Star Citizen: January Subscriber's Town Hall feat. Sean Tracy

27 January 201601:01:011,659 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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all right hey everybody can you hear us let us know let us know if you can hear us take it from the top yeah we'll take it from the top if we can thing we do six times a week soon as we know that people can hear us yeah there's yay okay so now that you can hear us guys welcome to reverse the verse our special January subscriber Edition uh as a perk to subscribers we do one of these every month where we bring in our an esteemed guest and take questions specific speically from subscriber chat today's special guest is technical director of content y Mr Sean Tracy and I knew that before I didn't just ask him uh we're going to take questions from con from our subscriber chat only and from a thread that exist in subscribers Den uh while we're collecting questions why
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don't you tell people what you do sure and how you do it so they can form their questions around relevant topics sounds good he does it very well so uh te technical director um specifically of content um so everybody knows we have uh upwards of four technical directors across the company uh we have uh two in Frankfurt one in the UK and then one here um so I'm the representative here um and again if uh nobody's really aware of what a technical director rule sort of does um you basically hit the uh the amount of expertise uh that you retain for whatever whatever your role is as is at the highest level that you can basically get it to um typically a technical director will be an expert programmer uh by by some description so uh carsten wiel and Marco corbetta are technical
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directors in Frankfurt so they're the engine technical directors uh essentially how they're they're organizing how the engine is being created what we're going to do with the engine how we change it um and really really major uh architectural modifications things like this uh then we have derck senior and uh he's the programming director within the UK but typically your programming director is actually your technical director um so since we have so many different engineers in the UK working on gameplay systems um all the uh you know the mini puu features uh he is the tech director out there and then it's myself over here in this time zone now what I'm more responsible for uh in the in the last little while anyways is all the data that's going into the game we basically have two very important directories within our build and one is code and the
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second is data so every single asset you see within the game whether it's a character ship particle effect sounds things like that I'm responsible for that and really it's um basically anything that comes out of some sort of DCC tool and goes into the engine or goes into the game that's up to me so we keep calling them pipelines and things like this so I've got to manage all the pipelines and I'm trying to deprecate the word Pipeline and just call them checklists because it's so much easier for people to understand like pipeline is such this nebulous sort of like oh I work on the pipeline but now really you work on a set of checklist list items that is like goes here goes here goes here finish that and all those interdependencies so um yeah I'm making sure that we're using the engine the best we can uh making the content the fastest way we can I mean yeah I don't know it's not a job interview so I guess I'll just stop there what's a DCC tool
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oh I'm sorry it's a digital content creation so it's like 3ds Max Maya um XS well I don't even know if that exist anymore um uh uh zbrush is yeah you DCC Photoshop I mean I knew I was just asking for sure you did all right our first question uh comes from our subscriber thread since there aren't any questions in subscriber chat just yet uh This Thread says the procedural Planet Tech demo looked great what are some of the challenges in getting us to the point where players can actually land anywhere on Crusader there are so many challenges I I wow I mean that that's a pretty broad question um so I guess I'll pick a couple uh points that we're dealing with right now um one of the
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hardest things to deal with obviously is the physics of this so not not so much in terms of the scale um but you can't okay so the way physics really works within the game you've got a bunch of render mesh and then you've got a physical proxy which is a way way lower res representation of whatever you want to collide with um the reason it's got to be so much lower res is that you are doing so many more calculations on that uh than you are on on a render measure or something like this because eventually you'll just render it but in physics we're interacting with it we're shooting things at it we're crashing into it we're doing all kinds of different things so the problem is with with a with a planet of you know 10,000 kilometers or something like that you cannot possibly load that entire physics mesh all the time and even worse even if you tried to do that the the sheer count
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of that even if it was lower res would be so high um so what we have to do is dynamically load this physics um and we've got to load it on a sort of a per client basis because you typically on a server you'll actually load all your physics data all at once you'll have it all just sitting there you won't stream the physics in or out um it'll just be sitting there and obviously we can't do this on a on a 10,000 kilometer planet that has uh mountains and hills and all sorts of uh all sorts of different things so that's one of the biggest challenges that we have um but we've already got it work in which is pretty pretty neat to know um I don't know when we'll we we show that but yeah we've got we've got something quite nice working for that so we'll calculate on a per client basis um so that was one of the biggest hurdles to actually making this uh playable uh uh for the players
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because obviously if you don't have physics on a Terrain you fly right through it and it'll kind of ruin the whole experience um so yeah that was one of the bigger ones um on top of that of course is just the visuals of of the planet itself uh I mean how does that look look um how does it look and again the scale is just insane uh how does it look when you're you know 300 km 300,000 km out from that planet you've got to go from you know this planet just inheriting one pixel on the screen to it taking up the entire screen to it being like you are inside of of a level you know um so being able to transition through the atmosphere making that look hyper real was really really challenging um how many LEDs are involved in that it's actually way more complicated than that and I wish I could say there was
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like six lods or something like this no there was so many different levels of um processing that happens on the way in so sure there's a bunch of lods as you're approaching but once you get in there it is it is it's a dynamically tesselated objects so essentially what you're doing is you're only going to tessellate the objects that are really close to you or the or the sectors even that are really close to and most game engines have a Terrain system that works this way uh unreal has a cry engine has a base uh sort of terrain system that works on this uh uh this Dynamic amount of tessellation the trick is to get that to convolve around a sphere first of all and then second of all is to be able to synchronize this all over the network right so and again that that's got to lend itself to physics that's got to go across different clients uh yeah there's a lot of challenges when it comes to
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this and then maybe the last one that I'll talk about is um the actual objects on the surface itself now I'm not talking about like procedural objects or like trees and rocks and things like this I mean Landing zones if you have an IDE like to give you an idea Area 18 um that that level right now we're talking you know four to six gigs of data uh within that level so imagine flying up to one of these planets which is pretty heavy by itself uh and then also having to load that Landing Zone on the way in um to be able to stream that amount of data you can absolutely do this but can you do it seamless can you make it look like it's not just pop po po pop bunch of objects sort of streaming in um that's a huge challenge so that's something that we're working on on in the engineering front with these things um that Chris talks
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about on occasion called object containers and uh these sort of things so um we've got a very unique game where we basically have to be able to stream everything out and everything in at at runtime um so it's a very very challenging thing to do there is very few level loads so you can't just sit there and load everything behind the scenes so challenge but we have our we have our plan in place yes absolutely and it's starting to work yeah right yeah Carl Jones are our CEO uh here at cig we had a a saying when we both used to work for krych and that was difficult takes a day and impossible takes a week so this one is is is on the level of impossible right but but we're absolutely going to achieve it right sadly that's going to be the headline right right they will yeah I say today
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will be confirmed planets are done a week no that's not true the impossible impossible uh what can you tell us about physicalized Eva I know uh there were some expectations that it might be in 2.1 originally uh because you came on the show and said it might be in 2.1 no and it was and we pulled it out actually P out y we pulled it out on purpose where we at with that now uh it looks like it's definitely going into well I say definitely wow I am so going to not say definitely um it's in our Branch for 2.2 right now now so uh it's basically the same that we we were at with 2.1 however there's been a ton more work that's been done on it one of the biggest problems um was it has nothing to do with crashes has nothing to do with performance has everything to do with the way it feels like like the control of it um because fundamentally
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we changed the way um that the that the character is getting locomoted around uh when you're in the Eva you are now we call it a driven ragd doll um it's a it's a similar system to if anybody's seen these animations system called morphine or uh in FIFA actually is a really good example they use a very similar system uh where there's a there's a there's a level of driven ragd doll so you are we call it an articulated entity um so basically you're a set of rigid bones right that is getting driven around but you've got to blend animation on top of just physical impulses that is moving it around whereas the older Eva and what everybody's using right now is an animation driven um Eva so we say entity move here entity move here entity move here but the animation just plays based on how you're moving it's very very it's
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actually pretty simple it's just you're moving forward well animate like this you're moving backwards well animate like this um so with driven ragd doll it's a lot more tricky because of all the physics that gets involved with it so the reason we want to do driven ragd doll um is we want the body to react to things in zerog as as you would expect them to react now I think a lot of people saw some some of the fun videos that came out of uh the initial implementation of it right uh where we hadn't tightened up a whole lot of the limits so like somebody could go near a ship and if it hit their head their head would bend almost you know all the way backwards and things like this um so again right it was all about scaling those uh those physics impulses and those sort of things but really getting the control better um because our frame of reference changed so drastically
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between the old Eva and the new Eva and what I mean when I speak of frame of reference is and it's something I talked about before where where we would use the origin of the character or is you know like write down this is a character and this is the feet of the character and in the middle of the feed is the origin right we've just got z0 and that's where our origin is but when you're in Eva actually your origin changes your center of mass becomes Dynamic which is quite cool um usually it's around the hips but because it moves around a little bit um that makes controlling it really tricky because you've got to have something that is saying okay this is my forward Direction which way is forward which way's up which way's down these sort of things um so yeah um there's been a lot of great check-ins on it and it feels so many levels better um than than it initially felt so where there'll be
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bugs probably but we'll have to we'll have to cross those bridge when we get there why don't we just fake it why don't we just fake well that's what we had before right was fake evva and you know everybody was happy with that I'm not saying that it was awful um but visually okay visually I thought it was awful because here's my problem is when you pitch or or you you sort of rotate you were rotating around the feet and again you know we only had some limited free flight and even in the mini PTU are you really sitting there staring at a guy doing a lot of Eva not so much but let's say you're in a gunfight with a guy and all of a sudden he presses e and he starts rotating around like this it just looks stupid it it it looks fake and that that's not what we want and most people would say okay how about you
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just offset that that that origin to the hips and then just rotate around that well that's a little bit tricky because actually the animation system is assuming that origin is between the feet so it's better to go change it to an articulated en get all these bonuses of actually being a driven ragd doll um um so like you know flying into stuff and your arms reacting your head reacting and mostly your legs reacting um than it was just to continue to fake it if that makes any sense um the other big win that we get out of this is another system that we worked on sort of in concert with the physical Eva and it's we call it we called it fall and play back in the the crisis days uh but for us it's more like fall and play and fall um so what it means is and uh the implementation is going to get a little bit bigger um as you transition in and
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out of gravity is kind of our big thing um right now how it works is as soon as your pivot comes within some sort of gravity volume boom we just drop you down and you land on your feet whether or not you were coming in head first whether or not you were coming back first or anything like this so what what I wanted to do with it was basically give you um uh a range that that you would be able to land on your feet essentially so you know right now I think we've set it to 20 or 30° um and it's it's like a little cone uh so again if you consider the the the pivot of the character you can be rotated you yeah I think it's 30° um you can be rotated sort of 30° uh forwards backwards sideways you're basically within this tone of of I can land on my feet um so when that happens you transition into
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zerog G boom you know you're able to actually land but if you come in head first what do we do right now we could try to animate you know a bunch of different directions um but this gets really heavy to maintain and also it doesn't really look right so instead what we do is when you transition into into gravity we set you to ragd doll driven ragd doll um and well you technically already are if you're in zerog G but uh we kind of take the control away we put we put uh you already have mass so we put gravity to you so what will happen is you kind of you lose control a little bit um but if you came in head first you actually ragd doll you're under Gravity affection and you will fall blam and and and and and oh don't hit the table cuz the microphone will BL um um you land on the you land on the ground whatever in ragd
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doll and you know your arms will go all over the place or whatever um and then what the Fallen play portion of this is we will blend whatever you've landed in into a get up animation so we have eight different Get Up animations and they're just sort of different ways that the body could land so it's on the on the belly on the back on the side um um sort of Crouch down um and then we will blend into a get up animation and you will just get up from your fall so there's a lot of gameplay that can come out of this and I know this sounds like very um you wouldn't see the direct impact of some gameplay with this but if you consider things like an FPS level or uh even within a station that has gravity generators so let's consider you've got two different teams and you are fighting in this sort of area now if you are in communication with your team
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and you control some sort of gravity generator or something like this you can use this very much to your advantage if they're in you know let's say we have a hanger and a gravity generator you've got the other team in the hanger and they're flying around all over the place they're you know they're going to town on your guys because they've got zero gravity they can go upside down and all these sort of things you get that other team way up in the air and you tell your other guy throw on gravity gets who's all falling down and they have to get up and you've basically got about five six seconds of of of just picking them off right as they're getting up off the ground um and then additionally right there there's other things that we could build on uh I'm not sure if the designers have have really uh fleshed this out yet but how much better are you at at U transitioning from zero gravity to gravity is that 30° actually for you more like 40° is this you know a
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character progression thing is this something that you can have an item for um do you have do you have thrusters on your suit that can help you with this you know are you are you like a cat can you always Lin on your feet you know there's all sorts of little bits of uh gameplay that can go into this so that was a really long-winded answer for kind of what's going on with with physical Eva but uh again it's a real exciting thing because I don't think it's been done before not not like this anyway eight different Get Up animations uh eight eight different directions yeah I only have one get up animation it involves grunting grunting and their sounds yeah I know that's my sit down to all right uh this leads us into the next question sure uh how are FP FPS animations coming specifically with the unification between first and third uh really well uh oh there was a there was
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a great thing that happened about two months ago um our animation director Steven bner had gone out to Frankfurt and did a lot of direct work with our animation R&D programmer so and just so you guys know a little bit of history on this too um we all we did work together at krych the uh R&D animation direct um the R&D animation engineer uh Steven bner myself and uh there was a lot of guys within crch and we had tried to unify this uh for crisis 2 and even for Crisis 3 um and we were all pretty much set in the way that you can't you just can't there is no way to do it you're always going to be chasing your tail um what looks good in first person doesn't look good in third person vice versa um but we made a change and I mean I I got to leave a little bit of magic um so I'm not going to say exactly what it was uh
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but I mean we solved the problem um and by Wii it was really you know evil Herz egg was uh Frankford engineer that really kind of on line of code solved it um and it was interesting like I made a little meme for him like it was like oh a th000 man hours I do in one line or something like that um but yeah we solved this and uh the nice thing about it is it feels like an FPS again um is the thing it feels like it the weap is in the right place it's not bouncing around um you'll probably see and even if you go look at the older videos of of the FPS before any of this implementation kind of went in the weapons bouncing around everywhere it doesn't really look like the solidified firstperson shooter at the same time we didn't want to have um static weapon you know we just don't
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want to have floaty weapon Chris talks about it all the time he just doesn't want a weapon sitting there floating in your view right he wants it to feel like you are holding it but at the same time it's got to feel super responsive and and the real problem with it is that in a first-person shooter the weapon is the only thing that communicates your movement to you so if you're turning for example right that that weapon needs to can and things like this uh um uh good one is cover so when you go into cover you can't tell if you're sort of poking your head out or if you've just moved the weapon you know so it's the only thing that really informs your movement um in first person so if you're juking if you're doing things like this the weapon needs to move and that needs to translate to Oh okay that's how my character is moving uh a third person game doesn't have this problem cuz you're staring at the character you know
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exactly what he's doing but a first person game it definitely does because you don't know necessarily what your feet are doing what your whole body is doing so it gets tricky and cover but um I would say that it's going really well um probably better than it ever has been uh especially since that change because we've made a bunch of adjustments based on that that will make developing stuff even easier a good example of this is uh We've added an extra layer of Animation there's actually like four or five different layers that are happening when we're in first person uh but one of the big ones is this uh weapon hands overlay it's a it's a it's a clip that we can put on so essentially what it does is we have very similar animations for like rifles but we might have different sizes of rifle so we might have a sniper rifle which actually I can't hold back here I'm actually going to have to hold over here now my hands poses my hand poses haven't changed dramatically but they've
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changed enough that actually we have to do something so what you you'll see is um we've got this extra layer of Animation that actually all we do is we just put one animation to move that hand to that location we link everything up with ik and we're good to go um so what this all means is that we can make more weapons faster without having to uniquely animate every single one of them um that's a big big big win so so yeah a lot of this stuff then um and sorry I know I just keep talking on and on um the the um this is oure the start stops the start stops have have made super good progress so this was some interesting stuff that Stephen bner actually came up with some really good ideas on um and then the Jukes themselves are still a bit of a challenge um we're we've got them and they're responsive now um and so
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everybody knows like the the original implementation of the Jukes felt super unresponsive that was our really biggest problem with it um and you know just being totally open about it you were you would play on Mouse and uh you would I'm a mouse and keyboard guy so you'd be playing on Mouse and keyboard and you would be strafing right and then all of a sudden you would press left and something would happen and then eventually you would end up going left and even having you know six frames of delay or seven frames of delay was enough that it felt super sluggish was the problem and that was one of our concerns uh in releasing it because if you didn't see what was happening in third person if it was awesome in third person if we were making a third person game we would have been done like that was easy but in first person that communication done with the animations side get to get me in trouble yeah no kidding um in first person it's so much harder to
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communicate that movement and and most people are so used to Call of Duty or Battlefield or something like this that is this instant response and we have to keep that instant response because otherwise it's not that fun um you feel like your character is controlling you rather than you controlling your character um so yeah there's been some great stuff on the start stops uh then Additionally you probably saw that there's new Locomotion sets within the mini puu so those are doing really uh they working really well um the other thing that's kind of exciting about them and I mean it depends who you are to see how exciting this is but uh there's three Cycles within them so these are three cycle runs three cycle walks I know that sounds like oh yeah yeah you know and what I mean three Cycles is you know left right left right left right so wait correct so you go left right left right left right um reason that's good is that
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we can actually make it um not completely symmetrical so basically the second step on that is just there's a tiny bit of a shoulder dip in it or something like this they T they tend to look a lot more realistic than just a single cycle run because a single cycle run is like perfect all the time you never ever see anything different but um you know if you go into the game right now you'll see the one that's that's the most obvious is is the backup and it's probably a little too obvious and we'll probably chill it out but when you're uh when you're um running backwards you'll notice that the shoulders kind of dip down into it um it and it's only on one of the one of the Cycles but it looks really good uh I think it looks a lot more real is is the point uh I'm getting a special telepathic message from Hennessy please stop hitting the table please stop hitting the table oh is that me I'm sorry I get
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excited next question is about turrets on our on our multi- grw ships um right now they're not the most responsive they're they're not the the funnest the most fun gameplay experience at the moment what are we doing to improve turret performance uh a lot of testing really so we're trying a lot of different different um ideas um Chris has a really good direction on this where what we want to try um and this is this is something that we're just doing internally right now um the turrets as they work right now you sit in it you've got a Crosshair and you are moving Crosshair and that's that's how it's moving with you now the problem with this is that it's actually not like anything else in your ship like if you're sitting in the pilot seat right you've got a nice floating reticule everything sort of follows up behind
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that um what we want to do is Implement that have it sort of like a floating type reticule that that the turret will sort of catch up to problem with that is the responsiveness right you've got to make sure that that moves fast enough um and if it doesn't Mo If It Moves too fast it feels super fakey If It Moves not fast enough it doesn't feel responsive enough and I'm not you know there's no promise that we're going to do this uh we're going to try it internally and we're going to see if that feels any better is the thing um the other thing that I think will help a lot is just a little bit of feedback on where your ship is facing um and this has to everything to do with UI uh which way your ship is facing which way your turret is facing uh yeah I I mean that's that's pretty much all I know right now on the on the multi crew turrets but I know there's guys in the UK really
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looking at this pretty hard right now I'm just not super involved in it that's all okay hair character hair mhm uh what are the possibilities of stresses and using something like tress effect or the new AMD technology Pure Hair what's her plan for hair so I don't know too much about Pure Hair um I know that they've released an update to trust effects and we evaluated trust effects and here's something here's a little bit of History again on uh when Tres effects 1.0 rolled out um I was part of the krych team that did the implementation originally for Tress effects into the cry engine so basically AMD had come over with all their work on Tomb Raider um and we had done uh a tech demo called the Ruby Tech demo and you can take a look uh you can look it up this is something I worked on
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with phonic actually um now you know not to at all speak bad about the tech is very very cool stuff however we've got so many characters on screen and for us to go with just one character having ridiculously you know granular simulated hair um and then everybody else in the scene kind of having you know crappy poly soup kind of hair um doesn't really make a ton of sense to us um the other thing that that is a worry of course is just the performance implications so in all the games that have used dress FX um and again I'm not saying it's like a bad performing system but it is not a system for 40 characters on screen it's not a system for 60 characters on screen it's really a system for fur of a hero character it's really a system for hair
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of a hero character and again in something like Tomb Raider pretty much one character own screen right um and you may have enemies and stuff like this but generally you are only looking at one person um do we need Super advanced level hair simulation I would argue probably not even right I would say that there's there's things that we can do now with the item ports and these we call them skeleton extensions with pretty Advanced rigging um that will make it a lot easier for us to do a lot of hairstyles um without having to sort of resort to a to a GPU hair um or or or Tres effect or um I think advidia Hair Works or stuff like this um so I can't say no for sure but we have evaluated what was there and
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it definitely it just wasn't suitable for what we wanted and the real trick with those um Hair Systems and it's just from past projects having worked with them is getting the hairstyle you really want Works real good for you know long flowy hair that's real straight uh or even like a a ponytail or something tied back but as soon as you want some sort of real retro cut or or something that looks very unique it gets tricky it really does um and the other thing that we have to consider is the zero gravity of of all of this um so trust effect effect deals with that but it looks a little weird I mean if I'm totally honest right how it ends up simulating is not what you would really expect um so so that really matters to us with all that said we are
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going to have hair um we do have hair on the characters right now confirmed um the other and there's one little other limitation in this and that's the character customization so because we want to have characters customized not only their hair color maybe the style uh maybe the length you know there's a there's a really great Korean MMO out right now um they just released their character creator which is one of the best out there and and not to plug them or anything like that I hav zero involvement in it whatsoever I'm just I'm very impressed with the the level of customization that they brought it to um is called uh Black Desert I was going to say don't talking about Black Desert why not we play I played with that that for like 15 minutes so they just released the character and had this weird like distorted Eric stolon mask thing yeah
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and then you w into game with it it's like but in terms of hair customization I've never seen a better system never seen a better system um could do that with effect sure it's it's shiny hair but look at all the stuff you can do to it right you've got control points you can pull out the hair you can make it longer shorter you can crimp it you can do all these things with it and it's hilarious me talking about hair because I've got very little of it and you know like i' my my expertise in hair is pretty limited um but yeah we want the characters to be able to customize it and and again there's so many settings on the trust effects hair that we would have to then um persist and serialize it's probably just too much got important because all these systems don't exist don't won't exist in a vacuum as to be how they will imp will integrate with everything else that we're doing yeah and that is that is you
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know the the classic Tech director role is that we've got to make sure it works with kind of everything um and you can be the buzz kill unfortunately you're a bit of a kill Joy sometimes uh where it's like ah this would be an amazing feature in this one little situation but yeah okay but what's it do here what's it do here what's it do here so I'm just bummed it sounds like there's not going to be a Tomb Raider where she goes to space yeah right right and you I'm sure it can be supported it's not you know it's just is it worth implementing and then changing yourself I'm just happy you you finally confirmed that we will have hair in the game yes uh cuz we can write the lore that everyone in the future is the same bald man exactly same face same bald man same eyes some disease that eradicated the hair it turns out that's the perfect evolution of man is a bald guy we're all
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powder remember powder that was a bad movie all right matchmaking do you have anything to do with matchmaking or our lobby system not really think so I mean well a little bits and pieces like I work with Jason Neely on some of the game side stuff but uh I mean there hasn't been uh too much going like what's the what's the question about it like where's match about what what the future of matchmaking will be and stuff I didn't think right and that's actually it's it's not a it's not a bad question um really what we've uh and I'm not even sure if it's in yet uh is the ELO rating um so once the ELO rating is online um and you know it's funny because a lot of people think that just a little bit of trivia for you um uh the the ELO rating is actually a guy's last name it it's not an acronym it's not EO it's just
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it's the guy's last name that came up with it so just so you guys know but uh ELO rating is pretty important so that we can actually matchmake between um similarly skilled players cuz that's kind of the biggest concern right is so that you don't end up with a bunch of beginners in with the super expert guys right so I mean I expect that to come online but that will you'll likely see that come online as Arena commander makes uh further progress um but again the real focus is this is the mini puu really right now and once we've got you know Sim pods within the mini puu then I think you'll see a lot more work and and a lot more game types in Arena Commander will bullets from FPS guns be affected by artificial gravity or the lack thereof uh right now they're not they could be uh I mean that's a system that's already in the cry engine
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this the this this bullet drop uh is is basically the uh the term um and it whether it's artificial gravity or real gravity I think it's all technically artificial gravity because I mean it is a video game so it's all artificial um but we could um they're just right now we haven't been uh working ever at ranges that it would make sense right um yeah I'm not even going to try to spit on numbers but you know most of our firstperson combat scenarios don't really extend past 200 yards or 300 yards right now um not not to say that they won't ever um because things like Planet Side and stuff like that will will will change that drastically uh but currently there just hasn't been really a reason for it gotta they're they're they're freaking out about the ELO rating right
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now oh what that did everybody know that and I just like dropped the trivia and I'm like oh I'm so smart because I know this yeah W you tell us what ELO rating is you said it was named after a guy but what is the ELO rating uh it's a way to actually well it's a way to give a single number uh to your to your skill set and this is based on kills deaths uh uh the time played I there's a formula actually it's it's just a like if you check the Wikipedia I think it's just a formula so but again I'm not really that involved in that side of it but I looked it up because I asked everybody one time I'm like what does ELO stand for I thought it was an acronym and nobody had the answer but Google did Goa uh okay how do you plan or do you sorry how do you plan to do if it's
00:34:42
possible to do with the cry engine for transferring the mass inertia of a ship to its passengers uh I think A variation of this question I've seen before is Pilots will red out and black out M will those effects trans transfer to the people who are riding passengers in the ships it totally could um and that's a that's a really good question and we've talked about this a lot um a good and let me sort of take you and again I always turn these into a story or like a history um okay so we're two3 of the way through the so so the best the best way I can I can explain it was that uh with zero grav sorry with with the g-forces we uh there was an initial implementation on how the pilot reacted to g-forces and it was pretty crappy if I'm honest um the next thing that we did was reimplement
00:35:30
or refactor it basically so that it uses a blend space and what what a blend space means is that this uh these GeForce reactions are now parametrically driven which is super cool because you can you can pass the GeForce data you know whatever the value is um uh you can pass that to a single animation set and it's just going to blend based on whatever that that might be the question that came up and this is now a little bit more to to the actual uh the topic um the question that came up during that is what happens in a local physics G ship like a constellation uh does the pilot sit there reacting to the g-forces whilst he's got co-pilots standing literally right next to him not doing anything um and and what we ended up coming up with was actually within the local physics to ship no you you would
00:36:18
not actually feel any of this gravity change if it was artificial gravity this what do I know I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination when you're in a ship that has artificial Gra gravity uh it's going to compensate for this effect start Tre called them inertial dampers inertial dampers right now uh where we do want some sort of reaction um and I mean does this make because there is a kind of a a problem with the design here um when you're a constellation pilot you still red out and black out but yet you're not doing any real GeForce reactions so does that really make a lot of sense not really but it's balanced is is kind of the thing um what we do want though is De reactions so Star Trek you know shaking in the seat whatever um but then we want people that are standing there to have
00:37:05
some level of reaction we can't take control away from the player but have some level of character reaction uh to the damages and the things that are going on within the ship um do we have inertial dampers or anything like that not really not right now um and how it all works is just if you're within that physics grid you basically don't react uh uh to those things would that extend to items that are in the ship as well like cargo or MH like that so cuz I mean if you think about it yeah if we start doing that with the player we'd have to start doing that with the whole cargo and if your cargo's not strapped down or whatever and we don't want to have to force the character or the players to go to the back of the ship and get a tie down out and you know strap it down that would be super silly it's one of those things where we take it to the edge of realism and then we have to bring it back to someplace where it's totally I
00:37:51
say this one thing all the time if you want realism go sit on the bus bench and tell me how fun that was you know I mean it's you know it's games after all we're take close to realism as we can and then bring it back to the point where it becomes fun yeah definitely remember win Commander had the same exact issue way back then you ship had in the fiction acceleration absorbers and in the first builds if your acceleration absorbers got destroyed and you tried to accelerate your guy just died just died and it was really it's not that much fun yeah it's not very fun at all right right now on crusader uh players that are inside the local physics grids can't be killed I think it was a bug fixed people Pilots were getting shot through so they that's right so they made anybody inside
00:38:39
their invol right right now when somebody jumps on a ship you can't shoot them you can't do anything you can't fight people on uh Korea will run into a ship as a sort of a safeone as yeah it's like I'm safe I'm safe now that's funny are we going to fix that what's the plan definely well yeah absolutely we're going to fix that cuz of course of course we want Combat on the ships and I'm more thinking uh uh larger ships rather than you know consolation and Retaliator sort of thing uh but yeah we want combat to be able to go on on the ships if somebody's trying to board your ship you want to be able to defend it uh if there's people on your ship hanging out in a seat that you want to get rid of then you get rid of them um here's the trick is that H and it's interesting we just had a meeting about this this morning uh what we have to implement is a pierce ability system for our item
00:39:25
components so this is something that I'm sure you know Chris will talk about or something like this uh where we have uh where we have Shield Hull and then the component within there and we need some level of Pierce ability for the projectiles however uh the way the Pierce ability system works in the engine right now is basically is can I go through it or can I not right so if I say yep you can go through the armor well I all of a sudden start getting lasers in the cockpit I got the pilots getting shot out every two seconds so basically we had to reel that back um and we've got to put sort of a deeper system in place with the Pierce ability not just a not just a logic check where it's you know can I go through it or can I not uh where there's actually a thickness to it um there's going to be certain areas in the ship that we just won't do that with um a good one will likely be the cockpit I can't confirm
00:40:13
that for sure I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination we've actually literally the end of that meeting was okay design go off and you figure out exactly how you want that to work and you come back and let us know and then we will put it in as such um so yeah that was kind of a quick fix to make it so that yeah you weren't just getting shot out of your seat um the the the real Annoying one to me was when you were sitting in a turret and like somebody was shooting at you with a pistol or something like that and then that would shoot you out and I mean that's really cool in Battlefield if you've got like an M50 you know 50 cal sniper rifle and you shoot through some glass or something but I mean I would think that space glass is pretty strong um you know if you're going to have it as something to this you heard it here first space glass is strong pretty strong pretty strong transparent aluminum right so um yeah I mean the the long term to that is absolutely you will have combat
00:41:02
within the ship but we don't want you to get shot with a laser from outside um into the ship just randomly okay uh the transparent aluminum com comment takes us to our next question Cool almost as if we planned it uh hello Sean hello hello hi hi that was it who was it as far as I understood the cry engine does not natively support rendering the world into subr for example as far as this person knows the C was intended to have a non-transparent cockpit with just a drawing of the outside world in a holographic manner right um is that still something possible it would be a great way to enhance immersion MH uh no and that's a it's a great question a great uh comment that that he and he's right um we didn't have the idea there was just never a need for it um of of
00:41:52
subframes or basically like a picture in picture um is kind of what he means um we want it absolutely and there is inherently in the engine there is stuff that's doing something very similar um and the reason I say something that's doing it very similar is Stereo does something very similar um a stereoscopic rendering um or more specifically the post stereo technique not the Dual rendering but post stereo technique um um will render the scene twice but sorry it doesn't render the scene twice it renders the scene once and then actually uh um uh uh generates that second image based on all the stuff in that first frame so we could do something to this effect where we're taking that stereo render um whatever the second image would be created and actually map that down to a poly um the
00:42:40
the trick is is that there's so many um screen based and now that we're camera relative rendering there's so many camera based and Screen based effects that we do I'm hitting the table again uh uh post effects um on the screen that that won't work very well um if you're trying to do a picture and picture sort of thing um so you can't do uh uh these full screen post effects on this tiny little thing but that's good because um uh there's other games that get arounded by not having any color on that not having any normal mapping on that um you can make another image uh with less render passes uh pretty quickly and we've just we really need an implementation case that makes a lot of sense to do that with one of the biggest things I want to do this with and this hasn't come from any designer but but I've talked about it a million times is
00:43:29
that I hate the fact that as a pilot I don't know where my Gunners are looking I have zero idea and if I had a tiny little picture and picture of both turrets or even one that I could select where the guy was looking and I got some sort of remote view that would be amazing um so I I we're going to move that direction so that there is this sense of it's really to to to to get better teamwork going together uh in the ship so that you know one that you have a gunner two where he's looking so you can actually pile it in a way that actually that makes sense and three we need things like security cameras and things like that so you know it'd be really cool to have um if you're on a transport ship or or something like this to have a to have another security camera in the back so you can actually monitor your ship uh Capital ships are absolutely going to need this um so that
00:44:17
you can actually check different areas of the ship for borders and stuff like that exactly without actually changing the full screen render um and then and then further examples of that is maybe a cockpit that's completely closed um you know how does that work um so there is ways to do it it it is absolutely not inherently um uh uh supported in the cry engine it's not something that it had ever had the idea of doing uh but there has been other lenses um not just cig that had interest in that and have done it um a good example um of a liccy that did it was a big red button when they did Sonic Boom um they actually made split screen rendering so that that is the exact same concept as as having little picture in picture so um it's all about using all that data that you get from one frame and and compositing an image based on some of the information
00:45:06
that you can reproject onto that new one and in any game they usually a frame delayed there's usually one frame behind so whether or not people notice that's a different story so I hope that answers that it's you know kind of a roundabout you only go roundabouts okay that's true that's true here here's a here's a pretty simple direct question we'll see see how how concise an answer you can give to this one it's be a personal Sean Tracy challenge all right let's do it with the release of the Oculus Rift in the HTC Vive this year we're wondering if Squadron 42 episode 1 is planned to have official VR support upon release yeah I can't answer that um I can't uh cuz actually I don't know um do we have VR support sure um is it an expected thing to support for squadron
00:45:53
42 release I expect so but it's really more of a question for Chris I can't um this is less of a technical question uh because absolutely could but then again everything's possible just a matter of time and money but yeah so can't really answer that and that's about as concise as it gets let's get that one in a TI for the Sherman all right um going through questions but folks like Sean wouldn't have anything to do with the scitec pre-orders stuff like that so no looking for questions that are actually relevant to Mr Tracy although I can comment on the scitech pre-or it's going to be a little bit longer we were planning to do it uh end of January um we've decided instead to do a little bit closer to
00:46:43
when the actual items will be shipping they're they're firming up their uh production schedule now so uh it's not going to be in the not going to be immediately but it's still coming so is the design final can I ask can I ask a question um what I think it's pretty finalized okay like the really big one right like the the screen one and everything in fact isn't there people from side here who s I'm not sure they're FKS from here today actually oh is that the guys that were okay so got some guys walking around I had no idea who they were they seemed important yes they seemed very important I we don't know who they are yeah whatever all right uh integrated voice chat have there been any thoughts about that I know a lot of people have seen this uh there's a tech demo where there's positional audio where you hear people farther away when they get when they get
00:47:30
farther away oh sure I mean that's not um and I I totally write that off like it's a easy thing um there a lot of the voice chat stuff does that already so team speak is it's a great example actually uh TeamSpeak you can set any of the users to be in a different 3D sort of area so you know I'm playing with you i' have you behind or over the right hand or wherever um for us to know where the other players are that are speaking is super easy I mean we we know that pretty much all the time um and within your vicinity we know it even more accurately uh so absolutely we can do this um The Cry engine already has a voice over IP system within it um it the quality is not really where anybody's happy with it right now um and actually
00:48:18
the bandwidth is pretty high so we had talked to a couple vendors um that have different you know tech for this kind of stuff and really in the end we've just kind of decided that we'll just do our own um it it makes a lot of sense to just do our own now will it support the 3D position audio that's going to be a that's going to be a must um so it's definitely going to have to if you're piling a ship and you know again Connie is a good example you got two co-pilots right and this guy says something I yes definitely it has to come out of the right ear I mean it's going to sound absolutely ridiculous it's just a disembodied sort of voice um where things get even crazier is is some of the ideas uh that have been floting around about runtime facial stuff whereas you know the guy is talking and you look over and his guy's Flappy lips sort of thing yeah your webcam is
00:49:06
recording your face and as you move your exactly so that's there's there's little bits and pieces of R&D on this like and it might it might surprise you to know that a lot of our facial animators will just capture their own faces a lot of the times when they're testing stuff they're just with their webcams sure I mean um and uh actually in one of the in the bishop Tech demo uh there's a big range of motion that he does that was all captured from the facial animator from his webcam so I mean all this all that Tech exists is just what's the priority of it not that high right now um we know we can do it uh it's going to benefit the players better when there's a better party system when that's a little more clear um yeah I I mean I I just it's a bit cart before the horse right now so do we know how we'll do it yeah we have a pretty good idea so a
00:49:55
better party system is there a better party system coming to Star citiz there will be eventually absolutely but here's the thing the the party system still doesn't work as it's designed right um the contact system is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination this is one of my biggest frustrations with the game right now because I mean it doesn't we don't have to reinvent the wheel on this is my opinion is you know there's a bunch there MSN doesn't exist anymore but uh Skype uh Yahoo messenger I mean a billion different communication um um messaging systems that have been created before and there's no reason for us to reinvent the wheel so we should just be kind of doing what works um so for me that that's a big frustration but that's got to come online before you even worry about some of that Vib stuff um so yeah all right got time for a couple
00:50:49
more questions what what important Tech are you not sure about what important Tech are you not yet sure about will work that's a great question CU it's it's kind of our job to to know how each and Let Jesus got on the roof elephants on the roof sorry I know we shouldn't even people to stop us from answering this question uh yeah yeah I it that's that's a tough one I'm going to have to think a couple minutes about that and in doing that I'll just I'll just fill the air with with words um normally our job is to know how we're going to attack something
00:51:38
and I mean really very seldom do we just jump into something and have zero idea with a naive level of sort of development the stuff that scares me the most is the stuff that we don't know that we don't know and I know that sounds kind of you know nebulous but that's the stuff that bites us um is when you're not not sure there's going to when you don't know about a problem that's going to be coming because if you already know that this problem's going to come you have some sort of solution that we can come up with and we've done that in almost every case that's Universal to all game development absolutely human thought really sure sure and and those are the things that scare me the most so if if I was to answer the question I would say the stuff that we have not yet seen that it is going to be a problem that's the stuff that I'm I'm the most worried about and that I don't know how to solve because I don't know the problem that's
00:52:27
why they call it one of the reasons why they call it game development not game building we're not we're not there's no blueprint at the very beginning we're just building what somebody else has already figured out you know just a to B to C to D we are discovering and exploring the the solutions and the options that we have towards making the game throughout the entire process and we will be right up to the point where we we release the game and even after that absolutely um yeah I mean most of us want to just keep building up on stuff and you know if if any one of the these developers got 6 months to work on one thing they would come up with so much new so many different things um and again it's just really about triaging how much time you you you can allow them to spend on certain certain pieces of attack okay will local gravity in a system ever affect the the performance
00:53:17
of a ship like when a ship gets closer to a planetary body a star a planet or something maybe just a really big asteroid we all want this yeah uh we do um what it will be is can't believe I'm calling this a smaller scale will be on a planetary scale uh originally so as you approach a planet that's when it's going to do something um the ranges I couldn't even begin to tell you about likely what you'll see is that when you start doing the atmosphere entries that's when you'll be affected by that planet's gravity now are you going to be affected as you just approach it is there going to be a station orbiting not out of the gate G um there's a lot of problems to solve in there and one of the biggest ones is just relative velocities um because if you've got a space station you know
00:54:04
orbiting a planet that's the Space Station's moving at you know whatever 13,000 miles an hour um and your ship only really moves at 300 how do you ever get to the station right it will always outrun you or you know things like this um unless you then have yeah right some level of gravity that will give you a gravity assist give you the velocity to actually catch up to that and be in that same frame of reference but that yeah I mean it opens up so many so many problems um so originally originally um out of the gate uh you can look forward to the planets yes having some gravity uh that will affect you as you as you get close and and I'm talking pretty close um but not when you're super far away or anything like that now having said that we've got all sorts of tech online for Gravity Wells gravity streams
00:54:53
um so whether there's like a nebula that has weird gravity with in it whether there's a black hole that sucks you in I mean there's all sorts of different things that we can do with gravity right now um we just don't have the designs really solidified for for what they all need to do um is the thing but we've got all the tech online to do that stuff with and it could absolutely um be done would there ever be a a ship that could affect another Ship by proximity as it not like just in terms of it mass or it's like a weapon or something like like like the Vandal King ship or something like that was that Ian I'm not a physics person I'm I'm I'm a little bit and I'm not sure that it would even have mass enough to do that I mean what do I know though how much does a kingship weigh 50 lbs at least Lots over 9,000 easy um so yeah no that's a that's
00:55:44
a good question I I doubt that you'll see it on the ships though um it just doesn't really make a lot of sense unless that ship is just gigantic I would think though if there's a weapon of some sort like a gravity generat like gravity well gener yeah that' be super cool sort of what an interdictor is though isn't it uh ships interdiction ships create artificial gravity WS to pull things out of I don't know anything about interdiction ships yet Jared I'm just talking about in sci-fi in general SciFi not specifically to start um yeah I think that'd be cool I think it'd be cool to have weapons that actually modify the gravity in certain areas that'd be cool uh somebody was asking how we test multigroup functionality if the lobby system sucks so much uh it's cuz we don't test on live servers we test on internal builds with internal servers where we don't have to fight with anybody to get in uh yeah that and
00:56:32
that's kind of the win there and also we can increase the player count as we need to internally um it's really it's a pretty quick sear for us um to to change that um all right let's look for our last question cuz we are pretty much out of time already oh that was fast y That's why we like these ones that's why we invited you it's like we bring you in it's a day off for us it's a day off for us great uh da da are you imp here we go are you impressed with how far star citizens has pushed cry engine did you think it would ever be used in this context um in in this context I.E like solar system scaled nah uh no like I mean even even at the original onset when I was when I was demoing the engine for Chris uh you know years ago uh the the scale of the game was smaller right um we
00:57:22
never expected to do a solar system scale or anything to this sort of effect um I'm super impressed with where the engine has gone with this and in fact you know it very little there's still cry engine in there but I mean there's so many improvements across the board um that I'm super re I say super a lot um I'm really impressed with anyways uh one of the biggest ones is the local physics grid stuff uh it's a unique sort of selling point within Star Citizen it's a it's a unique feature that I've not seen in any other game uh and that that by itself um just experiencing that was really really really cool to see um additionally I mean there's so many changes around there um the 32-bit uh uh inverse depth buffer stuff so that we can actually render out to that that sort of distance
00:58:10
and then when I first did when I first loaded the procedural Planet when it had terrain streaming working all properly the scale I've I I've gotten so used to working on you know really really they're small now you know an 8 kmet level to me was massive right because if you're talking terrain and just running around as a guy that's a that's a lot of terrain uh to work with so the scale just boggled and it's not even mindboggling it really screwed up my sense of perception even in the editor cuz I might be working around and I've got this planet there you know it just looks like a little sphere or whatever and I start zooming in start zooming it I'm zooming it I've got to turn up my camera to a th000 MERS a second um and just to give you an idea of like the the the the amount of change that goes on in the engine we have these
00:58:59
little buttons for camera speed and we had 0.1.1 and 10 or a one and 10 so we've had to now add 100 a th000 and we even have a 10,000 one but there's no real yeah no reason for that yet um it's just crazy the the the scale differences to sort of wrap your heads around so yeah I'm super impressed with the with the stuff that's been done to the engine and no I never expected I never expected to see it to this scale I guess is uh is is the the answer well cool that wraps up uh the January special subscriber edition of RTV awesome uh thank you so much Sean Tracy for coming on and uh taking over and letting us sit here and pick your brain it's exciting stuff I love this stuff U around the verse is tomorrow uh
00:59:48
uh regular RTV will return on Friday uh we'll see if we can't get some some of our special visitors to pop in maybe and uh anything else you want to add before we sign off you got a little bit of housekeeping too sure um let's see folks have been asking about the uh the package split between Star CI Squad 42 it is not happening January but we do have a date now which will be February 14th um we'll reiterate all of these on uh around the verse and uh that other show we to reverse the later in the week but give people heads up as best we can um the one-time used melt tokens for the uh buyback store the buyback store are going to be distributed on Friday that's going to let you bring back one one ship package whatever with uh store credit um
01:00:38
it's one time use only so be careful what you de decide um what else I feel like there was a third thing I don't know what it is though maybe there's not a third thing all right we will uh we'll see you guys very soon all right guys take okay thank you

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