Star Citizen Live Gamedev: Modular Space Stations

30 August 201901:13:101,461 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hi everybody welcome to star citizen live game dev modular space stations I'm your host Jerry uh could be a non Today Show we're gonna be doing a bit of the exploration of process related to the creation of our modular space station interiors if you're a player of star citizen in recent patch we we created our we added a bunch of modular space station exteriors and so with the continuing form of development now we've moved on to the interiors and joining us on the show this week is senior environment artists from boundary if I'm old name habits cloud Imperium games in the UK Joel as a party Joel how you doing man hey how are you I'm doing well thank you for playing for joining us on the show we were talking about this
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before we haven't had you on very out death and we had John for like an art Corp retrospective kind of thing last year I think that was it yeah well welcome aboard so you're a senior environment artist let's take a few moments and just talk a little bit about what you do for star citizen sure so as an environment artist I'm responsible for creating and maintaining levels within the universe that could be like from a small section to like a larger section like out core as well as authoring smaller assets like walls flows and tanks and things like that so that's that's what I do as an
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environmentalist would you say yes would you say your focus is more towards man-made objects so I know that artists all have different kind of specialties and fields some work almost entirely on organic stuff some work entirely on structures and technology where would you say your focus is definitely on on hard surface man-made stuff hard surfaces is the term I'm typically going for for things that are sci-fi or mechanical as opposed to like you wouldn't describe like a Tudor style medieval building is hard surface even though the practices and the approach to developing that content is the same so I actually didn't know that's that's specificity to
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hard-surface I like I would have called it like a medieval castle if you were modeling at hard service modeling yeah just technology and sci-fi stuff is that's something just internally here at CID or is that something you found that's kind of throughout the industry well throughout the industry you like I'm sure there's people out there who sitting there saying I'm wrong you know you could be wrong about anything but at least that's what I've come to know like growing up and and learning in in this industry that you know hard surfaces when someone says hard surface they're talking about like either subdivision modeling or sci-fi just thinking we could use that as a tagline for starts is in life you can be wrong about anything so stars in life is our live broadcast where we we demonstrate a bit
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of process a bit of the what goes into the nitty gritty the behind the scenes of a particular feature or aspect of game development in a more long form approach on today's show we're going to be exploring the process of using our our procedural generation tools are tagging system all that stuff to create modular space station interiors right yep before we get started I saw a question and guys you can submit your questions I threw out to a twitch chat while we're live here apologies if you're watching this later on YouTube you missed it you missed the opportunity but you submit your questions by preface in your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets we'll do our best to pull a couple of those from the show throughout the show when we do these process things it's more like a more like a presentations
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more like a through-line for for Jewel's process so we're not going to get as many questions in this week as we would in other weeks but we'll do our best to kind of pepper them in where we can before we get started one of the questions that just came through was though what what are your influences my influences or Stahl's obviously I think you've gotta go past our walls if you're pure sci-fi artist and Ralph McQuarrie's an excellent concept artist by drama is it and is another great one lots of old even though it's it's not quite relevant to sci-fi like Jim Henson movies like the Dark Crystal right um anything there's like strong world building is definitely an
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influence of mind not just art you know that's you know why I was drawn to stassi's and in general was because it's a persistent universe it's it's a living breathing world and to me it captures you know the stuff that Jim Henson was doing you know with the Dark Crystal and you know even the labyrinth movies and stuff hello when the yeah they guessed you that promo worked for me and I don't know now I was trying to think of what we should do it we should do a show where we try to find the one person it's the idea that's not inspired by Star Wars and then push them out the door I know alright so let's get started here I understand you've got it you've got a scene set up in the editor for us yep it's just so that no anything so I so what are we looking at here so we're
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looking at a room within what are the space station interiors just a small portion of a one room of many many rooms and many different types of rooms bare bones which is nothing really going on except for some some intermediate structural assets going on and right basically what we're going to do today is I'm going to walk you through the process and we're going to do a bit of practical work and you know a little bit of theory work on how we can go from this and we can quickly generate something like this or if we don't like this layout we can click a preview button and let it load for a second and
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we're going to see a completely different set of props different layout different lighting and we can keep doing this until we're quite happy we is with how things are kind of laid out and this is just like a validation tool for us so we just went previewing it at the moment like the real thing happens when we generate the entire station interior and then these rooms come in randomly and then some objects of that that room come in randomly and the lighting changes randomly yeah I don't want I don't want to bury the lede here you didn't just switch between two different layers and a map you click the button and procedural generation system then went through read all the tags that work that are assigned to the different
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areas of this level and then pulled a randomized set of options that match those tags yeah correct so it's created a layer for me here so that might might be throwing you off but we can go ahead and just delete that if no one believes us so we'll click it again and of course procedurally generating in it a space station is not a super quick that's why so we'll just sit here then and it's not just the asset so it looks like it's bringing in lighting and environment effects yep that's the whole point of it so where did they replace me spheres come in so I the easiest way to troll any environment artist is to say is that
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a replacement you just watch them sweat yeah okay you're driving I'm from the passenger let's go so I'll break down what exactly is going on on here what are the different components that are making this this whole thing work so we start off with like a room type so if you look on on the right here we're working with says uni large these are universal large rooms and the kind of very generic large travursel rooms if you if you will you can say over over here on the as well we've got different like purpose rooms so we've got stairs we've got side rooms we've got a shafts lockers etc but
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we're going to be focusing on they're on the Uni large rooms for now and so we start off with a pretty bare-bones I'm turning on this overlay so we can see through this moody lighting there it's kind of like a husk of a room there's a lot of there's a lot of holes you know there's not much dressing going on and that's perfect for the base room because what we do is we we also what's called an overlay which comes in and it's got some lighting in it it's got some structural changes that fill those holes in and we do this we don't completely do the entire room procedurally because we like to have like a finite amount of control over
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what we're going to get so if we just take away specific chunks and then we we make sure that the things that can fill that in are validated and and kind of handled by an artist where you're gonna see like the best results instead of just like leaving it all to chance ya wanna throw in the chat right now is asking how much control do you have over procedural generation and we were talking a little bit about this before we went live just in our little pre chat about how we use procedural generation as a tool to support our artists you know the procedure generation is not the end goal of building these things it's it's really about assisting folks like you in creating the sheer number of space stations and environments that we're going to need for a game of this scale yeah that's that's exactly right as all saying we if we give it if we
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allow it all to chance then chances are we'll be sitting there regenerating these rooms like four hours until we've come across something that's not broken mm-hmm and works and then there's a chance that it's like ninety percent perfect and we're like right we still have to throw it away because we need to procedurally generate that last 10 percent this kind of allows us to handle a lot of the work but also offload a lot of the more granular work that would usually do to the procedural system and and fill in the gaps that way so we've got two overlays for this room we've got a third one this is one will will will make later on you can see the main kind of structure of this room remains the
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same but we've got these big elements within the room that can change procedurally and within these overlays for go back to this one is a bit more well lit we have these orange boxes dotted around periodically and these are what we call secondary elements so these are the the props that come in it's not it's not constraint to just spawning in props it can spawn in advertisement it can spawn in anything really because it's tied to a prefab system and the prefab is just a collection of objects that get stored to an XML file so that way we can keep track of it and on load time it reads from that prefab library
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so if we need to make changes to a prefab or we make new ones each time the the client or the editor loads we get the latest version of that whereas before if something statically placed in the level and we we update it we don't really have kind of find out control of how that's affecting the world around it but with a prefab we've got a lot more control and flexibility so if I'm understanding right it's not just it's not just this is a sign and every time that you hit generate it just gives you a different sign you can actually the same location can be filled with the different types of props yeah so we could we could be as tight with our
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specification of what we want to spawn here or we could go very wide so you'll see on these on these orange volumes secondary element we can see a category filter so we're looking for floral and maintenance props with a maximum dimension of 4 on x 1.5 on y and 3 in the z axis and again with the minimum minimum dimensions so that's saying that any any prop that we find that fits these tags these floral and and maintenance and then can also fit within these bounds go ahead and bring it in and there could be four five six different versions of flora line maintenance that fit within that spot we
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can we can preview what what one's going to give us so we can use the same same button to preview specific elements and then we can use the same tool to preview like the entire room so we're just going to run through and try generate a few props on this spot so you see we've got like a bucket a generator and a dolly let's see if there's if there's more items in this library and we got the same one and leaving it to chance that means that we might see the same one I'll pop a few times so we got a different one spawning in now it's really a collection of libraries that there's the overall asset library and then the library breaks down different
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themes and then after themes it breaks down into different you know subsections of types and you can just add to these later down the line without having to go through and rebuild every space station you can just add more industrial floor props here and it just it just continues to build to the library yeah that's right so the more we work on it like the more we're going to see like cascading changes throughout the entire game it as opposed to like making a static location we build at once we put it in the wild and you know it's what you see what you get like we can we can start changing like the very small and there you know it's a very small get propagated and then we can start
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changing the very big and we're just gonna say a whole lot of changes but you're right in like this is just a small element and you might you might not see a whole lot of change like it is still going to look for maintenance my type prop so you might see like the same prop aligned differently and you might be thinking well you know that's not super unique but it's just a different arrangement but it's kind of a cascading effect so on the top level we have we can generate the entire station interior which procedurally picks what kind of rooms at once it's going to throw in a couple unis large rooms some of our our bespoke rooms I've you know belong to the rest or relax brand and stairs
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inside rooms etc within within those rooms themselves because we've got we can see here on the right we've got five different you know uni large rooms so we're going to have up to like five different variations of a uni large room so when when the system goes I want to uni large room it's got five to pick from and then just yeah within those five it's got two overlays minimum like well we could do one overlay in some cases but as it stands we got two per per you need large room and then each one of those has the ability to pull in either or a and B at the moment it could be more and then within those overlays we have the ability or these props to spawn in procedurally and if we're not
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as particular about what spawns here we can we can kind of expand the volume and we could say either do maintenance or maybe storage or seats or planters etc and like within this you will start seeing different items pop up and each time you come into a station you know you're you're in and out are gonna be completely different you might come in from from this area or you might come in from this area or this area depending on what station you kind of spawn out so you're seeing the room from a different angle but as well as that you're seeing different rooms on the other side of that so with a different layer on different props so you're gonna like we're trying to reduce like the
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visual fatigue of seeing the same static room over and over and over again with the same chair and the table with open noodle box on the side now you're obviously a environment artist so many of the questions that are coming in as they always do tend to tend towards gameplay and yeah obviously an artist is not here to speak about game plays that's not their area but there was a question I thought it was close enough that I think you maybe you'd have some insight it said when generating rooms how do you ensure that there are no holes between the prefab collisions where players could squeeze into and fall or get the places that they shouldn't yeah so that's that's kind of another reason why we do half you know handle third half procedural so if there is an instance like that and QA come to
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us and say hey we've got players getting stuck in an area that they aren't meant to for this area for instance say your props were able to spawn and we're able to get up on those props and then jump over the railing and get stock obviously you know when where death has consequences we're going to see a lot less of that but you know it people like to explore in this repercussion free state of the game so they're going to they're going to do that so that means that because half of its hand authored and we have control like all right we can't guarantee that we're not going to get a prop so they can get up on it and jump over the railings which means that we might relook at this area here and maybe put some safety nets in so players
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can't fall down there and get stock so that's that's how we would kind of it's going to happen and that's why we kind of do half hand or third half procedures so we have finite control over fixing that stuff obviously we get finite control over how it looks as well but that's how we're going to ensure that we can reliably fix those issues when they pop up okay now we are 20 minutes to the show so sure I mean there's no rush I just want to let you know we're what we're we're so cool we could jump into some of the meat and bones of it and what we're gonna do is we're gonna make a third overlay for this uni large room we're not going to do a whole lot because that could take a
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little bit so what I've done is I've duplicated a and I've made a new overlay see and I reckon we can maybe do something different in this in this area here so let's see what we're working with by turning off to the main room so these are all the assets that come in with an overlay so it looks like we got a decent chunk to work with so let's turn back the room and we want to leave that the base room unscathed otherwise it's going to start affecting different elements so I can see right now that I think in fact that this wall module is a prop itself which is like another bonus like we don't always have to use these procedurally like if they look good and
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we want to ensure that that's always there we can use that as as just a stock stand a prefab and that means we get something as complex as this or little to no work well someone has to do it once obviously but if other people like that and it works for the environment they're working on you know it's a time saver as well so I'm just gonna go ahead and open this brief up because I want it I want what's in it we saw a little bit of this when we were doing our decorate in the back alley of our court bit with yeah blue on actually guess it was 2 or 3 months ago now and the prefer but I can grab these and
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I think maybe what might be cool is if we have some big pipes coming and and intersecting into here so I'm just going to duplicate this pipe will see with if we have any bigger ones there we go there's a nice big one and we can do we can do small changes like this so we could do large changes in a room like we could pretty much do the same overlay with one area quiet quite different and it all Cascades like that's another variation in the works that we can pull from and that's another situation where you're gonna you're going to be seeing a completely brand-new room with a click
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above with a click of a button pretty much so let's see if there's a corner brush for this pipe and this size corners and what's a corner brush it's just the pipe set pops up you know they're broken down names of working down so that quite human readable so a pipe straight would be a straight piece of pipe of popcorn or etc so that way we can kind of know what we're looking for different puzzle pieces like the flat edge puzzle pieces and the corner puzzle piece isn't correct or you can say this this prefab is getting in that way so
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what we could do see whereas we can put him I think up here we've already got one there think of all our bases of covered pretty much might be able to throw it in now this is literally what you're doing in your day to day we're in the process of building out all of these different interior modules and prefabs that will populate the modular space station Cera's when it comes online when they come online so it was asking how do these procedural layouts compare to the shape of the exteriors do you do you just you just do you build the interiors and then look for exterior that match do you start with an exterior how do those match up between interior
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and exterior yeah so that's a good question what we do is we kind of have an approximate collision volume that represents the exterior of is of a station so we kind of you know we want to make sure that where there's an interior there's it's connected to a nice view room outside so there's there's a kind of a point on the exterior that we know that the stations going to be stemming from almost because we know that we want the interiors to have a view room to the outside station so there's points all along exterior that we can we can kind of guarantee where it's going to start from and then we build a collision volume around these
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different elements so with the ring we've got a ring collision element or if it if we want station interior in like one of the lateral sections of the station we've got a collision volume over that and what that means is that the interior procedural system will just keep going and it will try it why it's it's going to guarantee that it won't clip through those collision volumes so within within those bounds would say that the station rings are those big new rings it's going to just fill in inside of that physical ring so we don't really have to do much much work to make the two fit together
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because we just have we know what the station looks like we know what the components are so we can kind of do a collision model of that and just say use the interior space and that's a big advantage of the tagging system when everything is tagged appropriately the system just knows which ones to match up to what yeah and the station next series were developed with this the same techniques or you know how we're starting to see a lot of variation between station exteriors it's the same process as as well all we're using at the moment as well so there's a question like a mini Cheerios will this tech allow you to do more locations more
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quickly in the future yes um yeah that's that's the idea like we're not with these uni uni rooms they're not just for station interiors it's for anything where it's appropriate to use a room like this the same same style same kind of feel that we're going for with interiors we can use these and especially the prop the prop volumes here that this is our like bread-and-butter even though it's the smallest element in it this is the library we're gonna keep expanding and expanding every time we get something new we're gonna put it in the prop library and even even you know the the landing zone people can use these these
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elements because it doesn't need to be procedurally brought in it is a prefab at the end of the day so we're we're working on like how we can speed up and quickly iterate and build out these locations with little to no human input obviously we want to make sure that design have gone through and there's a logical logical location to exist and we want to make sure that it it meets you know our goals artistically yeah it's one of the most one of the most common questions we get is a variation of that one about you know if this is taking this long how do you expect to be able to do X in the future and it's because all this development is designed to be exponential it's the hardest part is building all the tools is building all
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the teachers building all the the tile sets and once that steps done once you know every every planet makes the next planet faster every moon makes the next moon faster every Space Station makes the next Space Station and you're just that much faster and it's it again sometimes be kind of hard to see especially if you've been following the project as closely as a many of us have just you know did it's it's like when you put a lobster in water and you're slowly turning the temperature up the lobster doesn't notice you know that the temperature is getting is getting hotter we turn the speed and frequency up and we get better and more efficient at making these with each asset yeah so yeah that's right it's making recyclable content as well having that theory in
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the back of our mind they're like you know we're building a room it's got a it's got to have longevity in it it's got to be reusable so that's that's why we build these rooms in a certain way as well because there's no point making it all bespoke in the colonial exists in one location because that's that's no good for reusability yes Chet I just called you all lobsters and I said that you were all being boiled alive Thank You Chet that danger analogies with Jared Huckaby this I mean this could be better it could be integrated a bit more about you know I wasn't expecting you know take to go so like it's a complex base the procedural system maybe I'll just I'll cap this off so you
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know to hide any kind of oakley's that are going back on their back there and then I'm gonna export this overlay that we've done to the prefab library let's make sure lines up yeah obviously one of the challenges whenever we do these game to have segments is that people's work don't often fit into a nice 1 hour block yeah if everything could be done in one hour blocks a game developer would be a whole lot easier than it actually is so we're doing a shortened abbreviated not quite as precise version of this whenever we do these shows so you you've made a collection of items here and you're now going to export it over to
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the prefab yeah I've just I've just changed up this one little section so we're not going to see any grand kind of changes in the arc in the architecture you'll just see something slightly different over here obviously you know in full capacity would go a bit beyond just doing by placing a couple of pipes and some grates just because you know you want to do enough that it warrants another overlay you can't just change like you know a floor around because there's much better and efficient methods for doing that ok like the problems if you just want to change one element turn it into a procedural prop and then it can be as random as at once so we're going to jump into these handy tools here which Y has
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been hard at work on and this is like the the main go-to tools that were using to help us along the way and what we're going to do is we're just going to export this out to a prefab library and I'll show you library after after we do it so I'm just going to say I want uni large or five overlay C and I want to put it in the room share to overlay I'm gonna sign it and that's all hunky-dory that's fine so we can turn that off we can turn these overlays off and I'll show you the prefab library if this window wants to jump over come on
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there yeah so in this room shared overlay I've got unis room large I might have to refresh this actually and then we've got overlay see which is the overlay we just made and we can just drag this in as a normal prefab and see obviously might not line up because I'm just dragging it into an arbitrary location but you can see there's our pipes that we changed just gonna delete that back into that bare-bones level that we started with and then we're just gonna click this preview button a few times we might not see ll1 straight away
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because it is procedural right we are one in three chance of seeing it but let's hope let's see if we can get up first Gary so the people the people in chapter like just make this show longer work yeah it's back to work after this it's so we didn't see how change yeah so we'll go again and like this might be a good showcase of just all the different variations we come across along the way out of there we go there's the room we made together the one that there's the there's the new layout with the asset you just created yep so you know
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something like this that changes the silhouette of that area like they're they're very strong changes they're the ones that you kind of noticed because as you're running through these stations like a lot of this is going to be a blur so strong silhouette changes are always good because you just say I'll hold up I don't you know my orientations off because I'm used to being able to see like this corner coming up so yeah that that works so I thought how much time we yeah we got a plenty of time so I thought would go over and we would make a prop volume as well and then we would throw it into the mix and see if we can get one of these overlays that this born in a new prop and we can highlight that end of the process as
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well it's really quite similar because at the crux of it it revolves around a prefab system so actually why don't we go here let's let's find let's turn on this early what were we working with yeah volumes turned off somebody Chad's asking do you ever think about just making a really clean space station sometimes a really clean location that isn't dirty and messy and disorganized yeah I mean if the style calls for we will but the style for the station's at least these ones in the stanton system it's utilitarian these aren't new that
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they've been here for a very long time and it is a large location to keep track of so you're gonna see a bit of things run wild within it it's not going to be kept updated updated and it depends as well like within these utilitarian station interiors as well we do have kind of like higher focused areas where it's more of a communal space where they would focus their attention on so that might be a bit more cleaner and high-end and less maintenance props around like you wouldn't expect to see these maintenance props in every single room this is more of you know that back traversal alley that that none of this
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the people who live here care too much about enough to to do something about it also a real easy way just to make something feel lived-in yeah but definitely why we're still working on utilitarian stations they can look they're gonna be a bit lived in and a bit beaten up but that doesn't mean that you know we don't entertain the ideas of what a high-tech station might look like or a station by a different manufacturer these are resting relaxed earned stations so they're gonna kind of feel like a public rest stop back on you know route 65 or something like that just don't go into the toilets captain
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coasters lived in doesn't have to mean dirty no it doesn't but it sure does help yeah besides I think without giving too much away as we work towards a location like micro tech you'll probably see me seeing a more cleaner aesthetic the two the two planets we've we've got so far Hurston and our corporal are very industrialized or very mechanically inclined stuff like that as we as we move towards other locations like micro tech and an Crusader I think you'll you'll see more of probably what what you're asking about yeah you can just say you know better population on those planets as well little tolerance for wrongdoings and one also the people who live there are gonna be a bit more
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sophisticated and someone I would say more maybe perhaps more organized but they don't say yeah they're not they're not better because they make their bed you tell my mom that for years all right so we saw that while using a storage tag in the other room so we're gonna go and we'll make a shelf I don't know why a shelf what's born here but for the sake we can for we're gonna do it I'll show you how we can kind of within the same kind of system storage storage come in boxes that can mean shelves any kind of container really we can still get kind of guarantee that we're not going to sport a shelf in there by setting things up smarter so
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they did we explain what this level is that we're looking at right now that this is our library yeah this is a level that where you've just got everything that you can pull from kind of splayed out with some yeah with with some debug text helping you identify which each one is so this just helps us so we're not you know someone's not making vending machines over here on someone else is making vending machines over here if we want to go in and debug vending machines or make new ones we know where to come to so we got you know a wide range of things and and this this library is always going to be expanding as well so might look a bit bare-bones before like a really huge station interior but it's something that we're gonna work on all
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the time on every location we're gonna be populating this with new things that you know someone someone might set dress apart manually I mean like oh great I actually want to be able to reuse that procedurally we're just you ain't get put it in this prop library and then everyone benefits from it across the PU anyone who's making a location from the PU will benefit from this library Zirin has are the modules system related as in star citizen related can we expect different themes and different star systems I would say absolutely yeah yeah I think you know it's it's it's easy to forget that we're still building the stanton system and even though the Stan system has our corporate Hurston and micro tech it is still you know one region of space so there's going to be a
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lot of similarities a lot of shared shared aspects between them all correct so I'm gonna jump the gun a little bit and we're going to take this procedural layout info box and this is the box that tells those orange box am i compatible so this has a dimensions three by two by one and it has some tags on that storage Lorelei so when those are in the box our look looking for those tags and those dimensions it's going to use this and the dimensions come from the bounds itself so it's not as much of an estimation so what we're looking for is Floor Store comm which means it's floor aligned it's a storage and it's a common
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element so it's common is it pretty much more sophisticated word for generic so we want to make a new one a new layer actually we're gonna leave the layer because I don't know how big this this shelf is going to be and we like to organize layers by the dimensions so we're just gonna go to town first and worry about the layer later and we can turn off volumes so this blue box isn't in our way so we're gonna look for some shelves this containers maybe none of those let's just search for shelf
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scroll Paran that's good now we could go in as well and we could populate the contents of this shelf with additional secondary elements like we could go as deep as we want obviously there's a point where we're saying that that's that's deep enough because we we want to keep track of like any issues that arise and and if we're seeing an issue on this shelf and then we're going to look at the shelf and it turns out it's something on the Shelf that's causing the issue well I'll go into that then and that's something within that thing that's on the shelf that's causing the issue and we have to go in there again we're gonna get lost pretty easily so Russian nesting dolls yeah we can we can
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definitely do it like I'll show you let's turn volumes back on and see if we can spot something with here we go so this seat here so this seat is it's got a secondary element in it so we're saying what's it looking for it's just looking for any floral and element that fits these dimensions so whenever this seat comes in we have the ability to spawn in something completely random with it as well so for example it could come in with come in with a trash can any one of these trash cans etc anything that really fits in that and then in the future because it hasn't very it hasn't been kind of spelled out
00:45:03
to to spawn in a specific thing it's just saying anything that goes on the floor spawn me in as we make new things we make new new props if it fits those dimensions we're gonna start seeing that seat come in with that new thing that we made with no effort from us at all which is just more added variation I don't think we will add those secondary elements in here and like because then I have to create another prop volume too populate these shelves so we will just do it manually but in the future I think I think a shelf is one of those those structures that you can justify having another secondary element in here so
00:45:54
because what good's a shop with nothing on it yeah so what can we put on here we can put up books I can try looking for some some books these cardboard in the future still cardboard or is it starboard synthetic tree material maybe just an idea for the riders outlet that was from mr. square peg don't blame me well I'm the one who read it I guess you blame me a little bit what else we got any larger books I don't know there's something compelling about a giant
00:46:42
bookshelf with only one book on it makes it seem like that one book is super important what is that one book with super important the Bureau of shipyard development nobody's interested in ship your development something we need to go off grid for these final movements we don't have too much time so it might end up being quite a bad burn shelf unless I can find some bigger props than just a itty bitty book to fill this with would be enough to demonstrate alright there's multiple books at my help look older I could be some like hidden relics we're filling in a bit more space now
00:47:34
which is good and as we going on you could probably see how you know if we were working with a prop library and we'll just kind of like doing this one off on on a location like you know I've got a room I might want a bookshelf there and I start populating it with books and then that's it that's it exists there and there only and then someone else comes along and in their area they they're like oh um I want a bookshelf and then they're doing the same thing there's there's a lot of like work that it's been done and you can't really reuse it that's why we're populating this library as well because
00:48:23
now I really only have to build this bookshelf once and anyone can use it so if you if you're in the location you like you know I think my room could use a bookshelf you come in here and you get one pre dressed and you know even if you don't want as it is you want to go in and you want to change change it up so it's it's unique it's your own spin you can do that you can extract the items from the prefab the important thing is that you're getting like half the way there yeah although I'm gonna say there's a public service announcement to anybody if you walk into any space station and you see a bookshelf with nine copies of the same fish tank book run somebody's trying to kill you idea there's a killer on the loose it's too
00:49:14
many copies of fish tank books something's not right here I think the author's trying to you know give out free copies so yeah I mean this this works for for you know the demo purposes we're not trying to show you like flash flash er and it's showing that like the process so now what we want to do is we we want to match this volume as close as we can so if we click on this we can kind of get some dimensions out of it I know it's a 2.7 meters tall and 2 meters across and 7.75 so I've forgotten all those numbers already so we go on X 2.75
00:50:07
and how tall was it again 275 it doesn't have to be the most accurate but because in the other level all you're seeing is those empty volumes it's best to have something that closely approximates the volume that way you can you can kind of guarantee that if something spawns in there it's not going to clip through this stuff near it and the walls and stuff like that because you can see that that volume that it's coming in as looks like I'm off a bit I mean it is just that just an estimate at this point so who cares or something
00:50:56
like this so that we know that you know this anything if you've got stuff clipping into these these bounds on the other end you know that the geometry is going to come in clipping and because I copied this info box from over here I don't have to set up the tags but I'll go into that briefly just to show you it's not like voodoo or anything we've just got on this info box a code that comes is generated from picking some tags so we go low-tech utilitarian it's floral and and it's storage we could take more or less tags as we need and we can make new tags as well so if we get to a point where storage isn't
00:51:44
descriptive enough and we're getting you know the storage volume has expanded considerably and we're starting to see less than desirable results spawn in then we can start thinking about having a new tag kind of subdivide storage into different storage if somebody's asking in chat if if should we choose to could we go even further down this rabbit hole and start procedurally generating the array of books like if we tagged every single book in yeah you could there would be an extent of how deep you want to do that every single book prestige all might be a bit overkill but definitely like you know each one of these brushes that are placed could definitely be a volume that way so I don't have to manually kind of randomize
00:52:35
it like I'm never gonna be able to randomize something as good as a computer can do so if I want to random like no I didn't I didn't kind of when you're getting in the mindset of of setting these props down and stuff like that I'm not placing these books the people who believed here are placing these books kind of thing so you kind of want to detach yourself from you know it's me I'm I'm some omnipotent being placing books in star citizen kind of thing so I think yeah getting these randomized would would definitely be great and there's something I'll probably do off-camera when I get back to work new brush and confirmed I'm nipping and being placing books sign me up
00:53:22
so we got all the tags we need what we're missing is a lair now because we're we're still hijacking Floor Store comm 3x2 and it's not those dimensions at all so what we can do is create a new layer we know it's a floral and store calm and it is to buy zero seven five and then this will be a new kind of parent layer for all the different types common storage modules that are 2 7 2 by 0 75 so you can see within these and
00:54:12
might be yeah there's two two different elements that fit those metrics as well at the moment we're just gonna have this one that fits this metric but we still need the layer for it so we're going to copy this name and create a new layer or one need to track that in and what we're gonna do is grab everything here and throw it in that layer we just made it should be good and then we're gonna get the trusty procedural element tool out and we want to create an element prefab from this
00:55:02
let me just select an existing layer sir okay well I'll have to do it manually so I wanna honor that's right chat is debating why books even exist in hundred and forty years in the future that that's a that's a question for philosophers and Dave haddock well people still collect vinyls to these days who knows what people are still keeping around it might be a full circle and finals might become the new thing like blu-ray to DVD so we're going to assign this this layer to the prefab library with a click of a button
00:55:50
great we can just double check this for our sanity that it in fact came in to come to a prop library floor aligned storage common I need to refresh the library demo or aligned storage come in I don't think it came in it might not like that zero in there so we're just gonna round it up to two one yep and what we're missing is probably
00:56:52
why I didn't save it is we're missing a prefab pivot I was just going to say that and we will not align it to this input box 2x1 everyone what's the correct layer prefab pivot is so that when it gets brought in one of the one of the variables is the pivot angle that can be out so that not everything is at a straight 90-degree angle every time right yep correct you thought I was joking what I was being serious I don't think I got these on the right layer either 2x1 store coming still coming in that's right
00:57:52
I'm just selecting a different layer that's already exported to the prop library so I can get this ball path automatically instead of manually looking for it yep no red text they were good let's check the database one more time Chiqui refresh 2x1 great so if I drag this in great we've got a procedural element now so that should be all we need from this level so we can jump back over to here let's go on our overlay because we want to change this up a bit and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring
00:58:44
in that element that prop just side by side for now so I can make sure that the size and the tags are correct when I when I modify this one bring this over so you can see I'm just doing that the same thing just but in this editor instead storage common to buy alarm so bring it in here and like this is a good kind of validation way as well so we can chuck it up here we can rewrite I mean I would say though that this doesn't fit but for the sake of the demo it could be like yeah yeah that works there so that's great so we're gonna put these side-by-side because I can see these I
00:59:33
can see the tags and the dimensions it's looking for and we're gonna get it to spawn in here I mean it's always gonna spawn this one in because we've only got one on that but we could do something else that's not as cool but we can lower this born chance of this coming in to quite low all we can see actually can we get this to spawn in over here that's the minimum dimensions okay we're gonna lower the minimum dimensions here and add storage if I do this not quite sure what will spawn in but let's try it anyway so - I suppose we've had a lot of luck with on this show going back to
01:00:23
reverse the version happier not sure quite sure what this is going to do and then we get a giant spider and that dude's genitalia that happened it happens I'm not proud of it but it happened so we're pretty much telling this volume that you can spawn anything between these I sure didn't need to change the minimum did I no lower is better so if it can fit within this volume and it's bigger than this internal volume it will spawn it in but we can see is that the right tank storage floor align oh cool so I didn't need to add any more tags
01:01:09
but what I can do is I can add a different like sub set of tags which would be kind of like an end or statement so either look for storage of lower lined or maybe look for bending floor lines so we can kind of do an either/or like either spawn in storage or a vending machine I don't care this this point and it kind of you can kind of narrow it down so it's less arbitrary than just floor lined I just want anything to spawn here but you know you kind of know that you know this is a communal space so maybe don't do storage bar I don't mind if it's a vending or a seat because they're the kind of elements you'd see in a more commercial space somebody see it somewhere for people to drink as well so we've got that control over that as well
01:02:00
so we don't need that that guy anymore what we can do is just cycle through this test what's coming in my database didn't spawning the way this might take a few spins usually a random system so truly random but as long as we made there's the you know the tags lined up and their sizes lineup as well just clicking it this is literally the last thing we'll be doing on the show so as we've already hit time so sure maybe it'll be appropriately funny if just want to make sure we'll just keep those tags say on star citizen live game dev we show you
01:02:56
the behind the scenes look at the true real to life process of the game developer and Wow sometimes it's it's something you know flashy like creating a new character concept other times it's just as important stuff like creating this procedural systems that will be the foundation for the future of space stations throughout the game and so don't you push a button and you push a button and you push a button it still doesn't do what you want it to do so I'm just going to get a couple of these randomly generating at once so we can start seeing a couple get through the you know the random seeds a lot quicker I'll see if I can get my shelf
01:03:46
to spawn in so now now I'm thinking I should have probably spawned in by now so and possibly an error I'm doing on my end it's alright Emily let me just remove the preview at the very least if this doesn't work let's go back to the original layer and just show the folks that have joined since the beginning the show how the entire layer can spawn in one way we can debug with a lot this is spawning incorrectly is we sit up the sizes to a tee so we we go where's this two by
01:04:41
seven five to seven five three point seven five to five and we said that the mental that this as well so now we're only gonna get something that fits within this so we're going to start seeing a lot less of it other props so floor align storage its utilitarian just check my default tags yep and now I can spawn this and I can kind of see the the
01:05:29
console will spit out at me okay so it's boarding now so we just have to be a bit more specific with the size I guess so we're just for simplicity because I know we're gonna wrap up I'll just drop that random chance I talked about - lets go point seven so don't want to sit here forever trying to get it to spoil a lot to not spawn and are we on yep so we're on overlay C and I just need to quickly explore this back out into the prefab library so that so the library is updated and I can turn off see actually I kind of underestimated how quickly I could
01:06:21
probably preview this because now I've got a one in three chance of spawning in the overlay that I put the Shelf in and then appoint a chance of actually seeing the shelf but you know all your dances sometimes you just gotta believe that you have joined us since the beginning of the show this is a one-click procedural generation button for all the elements that are in this space station room and you got it on the first track all that first first try I see people in the chat must have been believing so we did it let's do a couple more generations before we will have people go just because we showed this stuff at the beginning and there folks who may not have been here at the beginning see it so we click a procedural generation
01:07:09
button reads all the tags that are laid they're laid out throughout the this particular room and does a whole nother there's a whole nother layout with different lighting with different environment problems oh we didn't show there the the the dynamic environment probes ok katachi look briefly replicas they do have to let you go yeah we're we're on our camera yeah I'll talk over that while I chart different uni room because we've seen over five a lot and I don't want to get people to let people down and to think we're just kind of changing one room up a tiny little bit we're actually working on you know we have the chance of spawning in five different uni rooms instead of one so we can just do
01:07:59
the same thing on a completely different room so yeah you know real time probes is something that kind of makes this possible because previously we we baked our probes and they'll static food they would belong to a certain lighting setup so if we if we brought in red lights on a probe that was baked for green lights we would see red lights but kind of green reflections right that would really make much sense but because of real-time probes now means we can change up the lighting so whatever we want really got some stuff spawning in odd spots yeah you know I got too
01:08:53
many previews and then you know the lighting changes dynamically so now we can we can do a lot wider changes in terms of lighting and stuff like that as well for the environment probes are basically the image in the easy kind of a layman's sense you can have you can have red lights you have blue eyes you have green lights and whatnot but the environment probes are how are determine how those lights react with the environment for lack of a better term and they could they it's all the environmental factors that are there that can affect it make it look but make it look more greenish like you was talking about it's a big part of why sometimes your your spaceship looks a completely different color in one location versus another location just
01:09:41
like it doesn't realize and before they had to bake those in that they had to like create in each and each environment probe individually for each location but now they're dynamic that's so much more freeing I'm just trying a different is it Universal room but something came in oh very might be dying yeah for some reason I was dying but
01:10:32
yeah this we can run it a few times on on this level as well see what we get totally different changes and it's not just the props that are changing the entire atmosphere yeah we can specify on volumes as well you know whether or not they met you know warmish lights or cool lights so we can we have that finite control over like the mood in a room as well so we're not seeing kind of like in color theory you can have two calls that don't go together and you know that's another kind of control we have on it so we're not putting you know blue and red
01:11:21
lights right next to each other and creating like like jarring visuals you know we can put lights that work well together with other lots that work well together right well I don't want to keep you trapped here like these three dudes are here so you go ahead and switch back to your camera here we'll wrap things up Joel thank you so much for taking the time out of at the end of your week it's always you know these are always at the end of everybody's week they're always at the end of Fridays especially when they're into it from the UK me here I'm just starting my Friday I still got a whole day of work left to do but you you get to finish up and go home so thank you for staying late thank you for taking the time to show us your process to explore just a little of what goes into these modular space station interiors of course these are currently in development as part of our ongoing
01:12:09
work to build out not just to spent the stanton system but star citizen in general so Joel thank you so much i'ma let you go guys remember there's an episode of pillow talk coming out later today I don't entirely know when because I've been in here doing this for last hour so that's going straight to YouTube keep an eye out for that as well as updates to the public roadmap and we'll be back here next week with with another episode of star citizen line so thanks that's watching Tigger 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
01:12:56
and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library

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