Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Environments of Alpha 3.5

12 April 201901:04:461,499 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of reverse the first live this week the environments of alpha 3.5 and joining us on the show this week we have an esteemed panel some some RTV newbies on and one old hat let's take a few moments to get to know who our guests are what they do for star citizen and what type of questions we'll be dealing with today Nick why don't we start with you welcome to reverse the verse to tell everybody who you are Nick and what you do for star citizen they thanks Nick Etheridge and the lead environment artist for the pu team for the UK studio so I oversee basically the environment art team here in the UK anything to do with the PU so
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that's covered as Space Station's landing zones things like that and and for and for our area area G's for alpha 3.5 what were some of the things you were specifically involved yeah so pretty much solely responsible I mean not solely as and it's just me but my my responsibility was our Corp so October 18 that landing zone so that was a that was a big job for specifically three five yeah that was that's pretty much what I was on all right Joel you're up next welcome to your first time on our TV tell everybody who you are and what you do for started it itches I'm an
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environment artist on the pay you team for three five predominately worked on the space-boat exterior and then towards the end of of the release I did a bit of downtown work in area 18 central and so I know a lot of your work for alpha 3.5 was related to the spaceport right yep and luan welcome back to reverse the verse hello everybody who you are and what you do thanks so I'm Lowen but already one of the environment artists here as well and the okay team so for three point five I was mostly responsible for the planet our Corp so that's like the industrial area the downtown area is that really the
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global part of our Corp along with Pascal and the D team so together we just like took that and tackled it and try to make it really cool no no city planner for everybody well I think you succeeded and we'll talk about that over the next hour today's show is about the environment art of Alpha 3.5 now as usual we've put up a threat to collecting questions every single week and as usual there are collection of questions that you know we're appropriate for the subject weren't appropriate for this subject I know a lot of a lot of times folks questions tend to veer towards design questions gameplay questions or things about the future our discussion for this week is about the art and the artists who make that art for alpha 3.5 so we do want to try to keep the questions that come in
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live today to that subject and if you submitted a question in the thread and saw that your question was deleted and whatnot I promise we'll have another we'll have more shows about the future in coming weeks we just can't do one every single week I got to spread the wealth there are so many developers working on star citizen over 505 studios around the world I tried to make sure everybody gets their time the like and we definitely want our artists because they're artists are fantastic and they tend to bring the world of star citizen to life and one more thing I want to get through you three are here representing your team today but the environment our team is much bigger than just the three of you guys right yeah like I mean I think everyone that worked on our coop should be really proud like I think everyone worked really hard not just the
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environment team but the other teams that helped with the environment such as like UI with all the adverts the props team like we you know it would be quite empty without those those teams audio with the soundscapes I think it actually what would I'll call it like if it had like ad blocker on and it could be a lot more like a lot more empty and not as cool-looking without all the Dion's and the adverts and stuff so yeah like you know I think everyone not just the environment team you know did they worked really hard and I think everyone's pleased with like with the result now I want to see a UI mod ad blocker anything see what it does to the UI wanna do but when your your helmet
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visor blocks out all the advertisements yeah yeah no it's a common thing I wanted to bring it up because it's come up a lot of a side question side comments we've seen on spectrums and stuff lately you often see many of the same faces week in and week out on a TV or heart TV and and sometimes that can that can lead to an impression that these are the only people who are working on these things and we definitely have a wide and varied team and it's even though we do two weekly shows we still can't get everybody 500 plus people and five series around the world on the show too in front of you so I just want to give recognition and support to all the people who don't get to be on a TV or our TV every week your work is absolutely appreciated and I hope we represented well all right so we got a bunch of questions collected throughout the week we are also taking questions live in the chat you submit your question by submitting it with the
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word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets ahead of it that'll allow our community manager team to pull it out from all the other conversations going on and we are going to start right off the bat with some of the questions from the thread in the Laura makers guide to the galaxy that what the episode that was on the stanton system our Corp was described as mostly but not completely built upon and having oceans as recommended by the scientist that we consulted to plausibly validate wheel weather effects and stuff like that what we see in 3.5 appears to have no oceans is that going to be the case going forward what's going on with that seems like they'll be a good one for luan because he did a lot of the planet stuff yeah so you know and we're
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exploring these things early on we take a lot of a lot of the Laurent account see like what what is this thing what what parts of it can we do what parts of a we're going to require a little bit more research and I think our main focus for three five has really been taking the planet Eck and trying to make a completely hard surface industrial buildings planet with it so that our main goal was really to try and get the planet egg to do something quite different that it hadn't done before so with that in mind you know absolutely we can't aren't the all kinds of different things that could work you know with possibly possible oceans and things like
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that but our main focus is really trying to get this tech working in a way that we really benefit a whole city planet and you know that that required a lot of investigation into how we're gonna scatter these things how are we gonna you know what kinds of biomes can we do with with this in mind so you know the first early on stuff that I did actually did some tests after sitcom 2017 on the industrial side of the planet and you know I had like sort of all kinds of different really random geometry and buildings being scattered around and it was like okay so this is sort of like we can definitely use it for these big industrial areas so when we actually started tackling our Corp it was like okay so I know that that's gonna be one
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of the things we can do so let's push that ice push that tech let's push the planet tech to do all these really cool big plates and you know as you are indeed there's a lot of stuff they could be cool if I tried a little bit of this here and a little bit of this here obviously as the more that you want to do the bigger that a schedule gets and obviously there's only so much time to do these kinds of things so we try to focus down on what are the main areas of our Corp and what can we do with the planet tech for this release yeah it's I think it was probably the one of the most challenging things you've ever had to do creating a whole planet covered in buildings I mean like we did a lot of pre-production prototyping tried different things with it and you know we're using you know LuAnn could speak
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to this more but we're using the planet egg which is was built originally for organic stuff and it's actually easier to do the organic stuff like the terrain and mountain ranges and stuff because you your eye doesn't pick out things that you'd notice when it's when it's hot hard surface when it's all solid you know blocks of buildings and that was one of the biggest problems was trying to use the system that basically scattered rocks and and other masks out objects and and try and do that with buildings because the first thing we found was it it looked very jarring that make sense yeah and another thing trying to adapt that tech was we knew we'd have
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to integrate with certain sort of more bespoke areas of our core so for example with Joel I work it's quite closely when he was doing the prototyping the spaceport exterior you know we work closely with like okay so what do these materials look like what do we want out of these materials so then he'd be like I would be cool if we could do something like this I'm like actually that could work on the industrial side of things so you know it's about sort of reaching out to the team and everybody that's working out working on our core like okay how is my stuff gonna integrate with yours and how is all of this gonna work together to create sort of this focused tr0 version of our core essentially now it's a it was I will admit that after after Laura ville and getting all that worked on you know figuring out all this
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organic stuff I was I was surprises in the word I've been trying to think of what the word is but I was impressed that the the ambition of getting one planet organic and then switching to let's do the technological one first it's it's it's I think I think other projects might you know want to crank out a couple organic things first but we're like no but that's it's hit the challenges head-on and I'm really excited to see the results here let's continue talking about our Corp here one of the questions was about what kind of things can we expect to find by exploring art Corp since we now have this technologically covered planet now or in the future of the suggestions they gave were abandoned cities monolithic buildings maybe art Corp has a shipwreck somewhere um so um maybe not abandoned
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parts of the city I don't think that makes much sense for our Corp but but definitely like abandoned buildings and stuff like that work you know we see we see stuff like that we have the technology to do that with say underground facilities on other planets and moons it would just be empowering you know the mission feature teams to to be able to create these these missions and then there might be a small amount of content to be created to to embed these into our code properly but definitely like we have the ability to do that and we'll probably look into something in the future about bricks as well we've got derelict saan on moons and around
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the planet so again we have the foundations to do it and it'd be yeah interesting to look into doing that for our Corp as well hmm yeah I think how whole abandon cities is probably not with the law of our core as it's like a corporate planet and it's kind of hard to imagine I mean maybe if it's if it's part of the law but yeah I would definitely see abandoned buildings things like that like like slum areas that could be explored Disney World has an entire abandoned theme park they got an entire theme park at Disney World the some old Animal Kingdom style park that they just closed down they didn't bulldoze or anything it's just closed it's there it's cemented by water it's on the lake
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people still trespass to try to get pictures in there gets all over own now isn't it just like yeah we're not going to do it anymore and we don't have anything to replace it with so it's been a banner for years but not entirely you mentioned the underground facilities Joel we see traffic now moving into and out of underground tunnels and everything we had a number of questions come in about whether we'll ever see any underground areas on our court yeah I mean I think there's definitely room to move from having just one kind of error to walk around you know arity into having more of that like we said we could definitely look into we've got the buildings and we've got the rooftops so
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with with we're kind of forward planning for potential mission locations and there's no reason why you know exploring parts of a trench or something like that could be something we do down the line obviously we want to flesh out the whole of the Statten system first so you know we want to do horizon we want to do a new Babbage but there's no reason why you know we could go a bit deeper into our Corp and area teen and and bits around and even other sections of our core yeah Chris Chris talked a bit about that on our TV a couple weeks ago where you know it's it's you know we want to go through and get a first pass on all of staunton first and then go back through and see where we can catch up and add to the existing planets so III
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think everybody can see a ton of possibility in art Corp as far as undergrads as far as ground-level stuff deep deep under a you know deep slums a number of questions had came in about something for land vehicles to do you know you know you know the streets that we can drive upon or even you know a little street city races kind of stuff like that lots of lots of possibilities there when it comes time to come back around still probably too early to confirm next question says our court buildings are great but are there plans for additional variation in the future in terms of materials colors and texture quality it's very red yes it is very red some been some great jokes about the
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guys who own the shares in red paint could Julian Ayers yeah exactly it's like mr. art corpse nephew you know it makes red paint exclusively yeah yeah definitely like I mean we had a billion and one things to think about when making art corp and definitely diversity not just in color but buildings sizes shapes style but we just wanted to keep it to a billion one things not a billion two things but it's actually something we've been actively working on now not for three point five but for a patch release so we will were actually implementing more color variation as a row base base for diversity but we've
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we've been working on some more building types so we're putting those in and more tile variation so different areas of City actually do look a bit more unique from other bits and big kind of mega structures not as big as like the CBD or first in but some some more unique kind of areas bit more circular shapes going on there so hopefully with the post three five there'll be some more things to discover and more more interesting things to look at so it so yeah we totally get the criticism for for that everything's being read but we like I
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said we had a million one things to think about so with that we played it kind of safe but we have been implementing some more diversity to air 18 and the other cities you have to start somewhere and I've seen some less stuff that you're talking about and that's a that's why we have a meeting next Wednesday about getting some of that on ETV and the quartic ISM I saw I've seen stuff on the car so wait so I'm working on it guys to see what else do we got let's talk a little science here where's our corpse atmosphere come from it is are we thinking about introducing any parks you know any any biodomes that even eat any greenery to the planet to to make sense of the atmosphere up above yeah I think for the larger greener
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areas we definitely had some ideas and concepts for I don't know if you want to go into bit more on that but for the I know there was a question about rooftop gardens and penthouse kind of things we it's it's another cool thing that when we create the landing pad like one of our goals was you know we want to land on pretty much every building at least every building that you can land on so that's why we kind of came up with let's let's just make sure there's landing pads on all of the rooftops and those are you know modular locations so there's no reason why they always have to be landing pads there could be a rooftop garden or a penthouse suite or something or you're swimming for
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whatever you know as long as it fits in with the law and and works in the location you know we can swap out one of those rooftops for something maybe a little bit more interesting a little bit you know more unique so I definitely see the potential for yeah rooftop gardens and more greenery there I'll let the one speak for the for the larger kind of parks and things like yeah so you know when you do something like that you I've tried a couple of ideas out and there's when you put something that interesting on the planet how do you do it in a way that player goes okay that's cool that's a that's a park there and know in a way that the player goes well I'm gonna go there because there's only so much you
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know resources that we can apply towards making something like that at high detail in a way that holds up in a way that there is you know reasons to go there so it's definitely something we looked into and something that we can look then into but it's all a matter of trying to see where resources are and where we can spend it as smart as possible I mean yeah you can definitely imagine like for the atmosphere of our core there's probably some huge atmosphere processor somewhere or more a couple of them you know again back in sitcom 2017 I tried a couple of things didn't quite make it to the demo it was this enormous structure like three times the size of the person CBD building and I think there's a I had like these there were like arrayed in a
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way that it kind of looked like they could be atmosphere processors but if you think about the resources that would take to put something like that very it's like okay we can spend some time and make that visual interest area of interest or we could go ahead and you know focus a little bit more on what these buildings look like on you know the quality of these buildings near eighteen the tiles and things like that but it's certainly something that we can look into and it's something that I think it's definitely very interesting I mean I'd love to see some of that stuff some of these parks and you know little green areas and just different pockets of color Daigo mmm what could that be you know yeah it's a hard it's a hard thing to balance because is the the I understand the instinct to make these you know when you when you we've built a 360-degree planet to just go in and
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spend all your time you making it as detailed than is and as capable as some likes Cairo like what would be the main you know world of something else but we've got to make hundreds yeah I mean we would love to go deep deep into our core straightaway and and you know if the game was just alcohol you know you could make a whole game out of that but it's more than that it's it's it's lots of different planets to visit so we could we got a scale accordingly yeah it's gotta be one of those things where you say you hit this for a version then you hit this for version you hit this forward and hit the Spurs and then somebody goes back through and they're going back for something well these people are moving on and then another way you know it's it's it's it's almost gonna be like like a chorus yeah I mean everything every location we look at we obviously try to do more stuff than we probably eventually
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do we've got the unites and we say like this is something we there are things that must haves we we need to have this kind of thing in and then there are things that we can try and get it in now or if it doesn't then we can go back and get it in a later date it's it's you know we're always trying to future plan our locations so so they start to continue with now in the last question we brought up the citizencon 2947 demo obviously there have been a lot of changes we offer with our Corp from that demo to what it is now and a lot of the questions come in to just simply want to know why that changed was it purely technical reasons was it artistic reasons was a performance reasons what precipitated those changes yeah as a slip a bit of both really I mean
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obviously with there was an obvious difference in art style of the buildings that was that was just an artistic decision we wanted to make the buildings feel a little bit more realistic the the you know we were happy with the demo but some of the buildings got very noisy and very top-heavy and very kind of oddly shaped so we kind of wanted to simplify them aback a little bit some of the new buildings we are going to be putting in though I spoke about before are kind of like a little nod towards that slightly more well select that that more of that style but be I was it was a artistic decision to to simplify them a little
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bit it actually helped us as well with performance because we could we could put the detail where we wanted to that the old ones were like detail all over the building so we kind of picked our barrels and made sure we put the Polly's where he wants to put them and there was a little bit of technical as well like with the with the demo I mean the demo was the son was in a fixed position so we could show it off in the best light when we actually started to look at this is a rotating planet we we want we wanted it to look the best all possible levels you know we're thinking about you're walking around in area teen you know the sun's moving around you're flying around you're on a transit system you're orbit we're trying to get it to look the best
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in all situations and if you concentrate just on you know one level of detail you could nail that and get it to look perfect but then other levels to detail it doesn't look so good so there's a real balancing act getting to look right and the other thing was the demo was very we use very much smaller tiles so it's very grid like you could see the trenches kind of do these kind of zigzag so we wanted to enlarge in the tiles make them slightly more bespoke in the sense that you're not recognizing like this kind of very it's kind of like very old-school Sim City where it's like in small little things and you can recognize this is a city block and that's the next city block and kind of
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weird-looking so we we kind of expanded the size of the tiles and that allows us to do a bit more here our stuff with that and and some larger shapes so you know I understand like art is always subjective so I understand like if people like kind of kind of like the old art style and compared to the nudes it's all subjective but there's a bit of both really both both artistic and technical reasons that obviously framerate is always a major consideration any time we add something to start there's an especially a giant city covered planet what are some of the the tricks and optimizations that we're currently using to improve the framerate of our car so yeah so um we we try to use larger
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brushes to build these locations out so past locations it could get very granular like a hallway would be made of a lot of small pieces and they would work well for these interior locations but when you're on out Corp the level in which you see these locations can vary from up close to you know low atmosphere and from very far away so we had more more view distances to consider when we're making these these locations so one of the yeah one of the approaches we used was to just combine a lot of these brushes into into bigger brushes so to reduce the draw calls which is you know one of them
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the main kills of frame rates would be draw calls and you know we could get away with a lot more aggressive lods because at a distance you know our carpets that's a part of full of a city so it's it looks very busy on its own so we could get away with a lot more aggressive loading because at a distance you know the detail just kind of blew in together and you get just this big picture of a city you don't really focusing on are there's this one tree out in the middle of the of the open and I can see on one load state it's got leaves on the next doesn't but because it's surrounded by like a lot of noise
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we can we can go a bit more hard on our lives as well Antion look we got more stuff about our core coming but I wanna switch gears here for a little bit do some of the questions that are coming in life in the chat do you guys also I know I know each one of you worked on our corpse specifically I did you guys do any of the work on Arkham spoons no that was entirely the d-team so you know the Pascal Patrick all those guys over there pushing the planet tech I know I worked with them too I went to D for some time and you know learned the planet tech they came came back here and you know took everything that I learned and worked with Pascal you know how he did things in Walla Lyria you know whatever sellin damar and took that
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and those things I learned and you know applied into our Corp but for us here it's um it was almost entirely foot well entirely focused our Corp yeah alright so so we won't be able to get to a couple of the moon questions that are coming here but I do want to ask one in case maybe you know these the new moons you know Walla and larrya every time we do a patch our work gets better and and these new moons look fantastic I thought the old moons you know Crusaders all wounds looked fantastic but these new moons what can I say do you know of any plans that we're gonna go back and use some of the new technology and the new techniques we've been using to update the older moons well you know you just said yourself like every time we put a patch else like something improves you know we're always
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testing things in-house we're always like you know looking at the planet tech and B how can we improve this how can you improve that and we can definitely take the lessons we've learned from our Corp and pass it down to you know the next planet and the next moon and the next you know it just comes down to really the the things that we can learn from this release and applying it to the next so we're always improving these things and there's absolutely no reason why we couldn't look into something like that and you know the planet X evolving a lot and a lot fast because we need to be know be pushing out lots of planets so it's all about learning these lessons with the way that we scatter objects the way that we create different ecosystems the way they blend together the way they colored the way that the assets are
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color as a matter of fact I tried some very organic style acid coloring in our Corp so you could have areas of our Corp that were more driven by the global color so you could have buildings that were more gray buildings there were a little bit of green a little bit of this but the problem is because that deck was made for you know the organic stuff you'd get you know it's not like you get a couple of nice panels that are green or a building specifically that's green though it's kind of just more of like this blurry gradient just applied you know with with that working we can look into how we can tint this the you know these assets and go into the next moon of Planet whatever and be like okay so we can do it this way let's try and push the tech this way so by learning
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all those things these moons will just inherently get better and better and better together as we go along so yeah it's definitely something we can look into you actually touched on something a little bit that it's one of the questions that came in and one of my favorite questions that came in how is the experience now that we've made one organic planet and that we've made one technically you know covered in technology planet were there lessons that we learned from making a technologically covered planet that could actually help us making organic planets in the future well you know absolutely um so early on when I was trying to figure out how some of these buildings would scatter I looked into some of the way that they scattered the rocks and I was
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in constant contact with the about and we always say D but it's Germany they would say the de team you know D team forever they I was in constant contact with Frankfurt about okay so you how would you guys array these rocks in a way that it would almost look like an actual formation of things so all of the exploration that they took there I applied onto our Corp so now there's no reason that we can't take okay so we know we have these enormous meshes I'm talking one of those plates is almost like it's anywhere between two to six kilometers now it's scattered in a way that it goes a little bit more random so it's like small or big or small or big you know there's like levels to them but there's no reason we can't take that information of of that R&D and apply it
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to say we want to start scattering some enormous rocks somewhere in a planet somehow some enormous cliff faces I don't know any kind of thing like that all of the expressions that I do here also involves there and all the explosions that they do hit there will you know come back to us and it's just like I said right everything just improves with together it's all these little pushes is like you learn a little bit here learn a little bit there and that applies just outside of planets as well all right like are you doing our Indy - how do we do materials for spaceport well okay I can do that in the our core buildings I can do how we're gonna do windows there well I can do that in the buildings in the industrial areas how are we gonna do some of the VFX here well the VFX is done this way let's push it in a way that can evolve into server maybe a planet that brings both of these
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elements together so it's all about this R&D process that's just constantly happening happening in all kinds of levels yeah you could almost flip the question the other way around like like was saying earlier like it's it was how do we make a technological planet out of a know from an organic planet system and just add to what no one said we you know with the the rocks and scattering and things like that they would because scattering small rocks you don't need to see small rocks further away so they would they would lot out and disappear very quickly that's something we really had to push for was as soon as you make those small rocks buildings it's like well you can't have a building a mile away just popping in so we have to push
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that view distance for like miles and miles and miles out so you got the horizon and you're still seeing these buildings there was a time where I pushed it so far that for a week or so the editor was stalling and people trying to work in our corner cook and I was just there like I'm sorry I was just trying some stuff questions in the chat came and it may be it may be a laugh lauds obviously levels of detail to think the things that you know big fancy model when it's up close and then a slightly reduced model and it slightly a more reduced model and slightly more regional model for anybody doesn't know how many Lots did you use an art court like if you're in the ballpark it's an interesting question it just did did you
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ever bother to count that is a are we too afraid to count there will be a lot of lots on the grand scheme of things like there would be generally we have about five Lots / / assets if you if you calculated all the Lots five loads per building again it gets big but at the same time you know with the procedural tech in the planet tech you know we just have to lot just building once and then you know it slotted there and that's not it there and we get a lot of reuse out of that one building but it's definitely like a good portion of the time is is doing these loads and optimising it obviously
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if it's like an interior space that you don't really see from far away we don't have to do five Lots because even on low spec you you probably never seen lot five a lot for but definitely the buildings like we went right up to the the cusp so we could get the most draw range out of them and that goes back to the previous question as well as about the above you know how we change the art style and it's a bit of both a bit of we just wanted to make it look like this and a bit of performance well the way that our lot system works now it's all about getting these very small polygons and averaging them out and you know these buildings are pretty large so one thing that we could take into consideration it's like okay lot 0 which is the most detail that you see would have steel polygons that are large
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enough so that you see a lot 0 for just you know actually quite quite some time like it maybe a kilometer I don't know like 500 meters whereas if we had lots of little details lots of antennas little polygons little things little cables that thing within 2 meters which would go pop yeah yeah we for example in the rooftops so we've got the buildings and we've got these rooftops on them and they're there you can walk around them so there are higher density Polly's and draw calls then then the side of the building because you can fly past the side of the building but you can't walk on it you know so so they had to be high detail but we got to make sure because we've literally got thousands of rooftops in in one city or the collection of cities so for example around area 18 so we
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can't just even with loading so basically with each Lord you need to reduce them out of Polly's and draw calls so with the lowest Lord Lord 5u you're looking to for it to be the simplest simplest object like a box with one material so one draw call but even that like it still costs if you've got thousands of these it's still a thousand draw calls you know so so in addition to loading we we made sure like things that were small and and couldn't be seen from a distance well not only were they loaded but they just disappeared when he didn't need to see them so the rooftop has tons of railings going around and we calculated we had about just one railing
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type there was about 60,000 on our corp or something like that so look at the planet and you see what the stats are saying you're looking at millions of objects sometimes you know yes yeah like saying I think when we added out Corp in we added over a hundred thousand entities into the EU which was which was fun for the engineers but but yeah like so with the railings and the--and small things we make sure like because the railings are very thin these objects and from a distance they they get to like a pixel thin and then and then you don't need to see them so we we set the view distances on those kind of objects very low so if you're on one rooftop and you're looking over to another one
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you're not going to see the railings anyway because they're really thin so we don't draw them we just turn them off so it's those those kind of tips and techniques and those things that will help even further then then you know good loss is one thing but making sure we've got a system in place that doesn't even draw them is even better I want to shout out to the to the folks in chat who followed up with definitions of lods and Louisville details and what they were we have between a TV and our TV we've probably described what LODs are a dozen times over the last two years alone and so I gave a very brief description sort of this not to take too much time but folks we're still asking in chat came to the rescue of many folks so thank you Chad we do a whole show
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about lots of well just one more thing to add is something that we we want to look more into his hierarchical lots so there's probably guys that can give some definitions there but basically the gist of it is instead of basically we will merge lots together so if you've got five buildings on a tile or a hundred buildings in the city or whatever the the the when you are close to it you're seeing the the building at lot zero and the more further you get away that that Lots down but each building Lots down and then we will merge those buildings together as one mesh which will then save more more drawer calls so it's
00:41:08
something that though that we want to get into more in the future i from from LODs i want to move on to one of the arch enemies of players driving surface side vehicles across planets and moons rocks that's talking about rocks for a second a lot of questions they've come in and chat it came in the thread folks wanting to know what our plans if we have plans have we thought about plans for changing the distribution of rocks on the services of places like glory Lord well and I'm sorry Hurston and the moons maybe even using something like density Maps it's it's it can become a chore from time to time to have to spend most
00:41:57
of your time driving avoiding rocks and not enjoying the beautiful Vista that you guys have created because everybody's focused on of rocks the entire time yeah so you think about it this way right well let's say that we have to design a map our texture map that tells the ecosystem you know there's more rocks here less rocks here and then within that system you have something else that goes okay these rocks scatter in this kind of way you're actually talking about a lot of a lot of men ours actually making this content when in reality what we want to do is we want to make as much of that procedural as possible right so as we evolve this tech as we take like like I said before is we take these lessons that we learned
00:42:46
and we make the tech better you know this stuff is gonna come back to the to the moons and we're gonna definitely start you know addressing some issues or introducing others because you can never predict how these things are gonna go but uh it's really about how can we make this as expandable and scalable as possible so right now the there is a few ways that we can scatter rocks but we're you know definitely looking into how we can make that system more procedural and you know more even fun both visually and gameplay wise for the player and you know it's definitely something we're looking into all right so we're gonna get back to the co some of the questions in the thread now that was good news about rocks I
00:43:36
don't get to play as often as I'd like but when I do get in there and I was I was excited to happen to Marisa and I had I had to trouble the rock so I mean we I've been waiting for a show where I can ask someone so I might have slipped that one in there myself back to the thread here there's there's art Corp is an amazing accomplishment thank you sir I'll take all the credit for them technically and artistically but with such a massive space even the diverse assets you've built can start to feel repetitive as you explore a few hundred kilometers outside area eighteen do we have any plans to create the equivalent of biome diversity for our court yeah so right now what you're seeing is in the simplest of terms you're seeing an industrial area in a populated area
00:44:27
so within this industrial area I looked at throws like okay we can have a more plated area we're gonna have a more dense building area a area with more chimney stacks so maybe that's something the player can fly around but you know as thing as we develop these things we try a few different things and we go okay maybe there's an area with really large buildings some atmosphere processors maybe there's an area with almost nothing it's just fly it's almost like a desert but of you know machine-made objects so again it's a question of K we have all these things we want to do let's pick what the best representation of our Corp at its base level is and for us that right now that is there's these
00:45:19
big plated industrial areas some pockets of more you know lots of pipes and chimneys and you know this more dense industrial situation that you got going on there and then some really low suburbs and then some more downtown like suburbs so you know as you look at the around our 18 you're gonna see some really sort of flat suburbs and you can see some bits that raise it up a bit and raise down and raise up and down and you know that's our idea of biodiversity for our corpse like how we can we take this these different ecosystems and blend them in a hard surface kind of way but yeah it's you know it's just about focusing on what we want our core to be right now there's you know there's no
00:46:07
reason we can't look into other things so yeah I mean yeah Chad for that I mean like mentioned before we're looking into some more unique kind of super structures and buildings and at the moment it's more I think for me anyway it's more about giving more meaning to going to an area like why would I want to fly to the industrial area because I think like I think it'll end did a really good job on that but at the moment there's no to go there so we want to give the live designers and the mission designers the tools to to be able to you know Plunket area down and go okay here's a cool mission to do so again we've got the really early instances of that with like pachucos missions and some drop-off areas but going forward you know we want
00:47:00
to have a bit more areas to go go to and we want to show off these you know super structures and dusty areas and give meaning to it so we're like the procedural tools that we're using to generate you know the interior of space stations and things like that that's where we're kind of looking into you know working with life designed to create interesting locations and reasons to go there I got a couple questions here I think will probably be up your alley right off the bat I know a lot of your work focused on the star port what lessons did we learn from lore VLEs star port that we took in inquiry incorporated when building our corpse so
00:47:52
yeah I guess when we when we first started the spaceport in our Corp we looked at at what we did with Louisville and and one of the things we wanted to do was was have a bigger read from from further away so there was those kill er sections for landings and clear sections for what size ship you are as well so as you make your approach you can start to adjust accordingly but you know that that's twofold as well that's number one that's just for a bit more visual clarity that it's it's a lot more open but also for performance as well as well it aligned to what we're doing with the
00:48:40
rest of the structures like luan will say we're you know the old buildings and stuff like that very dense they launder out really quickly so these these larger structures obviously help with visual read from a distance but they also play nice in optimization and just being able to be drawn from further away and then a follow-up question here we had a couple questions coming in about additional larger or unique buildings like the CBD obviously stands out on Lord bow questions came in about are there any plans for larger social buildings like they specifically mentioned concert halls or super clubs I don't know what a super Club is compared to a super super Club that take
00:49:28
advantage of the city view basically more large scale areas for player congregation where where a bunch of people get together and and view out over our course yeah like like like we like with some of the new buildings we've got an interesting building which has a the landing pad isn't on the roof it's actually in on the side of the building which is quite cool and coupled that with lay low and to talk about this because he actually did this it's a really cool circular doughnut yeah building I spent some a Lego structure into maybe introducing some different buildings now this isn't this isn't more of a tall building we're talking more something that spreads out there but I made this what we call the donut
00:50:16
building or the donut tile and in my head cannon its art corpse headquarters for dunking doughnuts but you know as I develop that which hopefully you'll be something that you see shortly after 35 as I developed it I was thinking oh well is this kind of place you can definitely see it from space you see something circular over there and you know what what is this base use for so at first I thought it might be some sort of stadium or you know a concert hall actually crossed my mind but I figured it's like this sort of bustling center of commerce maybe and there's no reason why in the future we can't develop areas like this for live design too hey let's add lots of like a shopping center there or let's let's add a
00:51:04
mission there it's all about fleshing out you know giving the live designers a tool box or a you know a place to play and invent missions and areas so it's all about fleshing out the stanton system and what we have now and creating these interesting places they can go to right so yeah so this donut building should be pretty cool I like it I hope everybody else likes it too yeah sorry it was it was something that we actually planned to do originally and we had it white boxed in when we had the whole city but you know we wanted to focus on the other buildings so we kind of put that on the back burner like with some of the variants and so we're gonna we're gonna add it in for a post 3/5 and in a way it's a shame we didn't get that in
00:51:52
but in a way it's quite cool for for guys to get an update and it's like oh there's some cool new structures in post release and and you can see it evolving and updating yeah I saw I saw the donut building in what I was looking at we keep calling a donut building but it's it's a circular building if folks who have been following the project for a long time remember early arccorp concept art that had these circular buildings so you know many people were kind of lamenting the loss so I'm glad to hear that they're coming back yeah that was spread those precisely the kind of stuff we looked I was like oh remember those old donut buildings how can I bring it back so yeah yeah I think I think it's a good break up visually from all that it's yeah it's from a distance it's really good to see some some different shapes going on from you flying around definitely so this one's probably be a
00:52:43
little crafty but I'm gonna ask it Chris talked about a potential future where players could rent buildings or own buildings you know for player housing or possibly even horik housing and this question of follows up on that would we consider the possibility of allowing owners to visibly change the exteriors of their buildings maybe even add a giant hologram of their own org logo or what about anterior customization I really like that question actually don't like the IC is the same idea behind haps you know when we play around HAP's and we're getting the very early first instance of persistent HAP's now so you can take an object and put in your app and it will stay in your
00:53:29
inheritor like a turtle but so I see these as as the same kind of thing so there's no reason why we couldn't do things like own buildings with with objects that we can place or that the players can place and they would stay there so I'm not sure when when when we would be doing this but it was it's definitely something we'd want to do because we want it to be more like with the haps more room customizable and and people to make it their own home and and it not looks like everyone else is Sica and go into someone's house where you go into someone's building and it's like oh
00:54:16
well how'd you find that thing where'd you get that so yeah that's I think that's a really cool idea it's not just Turtles I saw an image on Twitter this morning of a teddy bear on the dash of somebody oh yeah and I was like hey you want to talk about cool ideas with lots by the way with the turtle the turtles like that right I guess it's more of a quarters lot zero for the tortoise a big argument about that well okay but listen but the turtles like this and then lot one for the turtle it's in its shell so as it transitions the LODs you can see just come back into its shell that's the thing though that they did with the props of kados yeah there's another toe I think there's two the ones it's on one of the tours but one of them doesn't go into it so what if you look at it it slowly swivels akai towards you which is just quite a funny there's a good job
00:55:05
by Steve Egan on the props team he did those toe using lots of creatively yeah really nice I said yeah well until it starts moving around and I have two players have to chase it and bring it back I'm not ready to call it funny yet did you tell them that sigh it's my personal challenge to him until I can move around it's something I gotta chase it I'm considering it like a like a genetically in grown replicant turtle not real Angela can move alright we are almost out of time so I want to get through I want we've got quite a few questions I want to see if we can't pull it around a few of these get get it fillies in there are we gonna see Space Station's in
00:55:53
orbit above Hurston and arccorp we saw one of those in this isn't cons for 9:47 demo or or maybe even skyhook stations that are tethered to the surface it's actually something Joe's work you know right now yeah it's definitely variants of the station's are on the roadmap and something we're working towards it'd be cool to to get these space station like dry docks around our Corp for say larger ships like the hull series that you know they don't have to go down to today atmosphere they could land at these dry docks and ferry their goods to there and then smaller ships can take it down to the planet vice versa definitely stations are getting with that yeah it's something the idea is
00:56:45
every every major landing zone like like lovel like a like area team will have a cargo station or port station in orbit so you'd be able to drop off like big things that like like the whole hull variance right that have trouble flying an atmosphere would would not you know not need to go all the way down to do their runs they could drop it off at a cargo station and and then you know someone else or or part of the orc could do the rest of the journey and take that in any chance of getting panoramic elevators in our court to see on the outside of built on the buildings when people go up and down yeah I already let that question as well
00:57:34
because I think it's a good idea it's definitely something we want to look into there's no reason why we couldn't be able to do that another thing similar but we another thing we're looking into is actually having windows in Habs so we can look out and have like a views there exactly it's definitely something we want to push for when me for arisin because of the views they're going to be great but it was it was something we were looking into originally with arccorp but it was another thing we put on the back burner but definitely something to revisit and yeah like there's there's no reason why again I
00:58:25
don't think this would be everywhere but certain like hero locations or buildings could have its own external elevator there's definitely some great real world examples of that around the world so you can have a panoramic view Habs with Windows you know you know if not every half has a window or even if they did but they'd have potentially different views and what I so it makes certain tabs more valuable for others you know it becomes a bragging rights thing it's like it's yeah my player look at the view from my player habit and you know in you know JJ's player hab would be facing a brick wall my view sucks so yeah it's just one more thing for for players to strive to achieve and star citizen has there been any discussion about seasons potentially changing the look of planets like our court for
00:59:13
Hurston what does autumn in our court would look like mm-hmm I want to see snowy arccorp that'd be cool yeah like something like weather systems is something we do want to look into but I'm gonna leave it there finally before I let you go cuz I know we're at time and I promised I could I did let you go on your Friday thank you for staying late for this as always how fun is it creating environments for star citizen and what are the let's just start there and we'll go to the same work you enjoy your jobs a lot of yeah yeah it's it's fun it's interesting because it's really challenging like as I said like hope is probably one of the most challenging things I've ever worked
01:00:02
on but that makes it fun because you're you're not just doing paint-by-numbers like people know what that is you're not just doing kind of like a routine thing you know what they're doing and it's like okay I'm going to work and this is this is what I do every day it's you come to working like okay how are we gonna solve this how are we gonna figure it out because it's it's when we started on looking at Alcor it's like we're just like okay like this is an interesting problem how to cover a whole planet with buildings so that I've read the question a bit but for me that's what makes it fun like the challenge of it you know we're pushing we're pushing boundaries which we're trying to do things that haven't be done before and and that's the reward and
01:00:54
where the fun comes for for me I mean there the challenge Israel I think that pretty much hits the nail on the head well to a certain degree where you know it's the challenge of figuring out how we're gonna do a city planner mmm you know like you get you sit down in the meeting room and you're our director and you come like come to you and like by the way you're gonna be doing the planet that's covered by cities and you go excuse me you know that that challenge is you know it's quite exhilarating it's quite it's just such an insurmountable thing to figure out and when you finally see it and you know players are playing it and having fun and you know that's the reward and that's what's so really exciting for me it's like definitely the scale of things is challenging and can be daunting but again it's it's what
01:01:44
excites me as an environment artist just the sheer scale and how we're gonna do it like everything starts as a like a blank canvas and it's like take this point and populate an entire planet with City so it's never a dull moment yeah it's one of those things where if you're truly working on something that's unique and you're truly working on something that's new and you're truly working on something that's groundbreaking that's never been done before there isn't an instruction manual there isn't anything else you can look at and say oh that's how they did it you know and we can do something like that it's you got us have to create a lot of solutions from scratch and it's always impressive at least from my from my perspective to see how you guys tackle
01:02:32
these things and accomplish it on a daily weekly monthly quarterly yearly basis so thanks all right guys that's it you survived Nick and Joel you survived to the best time yeah I hope it wasn't too bad for you I hope you enjoyed it right this time isn't it Jared well even had everything off and just like Helen seeing just I'll leave it at that the one Nick Joel thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedules to be here with us on on on our TV this week that's it that's all I got I don't have any special messaging I don't have any announcements I don't have anything Oh actually I do I do have one subscribers if you're a subscriber remember the SUBSCRIBE program check
01:03:19
your inboxes on May 17th we are doing a special reverse the verse live with a live studio audience here in the studio we got about 40 spaces available it's gonna be on a first-come first-served the event is on May 17th signups will be on May 3rd I don't have a specific time we will get you the time when signups start ahead of time we'll announce it on the show that's on that day and of course we'll post about it in the subscriber forums and we'll probably even send out an email so we'll make sure the information gets to you one of many different ways but I'm excited it's gonna be the first time we're gonna be able to take questions live from people here in the studio and that's just something new and exciting to do so yeah for our TV that's Nick that's Joel that's luan I'm Jared that was JJ in the I was Tyler with the questions we'll see
01:04:10
you next week everybody bye thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen a squadron 42 you can subscribe to our channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library

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