yeah maybe those particles held ourselves visual might might actually look like what what the what you expect it to look like we're just using that was fun you don't have a bad joke to tell not this time I
00:54:43
forgot to find a collection of dad jokes say didn't didn't you didn't you come with a bad joke I didn't I can repeat joke do you remember the joke I was like yeah I do I don't remember the joke can't move the joke God give me two seconds I thought my eyes closed it was quite bad so have you have you heard an explosion in the cheese factory last night no because there was a lot of debris now I know I didn't remember that one yeah just burned a hole in your memories the self-preservation instinct two years from now and that's how the same joke
00:55:30
again two years from now when we have to back all right guys been Mike Mike meow thank you so much for taking your time to be here on the show that's this week it's these shows where we get to highlight departments that don't always get their time in the Sun are some of my favorite it's it's a-you know me it's I always like to do but the things that no other video game developer would do it just what's about the BFS guy is on a Q&A for an hour live modernist what that means could it do I appreciate it's not everybody's cup of tea but I really like being able to highlight the work that that everybody on this product does as much as I can so thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to be here with us thank you very much thank you Vince look it's a pleasure um yeah that's it remember if you didn't see a TV yesterday you should check that
00:56:18
out there will be no around the verse or reverse the verse next week because we have our Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States we will instead have some unique anniversary special content for you to view starting next Friday so you'll see that instead of our TV and then I will be back the week after that and who knows we will have now maybe we can do a show with human resources or something that's the last white whale that's the last Department I've never gotten just as powerful we're talking with human resources about how to fill it what about office managing like person pine milk and stuff hey those other planters hold the studio together oh no actually no actually you may be on our TV but maybe I can now I'm going to call
00:57:09
an office manager on a calling all Deb's because they do they do deserve they do deserve their time you sign off using today soon yeah yeah except I was manager has absolutely refused to ever be on camera so that could be hard maybe we'll do it with a she / like well this unknown person people you're doing testimonials with a voice transmogrifier alright guys that's it that's Ben that's Mike that's me how I'm Jarrod we'll see not next week but sometime after that take care guys see it thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can
00:57:58
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.