Squadron 42: Around the Verse - Bringing Gameplay to Life

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:12

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm sandy Gardner and I'm Sean Tracy this week we're back with another squadron 42 special we'll take a look at the all-important gameplay story animation team but first let's check in with Nick Elms over in the UK for this month's project update hi everybody and welcome to April squadron 42 update the GFX team have made a variety of visual improvements to the glass shader making it an altogether more versatile tool suitable to as many assets as possible a simple unlit mode has been added allowing the glass to be used on visors and ship canopy interiors without distracting reflections and glare the refraction effect has been improved with the enabling of glare and blurred reflections allowing us to achieve effects like sun-blasted or frosted

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   glass condensation grease and fingerprints combining the refraction capabilities with the unlit mode is making it possible for us to create some convincing dynamic visual effects we can now fog out the edges of the visor for example if you're out of breath we can ramp up the glare if you're looking at the Sun in a dirty or damaged helmet we also improve the crack effect and synched it with the health entity so we can realistically smash UI screens the VFX team have been working on the screen interference system that will feature heavily in many areas around the coil in s42 although still in early R&D we are adding more drama and situational reaction to the cockpit experience with these effects that add interference to onboard computers and readouts lots of things in space can mess with your

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   instruments and the static storms pulsing through the coil aren't doing pilots any favors as you can see this adds an element of environmental storytelling to the rather limited view of the cockpit interior and even simple effects like these add narrative tension as well as added challenge from a gameplay perspective staying with the effects the contrail system has had addition focus this month details like the unique contrails seen when flying through the coil and more layers of detail and immersion to the environment as we saw a few months back on a TV the coil is almost a character itself it's a really singular environment and it takes a bunch of seemingly small components working together visuals audio special effects and game mechanics to create what's coming together as a really

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   compelling experience it's important while implementing all these design elements that the area retains its disorientating intimidating personality and represents a challenge for the player but remains fun and intuitive in terms of gameplay as we saw on a different episode of a TV the crew of the Idris frigate more than doubled in size from what was originally planned we've had to make some design tweaks to accommodate the extra hands on deck with a glaring need for additional officers quarters we've now added pilots quarters linked to the main crew quarters on the idris as you can see these digs are considerable upgrade from the double bunks in the main room that we saw back in the vertical slice they really helped to make the address interiors feel like real lived in spaces the gargantuan Shubin engineering facility is a great

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   example of the really impressive levels and physical spaces in the game you can see how the scale of it and the atmosphere from lighting to lay out further carries the visual storytelling so important to the medium a lot of squadron 42 s narrative is affected by and centered around the Shubin mining company and as we were developing the story and looking at the level design what started out as a relatively simple mining platform eventually morphed into the massive facility you see here it even necessitated the inclusion of a monorail system as seen in last month's update to make getting around faster and more convenient another key location seen in the December livestream was the old chem lab facility long gout Commission we're working on a new control room prop set for it and these assets represent the brains behind the operation so to speak in their day long

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   before the events of squadron take place these systems were top-of-the-line with hardware and software working in perfect harmony to keep the operation running smoothly efficiently and most of all time as it does though has moved on and these ones high-end systems are left doorman gathering dust and slowly decaying safety might not be a word best associated with them now we've been testing a prototype to allow players to manually inspect the FPS weapons that they are currently carrying when in this new inspect state the item is displayed centrally and can be rotated allowing the player to view each side and any attachment ports the focus has been on pistols stocked and shouldered weapons as each type of gun has very different requirements when it comes to animation poses and the fluid transitions between

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   them as you can see in these examples of each style being tested building off the progress we saw in last month's update work on the turrets for the massive Vandal hunter ship continues the organic design seen in all the Vandal weapons and ships manages to be intimidating and beautifully fluid all at the same time equal parts deadly Viper and blooming flower the Vandal have a very distinct look and feel that we're trying to make consistent with everything from their large-scale tech like ships to their turrets and even their hand-to-hand weapons armor and physical design everything about the Vandal is intense and visceral and when players tangle with them in the game it should feel markedly different than engaging with humans or other alien aggressors that's all for this month's update thanks again for all the fantastic support and we'll

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   see you again soon with another s42 update thanks Nick as we've seen over these last few months the story of squadron 42 is told through various mediums within the game last month we looked at the way AI can convey character and story information through combat and other forms of in-game interaction we've also seen how cinematics utilize the game's all-star cast to create dramatic effect but there are a lot of important interactions that drive the story separately from the tentpole sequences that's where gameplay story animation team comes in let's take a look at what that team has been working on and just how it's factoring into the game in this month's feature in squadron 42 the story is is quite

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   vast and very deep and to be able to handle this properly we've actually taken the story itself and broke it into two different production teams the first is cinematics and they are primarily concerned with things such as the through line of the story that the the major plot points that take you from the beginning of the game through towards the end of the game squadron 42 is is considerably deeper than just that the main through points and we wanted to build a more robust life essentially within every place that you're at in the world and to be able to do that and to to handle the production of that we've created a second team the gameplay story

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    team and this team is going to deal with things that may or may not be through line but that add a greater depth and and player experience to squadron 42 gameplay stories different the cinematics in that there's often like a more interacting element and I mean a lot of player choice or something else interacting with a couple door or something like that something that needs to happen in the world that means it's it's got an interactive gameplay element it's something in between where it has an element of storytelling and cinematics to it but it also has elements of gameplay mechanics in squadron 42 the characters that you meet along the way that are on your battleship are in different locales they all have their own lives and you can interact with them and they will respond

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    back to you or have conversations with you depending upon who they are and and what their relationship is with you this allows us to add a greater depth to to the the experience of squadron 42 you you don't just feel like you are being pushed from plot element to plot them into plot element but there you're actually living within this world you're living on that battleship these are actually living breathing people that you're interacting with within the the star citizen and squadron 42 universe part of gameplay story is absolutely critical to the main story so you can't really make progress in the mission until you speak to the characters and get the information from him within sort of telling you where to go what to do next and stuff like that but also there are the characters who are completely

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    incidental that you can go and talk to and you can find out you know how they're feeling or what they're working on they're doing and there's a whole backstory to them that just to make the whole world believable so depending upon the choices that you make in squadron 42 different people will have different reactions towards you and those those reactions will change based upon the choices that you make and that gives instead of them having the same response every time you come to them or no matter what you do is it's a canned response they're actually responding to what you've done in the way that they would as a person in in what they're they're their likes and dislikes are and things like this so they're reacting to you

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    like real people instead of a typical AI there's at least probably 250 gameplay story scenes that I'm currently looking at I'm just trying to tackle those one at a time really well a first approach the gameplay so it was really just to get a handle on everything that had been recorded and and how much we had to work with the basic way we'd approach any gameplay story scene would be the same the first thing we do with assemble all the assets so the face animation the body animation and the audio we would take a look at the mocap that's been shot usually the quad video try and understand what the scenes all about who's in the scene what's the intention so work closely with design probably at the start when we familiarize themselves with the scene so we'll talk over the scene with them how they see it working where it's going to fit in the world etc then we'll go off and we'll try and assemble all the animations build in it

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    build the scene get exported in this game to us a first pass of it and then we'll have to talk to design again and say this is what we've got can you get us help us get it working properly so the main tools we've used for gameplay story are for the scene assembly we'd start off working in mire using the redline scene manager building the face body and an audio assets together there from there we'd export to the game and then we'd probably use track view to a previous pass on the scene so we can see in the game quickly then when we're getting a bit more in depth we'd go into manikin setup or eliminations there with the correct tags and so forth on the sub to get things working probably used subsumption which is in-house tool which is undergoing a lot of development work at the moment and that's where all the magic happens really and there you touch the other more complicated parts of the game so that's an interesting stage and

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    why don't we need a bit more design support for it's also where the animations really start to come to life and be interactive so it's very cool so we'll try and get things working in the game just in this exactly the same way it's been shot which is a great way of sort of revealing problems and then I'll usually just try and solve them just one at a time okay let's start the biggest thing what more lives worst about this scene okay let's fix that and let's move on to the next one and the next one or the next one and so hopefully you're arguing about power berry sauce small details and if there is anything that we don't currently have the tech for then you're gonna call that Howe and ask for help for other departments to bring them involved get them involved and help you solve something that maybe hasn't been solved in the game before our first step would be to get the face body and audio animations working in game that's reasonably straightforward once we have that way you can see what's been captured in game we can then decide how

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    we're going to tackle the more complicated problems sort of one at a time really so the first steps are easy enough after that it comes a little comic aid the motion capture doesn't always match up perfectly sometimes our performances people pieced together two different takes of mocap so quite often some of the animation work will do will be to sort of blend over those little cuts in the mocap sometimes we need to capture new idle to go in place for when the players taking their time to make a choice so we might even need to do with some fresh mocap for that yeah usually it takes a lot of work to get it from just the initial capture stage into something that's there's fully working in game every aspect every branch working correctly another challenge that gameplay story needs to deal with is because we have these these scenes that happen they they may have one two three four more characters playing all at once

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    those characters are not playing through just a linear editor those current that they they have lives before the scene and they have lives after this scene and the challenge with that team is to be able to work with the performance capture and create transitions and and the technical ins and outs for these scenes so that characters when they're running under AI code can make their way to the scene properly we can we can perform the the experience and then they can exit to wherever it is that they need to go so once we've got a gameplay story scene in game initially we're then gonna try and

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    push that and get that to our final quality stage so induce that will have a lot of different things to solve along the way you might have to add the same sort of stock then poses to make sure animations work together at an idle maybe bring in some new mocap maybe make sure the facial animations working correctly I did any player choice implement scene branches in a voice for the player if there's a look at the player needs to look at somebody or the character get to add that in and then sometimes transitioning to from an AI character as well so there's a lot of different things you have to solve one at a time and we just start with the biggest problem and solve that move on to the next and eventually when you can't see more problems then you know you're more or less done I think a really important point within squadron 42 and star citizen and and overall in

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    animation on this game is we try not to focus on the word AI even though in the reality of it it is a AI or it is AI code what we're trying to achieve is that this is a living breathing world it's a living breathing universe and everybody who is in it has their own likes their own dislikes they have their own backstories even characters that you may fight against instead of treating them like just a random guy on the screen that that person got there somehow and they have some sort of goal and that helps us to drive how those characters react whether it is in a combat space or in a space like

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    like the gameplay story adding far more depth to to the gameplay experience of works animation for long time so for me animation is the lights that you know the lights up the game it's the most important thing for me so yeah I'm really keen on animation I think it's if you if you look at something for the first time the way it moves it's probably the thing you'll see first so I think it's yeah it's usually important so I really enjoy working on the gameplay story and I want to bring these things that have been captured into the game and bring that life into the ship so that you're not just walking around an empty spacecraft or there's real people there with real stories and interesting things going on the whole time so ya know to gameplay story scenes are really the same we have massive range from simple or quick one-liners that are said during combat up to full

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    scenes and multiple characters up to sort of 12 characters filling a room at a time with very dramatic things going on and then we have everything in between a lot of scenes will be just sort of two or three characters you know talking or doing something or working on something so you know I'm still discovering as I go through different aspects to gameplay story so it's there's a lot of variety in there it's very interesting thanks guys as we've seen with squadron we're telling this huge story but that story is taking place in the living breathing universe the gameplay story animation team's work is going to go a long way towards fleshing out the narrative and achieving the balance that makes it all feel believable we'll have even more on squadron 42 s development next month and you can still head to the squadron 42 section of our website to sign up for a dedicated monthly newsletter which includes recaps of the updates and

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    features seen here on ATV as well as further insights about the game and info about special events and promotions as development continues that's a lot of stuff I know in star citizen news the devs continue to fix bugs and make improvements to alpha 3.1 testing and releasing patches regularly meanwhile work continues on the features planned for 3.2 and some teams look ahead to future releases continuing development on Hurston and its move among other content you can always follow along with PU development by our public roadmap always available on the RSI website and we'll continue to bring you project updates here on ATV in the weeks to come if you or your friends still haven't had a chance to get into the PU we have starter packages available to pledged for at a discounted rate check out our latest concept ship

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    the innovative and stylish 100 I from origin jump works and if anvil aerospace a little more your style there are still a few days left to grab an official Hornet t-shirt for 20% off the regular price we're also teaming up once again with Intel to showcase star citizen through the power of the latest obtained and core AI 9 technology over the next few weeks we have screenshot contest going on with a chance to win an Intel obtained 900p solid-state drive so make sure you check spectrum for all the details in citizencon news we're excited to announce that we will be celebrating with you on October 10th at the Long Center in Austin Texas for more details including ticketing information check out the official citizen Kham Kham link you can access it via the Handy link we provided in the video in the description

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    below cool it will be nice have citizencon back in Austin where it all began and that's all for us this week tune in to reverse the verse live on Twitch tomorrow for a monthly subscriber townhall episode where Steve bender and myself will follow up on some of the things you saw in today's feature and remember to check out this week's new episode of bug smashers and calling all devs thanks as always to our subscribers for sponsoring the shows and thank you to all our backers for supporting the development of squadron 42 and star citizen until next time we will see you over a lovers [Music] thanks for watching for the latest and

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