CitizenCon 2951: Crafting Worlds - Planetary Tools & Tech

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:03

   CITIZENCON CRAFTING WORLDS: PLANETARY TOOLS AND TECH - [Marco] Hello. I am Marco Corbetta, the VP of technology, and we're going to talk about some new planet features today. First, Anis is going to give us an introduction about Gen 12 and what that means for planets. Then Will is going to talk about dynamic foliage, shaders, plants and seasons, and he is going to show us river demo as well. Then Marc and Morgan are going to talk about Rastar, our new base building tool. So let's get started with Anis. - [Anis] Hi, my name is Anis and I am the senior engine programmer here in Cloud Imperium Games. My main responsibility is the development of Star

2. 00:00:54

   Citizen Planetary Technology with a focus on planetary elements rendering. GEN12 PLANET RENDERING While there is another talk dedicated to Gen 12, I wanted to touch a little bit on how it applies specifically to Planet Tech. It's our rendering abstraction layer API. It aims to provide next generation features for our 3D engine by reducing some CPU latency and rendering common submission over it, which is a significant bottleneck for our game. Part of our recent efforts have been put to modernize our old school renderer to shape it in a conformance modern API rendering style to be suitable for the newest low overrided APIs such as Vulkan. Today, I'm going to talk a bit about Gen 12 benefits

3. 00:01:44

   for planetary rendering features. As I said, Gen 12 key aspect is performance. The way this is achieved is to make common submission easier for multi-core CPUs. All giants rendering APIs rely on a single threads in which you have the view of a single time line where GPU comments are guaranteed to be executed in order. The driver does the rest and there's a responsible to handle memory and synchronization. Gen 12 can scale much better thanks to the ability to dispatch and parallel comments that are submitted from different execution units. The memory is directly handled by the renderer, and synchronization primitives are used to make sure comments dispatched in the right order by considering cross dependencies between resources. Since the rendering driver is thinner and more

4. 00:02:34

   responsibility is given to game developers, this opened a new opportunity to forge a new render for specific needs a game like Star Citizen might have. Our planetary technology introduced a new set of engineering challenges, so we need to be very creative due to the fact that most game industry standards techniques are not working very well for Star Citizen. Thanks to Gen 12 optimizations, we can push our planetary rendering computational budgets to perform more GPU operations. This translates to better visuals, more details and less compromises. As a member of the Planet Tech team, I will show you some improvements we've recently made for our planetary terrain rendering pipeline. We made two important improvements.

5. 00:03:24

   The first is a ground skill level, and the second is for large scale proposals. Both technique use dynamic tessellation. Dynamic tessellation is a GPU feature which allows to increase the triangle count on the fly before the resolution stage occurs. The new triangle are then manipulated to shape the terrain high frequency details and improve surface visuals. This new technique is replacing our parallax relief mapping, which is a per pixel technique, and instead of creating geometric details like tessellation does, it works by simulating details after the rasterization stage with a cheaper approach, by tracing raised from camera to surface. The second improvement targets planets visuals at long distance. This technique is also tessellation-driven,

6. 00:04:12

   and it aims to improve terrain/ocean intersection where CPU geometric representation lacks for enough control points in the geometry. We reached the conclusion. Thank you very much and enjoy the rest of CitizenCon. - [Will] Thanks Anis, I'm Will Hain and I work on the Planet Tech Team. DYNAMIC ECOSYSTEMS AND MORE Over the past few months, I've been working on a number of improvements to our ecosystem spawning system, which is the system that spawns all of the objects on all of the planets. We've been doing this to give our artists more power and flexibility, as well as improved performance for everyone playing the game. The first thing that I did was a complete overhaul of how we spawn the objects. We used to spawn them on each terrain patch as that terrain patch was created. But this meant that we were limited in our control in

7. 00:04:59

   that we could only spawn new objects when we were creating new terrain patches. The new system has an entirely separate grid division of the planet, and this means that we have a lot more control over the resolution of our objects when they spawn and how we spread it across multiple frames, which means that we get better performance in the client. This also means that we were able to add a setting for the clients to control how far away each object preset respond. The next improvement we started to look at is making the ecosystems react to their situation and surroundings more. For example, we can now introduce scaling biases for temperature and humidity so that certain objects when in higher humidity can be bigger or smaller and the same for temperature. A new system is being designed for animal and entity spawning using tokens, which means that we can specialize our object presets

8. 00:05:48

   better for different planets. For example, we have something similar for rocks. That means if you put a rock on a snowy planet, it goes snowy. And if you put it on a sandy planet, it looks sandy. Now we can do something similar for animals. We can specify a small herbivore, for example, and in the snow, this might spawn some sort of Arctic rabbit, and in the jungle this might spawn something completely different. We've also begun to experiment with a new foliage shader that takes into account the health of the plant based on its surroundings again and the current season of the planet. Though what you're seeing on the screen is far from final. In the same vein as that, we've been working towards having more dynamically placed biomes around natural areas, we've created dressing object presets that are automatically placed around coasts and of course, my favorite thing to work on rivers. In the most recent couple of months,

9. 00:06:38

   I've been doing more work on the rivers to prepare them to be closer to what we would consider shapeable so that we can get them out to the players. This is included finer control of both the shape of our rivers as they flow from springs to larger rivers, but also the objects that spawn around our rivers. So we have control over what spawns in the water, what is spawning on the banks of the river, and what is spawning further away and blending it into the biome that it flows through. The other thing that we've added as well is a wet edge around rocks, both in the sea and in rivers, which reflects the fact that they were probably wet from the river. And so they look a lot more shiny. We've also been working on introducing basins to the river system so that we can have more natural pauses in our river systems and other bodies of water than just the oceans. Another major change was to stop using the planet's

10. 00:07:26

    ocean mesh and just displacing it up to the river and instead building specific river mesh sections around the river. This means that we can have far more control over the shape of water, and we can use our own specific river material and shader, meaning that we can specify colors, flow and other properties of the river water separately to the ocean of that planet. Rivers aren't done yet, but they're closer to being used in production than ever before. The next steps include a planet populating tool, so one click to create an entire river system across the planet and maybe working on a little bit of lava flow. But we'll have to see when that comes. Next is Marc and Morgan. Thanks, everyone. - [Morgan] Hi, I'm Morgan. I'm tools programmer from Planet Tech Team, and now I'm going to talk about Rastar. RASTAR: A BASE BUILDING TOOL

11. 00:08:22

    What is a Rastar? Rastar is our work in progress tool for planetary locations, creation and addition. The name stands for a mix of RTS, the game giant, which takes the inspiration from its map editor system and star as well...you know. Its goals are to replace our previous placement system based on prefabs to a better object container oriented solution. As our previous system was based on prefabs, any changes to location was source of issue as it needs to reenable whole set of data to have things like missions or shops to work again. With the new system, any change will be easily manageable and wont require us to redo the work when a change is made. Plus, as now object container oriented, it can be

12. 00:09:09

    used for outpost case or even derelicts and more. It works as a modular system where applications will in fact be made of small elements that will be placed just like you do in City Builder RTS editor. And in a matter of minutes, we now have a new location where we can now create a bunch of cool gameplay. Let's go to Marc who will tell

13. 00:10:02

    us about the connector system. - [Marc] Thanks, Morgan. So I'm Marc, I'm also a tools developer for the Planet Tech Team. Do you know what's better than placing everything by hand? Not placing everything by hand. In order to do that we use what we call connectors. Basically, artists create small parts of homesteads that we can then smack together. Every part is modular so we can interchange multiple ones in order to have procedural homesteads. Every change is very simple. We can change the whole inside of a homestead or only a building that is a part of the homestead. And that way, it's very easy to make a lot of different buildings. Once something is connected,

14. 00:10:50

    it's considered a part of the whole. So it moves as one. It can be deleted and changed and it's basically all from connectors. So back to you Morgan. And last but not least, some of you might have noticed that the UI is not looking quite like an engine UI. That's normal, as it's based on our in-game tech building blocks, and that's for a reason. Well, today it's being used by our developers. One day, when it's ready and been thoroughly tested internally, we'll make a version available to you, the player. And Rastar is what will make you a pioneer.