Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Party of Fifty

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:21

   [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm sandy Gardner I'm Chris Rollins our Spanish community organized an impressive event this past weekend which they dubbed lust cincuenta to rabbits they filled a server with 50 players all grouped into one massive party and performed synchronized quantum travel and planetside infantry combat among other activities about stress testing the game so players

2. 00:02:54

   in our French community recently formed a party of 50 as well with their large pack traveling to damar to take in some sights together and attempting an ambitious flight formation the Aussies come on Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy I are the UK folks yeah what about them yeah very cool stuff now let's check in and see what's been in the works since our last update so new tech has recently come online that allows particles to be dynamically affected by external forces such as wind which we see here adding kinetic details to Hurston's trash biome one of the focuses for alpha 3.3 is further improvement of the mining mechanics introduced in the current release here is producer Matt Lightfoot to tell us more one of the biggest things that we released in 3 2 was mining on planetary bodies so as you guys know there's lots of things that we

3. 00:03:41

   can improve upon on one of the biggest biggest areas that we've got 4-3-3 is improving our mining on planetary bodies flow and we looked at the feedback from you guys what worked what didn't how could we improve mining as a as a full feature and one of the things that we saw from a design aspect was being able to change the danger fill rate so adding more variation into the rocks and the risk of being able to mine these objects being able to stop the rocks highlighting when they're in when you're in the third-person camera this isn't really very immersive also being able to fix some of the network D synchronization issues that caused some of the child rocks to not spawn in the correct position once you fractured the rocks we've also created an early prototype of asteroid mining to test the mechanics and visual effects of mining in space players can initiate a radar ping to locate mandible asteroids and

4. 00:04:27

   once located those asteroids can be fractured and split into smaller pieces just like the rocks family found on means of course mining in zero-gravity obviously brings its own unique challenges to the extraction process yes it definitely doesn't want those rocks to float too far away now with fight fate over IP our face tracking system set to release with 3.3 you'll be able to translate both your own facial movements and your voice Dietetic elite into the game so let's go to Graham philipson for some details on how the system is coming along hi my name is Graham philipson and I'm lead audio programmer here at foundry 42 recently we've been doing a lot of work on the facial tracking system for the foyt feature a big chunk of that work is doing some QA to ensure that the facial tracking works well with every type of face whether that person has a different

5. 00:05:15

   skin tone wears glasses has long hair or maybe has a beard if a person does wear glasses it can make them look very different to when they don't and that could cause problems in the facial tracking for example if I remove my glasses now it makes it very difficult for the facial tracking system to pick me up because it's not seeing what it expects to see so I can recalibrate and now it should be tracking again additionally we need to make sure that the facial tracking system can pick up as many facial expressions as it possibly can in order to achieve this we've put together a QA test plan the QA engineers will be testing the facial tracking system and when they find that it's not quite doing what they expect they'll be configuring their screen in a view similar to what you can see next to

6. 00:06:03

   me this video can then be used to diagnose and 3hours the issue and we can figure out whether it's an issue for face wear or for our internal animation teams in parallel to this we've been doing a lot of work with turbulent to develop a back-end that can transport both the audio and facial data across the network and distribute it to all the game clients this is the vital work that needs to be completed in order to bring this feature to release also last week we heard from Graham about the work Audio has been doing to add sound effects to physicalize props since then they have continued working to improve this audio implementation to better support sliding props and they've been capturing new sounds through the classic Foley method of smashing things the audio team is also taking first passes

7. 00:07:06

   at unique weapon sounds here's an early go at the upcoming karna plasma rifle from Cass Tech Arms and here's a first pass on the sounds produced by the vanduul energy Lantz which we saw concept art for a few weeks ago yeah it's pretty cool that looks like oh hey it's you Deb's have been working on motion warping tech that will be used in both squadron 42 and the PU let's go to yen's lend for more the motion warping is what we call it in technique where we take animation driven motion then we try to stretch it to hit certain sync points in Maya the animators will mark up where

8. 00:07:54

   they want character to be and we then look at the environment if we try to match those points as we get closer to one of those point when when the animation says now you should be in sync with this point we start pushing you towards it over time and this will allow you to stretch the motion or shrink the motion to fit with where they were doing so for vaulting means you know you can slide over a longer obstacle where we might just roll over I'm not shorter obstacle we're also open to use this for a lot of day I move in there pretend to be animation driven following up on another system being worked on for squadron 42 work continues on the animation and mechanics associated with picking up and carrying items yeah grabby hands tech as we used to call it the old days we completed the work on the one-handed carry ball system so we

9. 00:08:45

   wanted to extend that to 200 objects so what we had to do was wear it to new grip types so we had flattened cope so what that large do is carry things from the side and then also handles off the other side that kind of thing but with those two groups we also have blend spaces from like we did with the 100 so you can change the size of the grips for different to go around different consoles and that kind of thing on objects so what the system allows us to do is have terrible objects of all different shapes or sizes but we don't have to you know create bespoke animations or anything like that it's easy to set these up and get the same polished results so yeah it's looking really good finally the mission team continues to work on FPS related contracts and AI behaviors staging some early tests in a white box environment we can see that this stuff has already come a long way from earlier iterations and we'll be continuing to track the

10. 00:09:33

    progress in the coming weeks yes we will a big thanks to our subscribers for sponsoring our shows make sure you tune in to reverse the verse live tomorrow on Twitch for a special appearance by chris roberts me i'll be stopping by the chat with jared and in pacific and well that's all for us today so until next time we will see you around the race thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen a squadron 42 you can subscribe to our channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library