10 for the Developers: Episode 13

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] hey everyone Brian Chambers from Frankfurt uh Jared reached out to me asked me if I could help out for uh this Edition so here I am uh let's get right to it um you guys posted a question so I dug through see what I could answer what I can't um I'm probably G to mess up names and excuse me for my dull

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   background um s Salan uh asked what are some things about Star Citizen as drawn yourself and so many other Talent people to the Frankford Studio to work on this project from your perspective as a studio lead has the crowdfunded model been a hurdle to overcome in regards to head hunting Talent first of all it'll sound like a like a a Fluff piece but it's not um so honestly having doing this for for quite a while the ambition behind this project and the commitment behind all the senior staff Chris and Aaron and the whole team um what they're able to pull together with the community um um and also them wanting pushing boundaries technically on design uh kind of forging some new

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   ground in in my opinion and others it's really kind of what what pulled us here to you know take a look and you know 18 months later here we are still working and pushing on things um in regards to the the crowdfunding um honestly I don't think it's hurt at all it's actually um uh it gets us noticed from time to time obviously um from the amount that we've Crown funded um and that draws people's attention um which is great it gives us a little bit more exposure and people kind of know who we are um I do get question occasionally from candidates in regards to crowdfunding and what does that mean and the finances and so on um and I take the time to explain the detail what we're doing dayto day months to months midterm longterm

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   Etc um so the most I say would impact is you know they want to know that it's things are secure if they're going to join us as a team because it's you know for these guys here we're hiring guys that are experienced and do this for a living and it's their their career per se F mosis uh asks what are the advantages and disadvantages of working with four separate satellite studios in four separate time zones as compared to one centralized studio um um I think the biggest hurdle honestly is communication um on the production side on the senior level across all side we need to make sure that the the communication is as solid as possible and that we're communicating in a way

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   that all the people that need to know the information understand where to go and how to get the information um if they have questions um that's something that I think we're constantly on the uction side looking at and reevaluating um I don't think that there's honestly in it's my opinion I don't think there's any one perfect model to it of how to do it or how not to do it um but it's putting things in place having the flexibility to adjust them as they needed or need to be um we've done a pretty good job so far and we've made a good amount of changes even since frankfurt's been involved stuff been driven by the UK um with Aaron stepping out and kind of overseeing all all the studios on the production level it's really kind of pulled stuff

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   together so we're all speaking the same language um it's definitely sometimes so you know frustrating I'll get emails at two in the morning I'll need questions answered when people are asleep in La so it definitely has some disadvantages but at the same time it also evens itself out because work is being done almost on a 24-hour basis um to some extent which keeps things churning so you know we'll leave here at night in Frankfurt and come back in the morning and we'll have seen progress and had things checked in and so on from LA or Austin that um are kind of vital for us moving forward uh Daz writes hi Brian can you explain a bit about your process for creating the

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   first procedural location and what look and feel you are aiming for I get asked a lot on the procedural plan it's and rightfully so because it's it's it's cool stuff and I think we we made some progress that people weren't expecting and kind of dumped it on people on that live stream which was pretty awesome to do um the first procedural Planet uh really had nothing to do with athetics hey what are we trying to pull off aesthetically nothing to be honest with you it was just about proving Tech so textures were pulled in um of a certain uh memory footprint that we knew would most likely have and then the tech was just pushed um until we got that up and running um after those first steps uh then we had an artti an environment

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   artist 100% dedicated to uh working with all of The Tech Guys and Engineers that were pushing on uh the procedural planets um they need to sort out the best approach on how to get rid of seams how to make those non-existent uh what limitations and parameters should or shouldn't be set um on and on and on there's so much detail that's going into that um and that work is honestly right now as of this moment going on to some extent um but a huge progress is being made um we've already done tests with different types of geometry and different types of look and different type of atmospherics um to really see that um we can come up with uh one thing that was interesting is is Pascal our environment artist that was

9. 00:06:29

   working know stuff he'd been playing with this one planet now mind you it's huge for a good amount of time a couple weeks I think um and there was one point he kind of made some noise and some of the guys had come over and looked he had actually seen something like a new formation that he hadn't seen although he' been looking at this thing for for you know weeks um and getting to a new part he had seen a new formation that looked really really cool but was completely unique to anything else he had seen over the last couple weeks and that's cool that's telling us that the parameters there are working it's keeping things uh new it's keeping things random but still saying within the guidelines that uh Tech is putting forward War doog how will the definition of procedural Planet generation work is

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    it only a set of random seeds or will an artists Define where land and water is and the algorithm seed will only Define the shape of the coast and the land and mountains River Etc um honestly it's a bit of both uh first we go cool what type of planet do we want what are what are we generating um and then we'll obviously adjust the parameters based off of that planet um for what we would like procedurally generated at the same time during the process we can guide it as specific as we need um there's a lot of artists control over there and I I think that's essential because we want people to come and have certain experiences on these planets um so not only can we Define and create new parameters for

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    each type of trrain or even each type of gameplay that's going to go in there um but then the artist can go through and have really fine level control um you know we would we want in a sense we want to focus more on the quality and then the quantity you're going to have a tremendous amount of quantity and I think you're have so much that you're really not going to see things repeat themselves which is awesome um but at the same time we we know having that control of the artist to go through and fine-tune stuff is extremely important um not only for look but also for gameplay um and then on top of that we know we'll create tools for the artists on top of that so now they're actually playing around with the procedurally generated terrain and so on um to really give it as pull it together as

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    efficiently as POS possible shrike or shriek don't know how to pronounce that sorry uh What technological challenges still remain before cig is comfortable adding a procedural Planet mechanic to one of our upcoming patches I get that question a lot um right now we're in the process of incorporating what we have so far in the procedural technology um into everything else um when we are proving out the tech and building it up and had Pascal working with guys we have kind of in a very controlled area we kind of needed to pull it away from everything else so we could just focus on it um now that we've gotten it a bit more mature now we're pulling together with everything else um we're seeing really good

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    progress on that but then we need to see what blows up what uh unknown or unforeseen issues um have come up to address those have come up and that we need to address them um we know we we knew there would be some issues already when we put it in and we've already identified those and it came true with what we thought which is good because our our logic made sense so we've already are working on those and then uh you know we'll churn through it um once we get all that solid and sorted so it's actually a a good decent play experience for you guys um then we think you know that's that's when it would be time to to hand it over um some of the stuff on procedures it's been interesting for us

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    uh working on it you know there's a build with a couple different procedural planets in there and uh you're on one you're there you've taken off in the ship you get up you fly away um you know five minutes of flying through space later I see a distant planet and then another five minutes to actually get there to get to that planet um which was nuts you know used to start flying and we're going as fast as we can and we're going all right cool we got this hey wait wait and we're just kind of sitting there tapping our feet tapping our feet so that's another thing that we're looking at is you have the distances but we need also need to make sure that it's you know um it makes sense for the game I guess you could say that the distances are there and so on

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    but that's for design and and and Chris and all those guys just sort out rug and he made note that I'm supposed to pronounce it like that uh cinematics and animation have played a big part in the wing Commander series but tend to be quite passive will we have a better blend of the player being in the room and simply have animated characters or is it going to be MGS style long cut scenes of little little interaction you'll have a good honest mix of interaction with the cutcenes um you won't have these long drawn out cutcenes that are non- interactive um all over the place um the cut scenes were were designed written and shot in

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    away they give a a large amount of different variety and how they play out some do take control fully away from the player but for a very specific reason um if if that makes sense um there's also a large amount that are fully interactive um and then there's hybrids that put the player in a defined path but the player has still have some sense of movement and and sense of control so I really do think once these all come together you're going to get a whole good mix and it's really going to feel fairly fluid and seamless um we also have added elements the scenes where they Branch but branch in a very kind of relaxing casual sensible way so the player has some choice but it's not like you know things pause in the AI

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    roams um until you push a button um so I think even the those with the different interaction that's kind of casual um and the mix it's even going to make them feel a bit more fluid exitics xiix I probably messed that one up uh since the Frankfurt studio is still growing are there any plans to build a German customer service team there or if so would it be placed in Manchester otherwise which department in Frankfurt will grow in the future there's been a bit as you know there's already a CS team in the UK I don't know how many people are there I know there were more people last time I visited recently um all primarily English speaking I think there's some

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    other languages in there too but I don't know them off the top of my head um there has been some earlier discussions really early of having native German speakers um obviously being here in Germany and interacting with the German fans although there's a large amount of English that's that's spoken um things are always more in my opinion a little more comfortable in their native language so um with such a large German community and I know that the communities are large everywhere but with such a large German community that's where we we've had those early discussions um that position could be here in in Frankfurt um I think which would make sense uh you know because they could interact directly with people

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    here too if needed um but it could also be in the UK and embedded with the other team so um yeah I mean that's still to be seen as far as Frankford studio and growing um I'd say in most departments we're still growing um we we're still looking for a few more people on for cutscenes um as an overview we're we're helping to drive cutscenes we have a large portion on design here on producing weapons on um AI code um and with engine code um with weapons we're fully sorted out as far as team size goes um and different department are at a slightly different state or various

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    right um we're we're pretty we're getting pretty close to capacity um as I mentioned briefly or uh recently on an ATV um we are doing an expansion just so we can build out the rest of the team and everybody can fit here comfortably um but yeah as a general overview I mean most disciplines we're hiring for whether that's art whether that's code uh um QA Etc but we're doing pretty good filling up with what we need um also important to point out I mean we're not hiring people to hire people we we have a specific plan in place we have a a headcount plan based off of the work that's needed based off of our dates and so on so all of the hiring all the planning all of the expansion that

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    we do and the building out of teams it's all based on a very specific growth and schedule that we're doing right AI so stul lator stul lator hi Brian I'm very curious about where ca cig is at with their AI any news for us nothing extremely new to report uh this second I can say we're making good progress AI is one of the bits that I I try to give an update on um and I know it's fairly high level on the ATV every week um but I try to give an idea of what the guys are are pushing on and what they're working on um there is in in overall large amount going on with AI right now um with subsumption system and how we're making

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    sure that things are set up today that are going to be best used for the future right um we we need to take the time it's in everybody's best interest to build as strong of a foundation as we can on things like AI so that could set us up to handle things that we want to implement um you know in the next few months the next six months even ideas that we have that are you know loose on paper that we would want to put in once the game's already out and mature stuff that we'd still like to push on that we think would be cool for for players so um we actually have here recently it's coming up not to date this video but it's going to come up in the next few days uh where I think we're going to have nine different people out

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    here to the Frankfurt office including um Tony from Austin and Chris and Sean Tracy so on and so on and so on a good amount of people from the UK um with a large amount of the discussion based on AI so um we know AI is important we're making huge advancements we're always adding new bits but we're also taking the time to make sure like I said that we build that Foundation as solid as we need to corrupt you for fun one Brian is building the weapons for the game something that gets prioritized and therefore built faster in order to get it into a specific patch over building it over the course of time and when it's ready it's put in then as in a lot of the things that I'm answering

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    honestly it's it's a bit of both um we know what ships and weapons will be released and um we know what new releases they'll be in or what new patches and so on so we do our best to line those schedules up right you obviously if we're going to put a ship out you want to try to get a weapon functioning on it or as many or all of them if you can um sometimes the ships move a little faster in production sometimes the weapons move a little faster in production uh but we do our best we can to line those up to give it the best experience um internally we have a good amount of weapons that we're working on we have uh four full-time weapons artists we have our

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    lead um and then three other guys that are are healthy to mount um so there's stuff that's coming out of them on a on a daily and weekly basis um again making good progress floppy donkey considering squadron 2 42 will be story driven how much if any of the procedural world's Tech can we expect in the single player campaign uh for that we're honestly still sorting it out um and I'll try to explain since Squadron is primarily linear um and it's it's got a defined experience but sometimes it's loose based off players's actions and so on um procedural Planet aren't absolutely

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    necessary right um at the same time everything's on this on the same code base so we have those in know there and we have them functioning uh or we meaning we have the tech functioning the way it needs to which it will be um could we use it so we can pull things together more efficiently absolutely um but you know I don't think it would be something and I could be wrong but my guess would be it wouldn't it be that you know when you go back in um you're going to have a different experience erience or see different terrain um it would just be used to set the defined terrain at that point tyy or Tiffy uh hey Brian Chambers this has been a question alongside the whole

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    community at least on Reddit for a while with new apis becoming the standards in the future dx12 and Vulcan I wonder what Ci's approach is on this topic we want a futureproof game which has the best of the very best graphics in our this can only be done with early integration of dx12 Vulcan so that you know what the limits are of the new technology and that you can build around that uh guaranteed they were also interested in future proofing um that the tech directors are setting things up correctly this one I actually because I wanted to get you guys a solid solid solid answer um a lot of the tech guys like I said before they're really not

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    interested in getting on camera but they will write stuff up for me if I ask and explain they totally dig the community they're just not fans of being on camera so I asked one of our Tech directors um Mr Carson venel and he actually wrote me up some stuff so I'm going to sit here and actually read this so if I'm not looking at the camera I am reading it from paper um so his response uh where actively looking to adopting new graphics apis as you know dx12 and Vulcan differ quite significantly from previous API designs such as dx11 and openg 4.5 they try to map very closely to current Graphics Hardware architecture as well as provide applications more low-level control of

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    video memory in order to take advantage or full advantage of them uh we started a massive refactor of the render and 3D engine in order to more efficiently prepare and submit items to be drawn well beyond the scope of the recent massively instanced rendering optimization done by us think of a departure from a monolithic render thread to more lightweight jobs that prepare individual render passes in parallel via the job system the hope is that this will allow us more flexibility in terms of draw calls in a lot of areas without complicated runtime merging if materials and meshes or tedious offline optimization passes on content creation side for example such as uh character attachments this Rea refactor will lay the foundation for all future rendering

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    and Graphics work on top of that we'll be reworking the Shader system and Resource Management to better map those new apis and take advantage of new features exposed by the new apis and Shader languages especially memory management is going to be a fairly complex matter and far more trivial but crucial crucial in order to get the best performance don't underestimate the support work video drivers do on dx11 and opengl additionally we Embrace asynchronous compute taking advantage of the heterogeneous multi multi-gpu setups uh onboard plus discrete GPU uh is another possibility that might yield extra gains that is instead of alternate frame rangering each GPU works on

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    different Tas for a given frame this needs some initial research first though to see how it can work and if the performance gains are actually worth the effort that they put into it in summary we agree that adopting these apis is going to be essential moving forward but at the same time we want to take our time to get stuff done properly so you'll actually see a benefit over dx11 visually and in terms of performance so the answer yes we're absolutely concerned with future proofing um I I wanted to be able to read that and although I probably messed up pronun pronunciation A little bit um you know the the guys that are working on stuff they here they know their stuff um we want to set this up in the right way that we know it's going to be able to

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    milk everything we can that we get the best performance that we can support the best hardware and so on so the guys are really taking their time and putting their energy and their their big brain uh Tex what into getting this where it needs to be uh Mr Cole asks thanks for stepping up the plate yet again to answer our questions compared to your early work with animation and motion capture for rough neck star Starship Troopers Chronicles how has the technology advanced in the last few decades and are there any drawbacks compared to the earlier methods um Tex made huge steps since I first started I mean Tex made huge steps in the last few years um when I did the work on the initial season of Ru necks

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    um Optical mocap wasn't even really used in production um I think you had some of the larger like film effects companies using it um but I don't think any smaller houses or or games were at all um at that point we had a um a magnetic um system flock of birds I think it was called uh stage side was limited to 12 by 12 12T X 12T um it was supposed to be Wireless but it would send these wireless data packets and occasionally the data packets would drop which would make the motion just completely blow up or freeze so a lot of times we actually had to run tethered so you had somebody in these fun funky suits with all these Gyros on them

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    um and then even on the software side there was a lot lot of scripting to get stuff to work mapping something you know the actual motion to to character uh you know would take a full day to set up a character and get that running where now you can do it in a couple clicks um but back in the day when we finished stuff and we looked at it I mean we were so proud seeing characters moving in the environment um when I go back and look at those nowadays um you know you can see the high frequency noise I kind of cringe you can see the high frequency noise in the animation uh you can see floaty feet um contact isn't really there where it needs to be but you know that was the day and for the time of what we did I think it was it was really cool um today you have huge volumes you're capturing

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    numerous people at once you're capturing body you're capturing face you're capturing fingers we're recording audio we're tracking props um huge volumes if we want to use them um um the software also is is leaps and Leaps and Bounds um you know almost to a point to say you know the kids kids nowadays have it easy right um but yeah it's true I mean back in the day it was it was a lot more archaic but it was still in incredibly new and exciting back then just as as the new stuff that's coming online now is so it's cool Kaji arel asks Uncharted for place a level so high in terms of quality animation lighting level of details even in large open area

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    content streaming dot dot dot Etc and on a PS4 a hardware where CR clearly stated in the past that Star Citizen could not run does that change the team's mind and the power con power console can have and can we expect that you at least reconsider a console release in the long term on a technical point of view I mean um charted 4 looks awesome uh I think it was the the day or so after it came out we grabbed it and had it here in the studio and told I told the team hey let's go in the kitchen and talk to Chris about it and so on so when I say kitchen we had a couch in there with a a console so we all went in there and were playing it um you know they they did an awesome job uh looks good it plays

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    nice um generally in console development and I can just say this from experience um the games look nicer the longer the console exists you understand how to use the hardware better you understand how to go around or through or above or under the limitations that the hardware gives you you find new tips and new tricks on how to put things together manage memory stream things so on and so on and so on so as you can see I if you look historically you know even PS2 and so on late generation PS2 games looked awesome comparatively right and it's just because people got more mature and held that they could use the hardware um with that said there's still a ceiling there's still a ceiling on

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    that Hardware of what's possible um you have technical limitations um if you apply those same learnings and that same logic to a piece of Hardware that has a higher ceiling in theory you would be able to produce more or do things better or do things more fluid it doesn't necessarily mean that it would look better it was really what you're after right if Uncharted 4 looked great and it was based on a certain hardware and we had harder Hardware could you draw more characters on screen could you put a little more love into the atmospherics could you have more on hair cloth animation just all those as examples right um so yeah I I think the team over there did did an awesome job pulling it off it looks amazing um yet that doesn't Point

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    directly that you know star that means Star Citizen could run on it right um as far as you know hey would you consider it in the future and not even a point really to to think about right now or for us to put energy on because uh um the team's fully focused on delivering Star Citizen and Squadron 42 on PC like we promised uh um to the community to the backers to the fans and so on so that's really where all of our energy is so I'm going to grab a bunch of these um last sum maybe another 10 and answer with one word I already kind of sorted the ones I could answer with one word so this will be Brian's fire round Leonard sapala in ATV weekly

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    updates you're well known for saying a lot with actually without actually giving anything away thanks Leonard really appreciate that um he also goes on to ask any updates on vrhe headtracking support nope Silo torn Brian can you talk about current plans for spinning motions of planets and moons will they have realistic spin or will they all stand still realistic our BH he had a bunch of questions this one's question number five how is the expansion of the Frankfurt facilities going and have office space limitation prevented you from hiring new people good and

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    nope loric eternis asks I've been wondering for a very long time how do you take care of that luxurious hair magic Death Strike ass in the the first procedural video it was somewhat easy to recognize where procedural Planet met the handcrafted landing area regarding the blending and hiding of those areas would it be more of an automatic or manual process both SE or saver writes if a rail gun fired from an Idis in Soul might a prospector hole be breached in Orion no nope elmac asks are there any Innovative

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    Technologies or gaml systems being researched slash worked on currently that haven't been heard about yet but you really need to share with us that will have a major impact on the game if they can be made to work yes the Hound asks about animations are the get in and out of pilot seats settled for every seat or they meant to evolve evolve and final it off Kaji arel asks hey Brian which shampoo do you use to keep your hair so nice magic um thanks for sitting through this the last 35 minutes appreciate it we at

43. 00:34:22

    Frankfurt appreciate all the support appreciate the support for the game for all the studios um it's fun talking with you guys and doing this when we have the time so thanks again and uh if I did an okay job maybe they'll ask me to do it again cool take care hey guys thanks for watching um 10 for the chairman if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes of around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse [Applause]