10 for the Developers: Episode 08

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hey how's it going everybody uh thanks for joining uh myself for Stefan uh CG supervisor and Sean Tracy Tech director Tech Conta director director of tech content director all things technical um so U he's going to help us answer help me answer some questions CU we' got some great questions this week um i' like to thank the uh

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   subscribers uh for making this show possible um because without you all uh there would have nothing there'd be nothing for us to work on no no and we wouldn't have this awesome platform to to speak and explain and all the stuff that we're doing behind the scenes to give them the uh best an ever and to give progress on where we're at because there's so many things and so many moving Parts happening at all the time oh right all right well I'm going to go ahead and get started our first question is Daz given that procedural planets oh awesome topic given that procedural planets are generated from a seed if we go down to a planet and mine a location and it becomes depleted what happens after we leave and this is a two-parter is the planet permanently altered or would that location regenerate creating an area that we can constantly go back

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   to and exploit well it's an awesome question and uh first things first just wanted to explain because I I tend to um end up answering a lot of questions related to the procedural Planet stuff but the the big brains that are really working on the procedural Planet technology Are all uh within Frankfurt so uh guys like Marco corbetta uh Carson wiel Sasha hoba um Pascal Mueller uh they're all working pretty much full-time on the procedural planets now we get a lot of oversight on them we've got to blend them into the game uh where they're working on the tech so um just consider that uh when I answer any questions regarding it is that yeah I'm I'm trying to represent as best as I can we just get to play with it right but they're really they're driving all the tuch that's right they're driving everything that goes through so to get to the actual question um it's a really

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   good question because yes the planets are generated from a seed but consider that our game is multiplayer um we can't generate a different seed for every single player that goes down to the planet so um me and Forest can't be flying towards a planet he sees a mountain I don't see a mountain I end up flying through it or whatever um so that's got to already be kind of set in stone so when we generate this planet originally um as a developer yes we will have a seed um but once you see it as a player you're always going to see the same thing now when it comes down to actually permanently altering the surface of it what's likely to happen is is that uh when we do do mining it's going to be an it's going to be another object on top of the planet it's not going to be the planet itself um so no you probably won't alter the actual Planet geometry itself or or any of the

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   seats related to it but you'll alter a different object that's actually placed on top of the planet so just to give a you know really out there example you've got a big block of ice right that big block of ice is sitting there on the planet you fly down you're mining water out of the ice let's say that ice disappears now the question is will that ice then regenerate well it's it's a design question it's really going to be up to the designers there's no technical reason why it can't uh but likely what's going to be happening is that we've got an area of ice right there's going to be a certain number of minerals within a certain uh pretty large area um and you're not going to get the exact same ice blocking the exact that's where the seed kicks in right so it's not you know you get the initial Planet generated but then the objects on the planet that you're Mining and stuff maybe those have you know multiple seeds so when it regenerates itself if it regenerates

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   itself which I why not that would be kind of and that's something that we want to control because it's really important that we control the Commodities within our world economics of the whole thing exactly so you know it's kind of a long answer to whether it regenerates or not I would say no it doesn't actually regenerate but it will be somewhere else um but the seeds are all shared so everybody will see the same thing exactly awesome all right um tranon asks are there any new animations or physic effects that you have been working on and the challenges that you have encountered there's so much right there's so much to do with animations and physics together um It's A system that is completely interwoven um Evo herzeg does a lot of work on this particular system as well as a gentleman by the name of Chris reain so um what

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   we've been working on constantly is the uh Zerg um driven ragd doll kind of Technology um this is pretty unique uh to our game um and and The Driven ragd doll itself isn't unique but the transition between like an animated character to driven ragd doll back and forth and back and forth and going within physics grid and things like this um there's a lot of problems uh and a lot of challenges that that brings um it might not be super obvious to the players that we are that we are working on things within there because from what they see oh yeah it all works um but there's little things that we want to fix uh within that so um the other uh the other sort of portion of this that's that's been very tricky actually to be working on is the uh skeleton extension portion of this so has a little bit to do with the new item Port system but what happens

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   with the new item Port system is that um you start as a base skeleton and then you add on let's say a head or a helmet um and that skeleton actually extends so we have a skeleton within the head um that has a shared root and then that actually extends into um as the base skeleton um then we just deal with it as a as a normal character so what's tricky about that is that we've got to figure out a way and and and we've worked on it quite a bit uh last week before Evo uh went on holidays um to rebuild that physic skeleton without completely rebuilding it because it's one of the things that takes the longest time on the on the CPU and then thus to be um uh synchronized to all the players so uh yeah that's kind of what we're working on within there uh we want that driven ragal to be affected we want um as we add different skeleton extensions on to

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   extend the skeleton physically as well there's just so much to think about I mean you know you're one physics environment then when you enter a ship you enter another physics environment right then what happens if you're ragd doing from one physics environment into the next physics environment and then you betweene back into your regular animation right so exactly there just so much to the relative space of that moves so often like we have a world space then we have the local grid space then we have a Zone space um so yeah there's a lot of transitioning between different uh we call them partitioning grids right it's just so cool though yep all right uh next question the uh Orion mining ship has a large laser for dissecting asteroids into smaller chunks everyone's I mean mining is just super cool dissecting asteroids that's a good way to put it dissect cuz you're like getting getting inside how do you implement a continuous beam weapon like

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    that is it mostly animation while using a ultra high rate of fire and ultra low DPS or is it an actual beam uh this is actually a really really good question and this um this comes up a lot in games actually when you're going to have something like a like a P laser that's that's really just a glorified machine gun or if you have a beam laser weapon and as everybody knows we don't really have a beam weapon uh within Star Citizen yet um we solved this problem on an earlier project that I had worked on a little modic project called Mech warar Living Legends um we had um they weren't they weren't continuous beams but they were they were there for quite some time so the problems you've got to solve um is not necessarily having having a long beam because we have different levels of casting that we can do but continuous

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    segments where you know where to break the beam so you know where it stops when a ray cast we got to we've got to show it somehow right it's got to we've got to be able to one author the geometry so it looks good um and then second we've got to be able to uh change the length of that geometry now does it make sense to have one piece of geometry that just draws until two km long well think of the bounding box of something like this right so that's going to call out as soon as you look away and things like that so that doesn't really work out well so what we did on the mear project was we actually had little segments just kep stacking on top throughout and then stack on top but then you've got other problems with that um that comes to do with draw calls so you've got one object two draw calls another object two draw two objects another draw call and if you've got 2,000 or something yeah what happens exactly so the best way to do

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    something like this is not necessarily to have like a uh uh uh like a really a continuous rate of fire um is to do that Ray cast you do that Ray check um every couple second every every couple milliseconds anyways not every frame um because there's no reason really to do it every frame um but to actually extend those verts you control the verts on the effect itself so that it does the exact same length of that Ray and then you grab those few verts and you move it back move it forward move back kind of Arty how our projectile system works currently for those that don't know in the original trailer I made a bunch of particle effects and then and I gave them damage and they physics and all that stuff but once we actually um you know came out Arena commander and needed a more sophisticated solution to support you know networking and all this stuff right uh we actually decided to switch from just a a particle effect over to a

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    cylinder a capsule right and then that capsule would draw and Shrink depending on you know its velocity and all these all these effects and then we would attach it a particle effect on top of that including uh with an additional glow Shader so we rendered the capsule as this type of glow which we have all these Shader effects on it and then we could also attach a particle effect on top of that for additional effects and then the verts actually can move and stuff so um that's going to be a super fun uh it's going to be NE looking forward and actually what's really cool is that we've already got all the all the um uh the actual weapon fire the weapon type uh we've got that all in place all the code in place it's just really a matter of having the visuals uh that that that come alongside it um you know there'll be cool things like um when we have um um scrap or U when you're trying to

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    actually pull out you know minerals and things like that from a ship uh when you're trying to get uh we're calling it scrap I think or something like this um but we're going to need a beam weapon for that we're going to need some sort of beam uh for repair we're going to need some sort of Beam for mining um uh so we need these beams anyways and again the the game code is pretty much done for that we just need uh we just need a nice effect um so that's kind of next upep for some of the VFX guys all right yeah so that's going to be uh I'm looking forward to seeing what the the team comes up with that one cuz uh we're getting close I think yeah definitely will planets uh oh was a good one will planets have variant biomes and or weather regions or will each planet be uniform do you think current procedural Tech will be capable of generating Flora which is like plants right uh and Faun

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    which is animals living living things at a Fidelity close enough to Art you are producing that's a great question so there's actually two questions within here right so the first one that I want to I want to deal with is Will planets have VAR B of course we have to I mean otherwise you're going to end up with planets that all look rocky planets that all look Frozen planets that all look and we've got some of the best um um atmosphere technology that I've ever seen um it's it's it's absolutely phenomenal um we've got uh I don't know how much we're we're talking about this yet but we've solved all kinds of lighting um uh challenges let's say so things like GI on the planets um there's a there's there's there's some good Solutions already in place so I don't see any reason why we

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    wouldn't have variant biomes um now if he's talking about variant biomes within the planet itself so you've got a planet up north is going to be the polar ice caps on the south is is going to be polar ice caps but in the middle does it get like absolutely there's no reason why we can't do this weather regions is a bit of a different story um that's a lot harder because um sure we can do all all levels of code we know where you are on the planet we know what sector you're in um um what's around you but how do we communicate that over to the player and how deep do you go with the design you have it where when you go to that location it's always raining or do you do it where there's actually some kind of weather happening I mean so I think there's a lot of uh things to solve with the with the weather give you an idea these are the things we're thinking about so the Fidelity of our planets are going to be such that you've not seen

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    this before um there's no question absolutely I'm now whether you have moving weather and things like that on it it's a problem that we're not yet ready to to solve and they're already taking a look at it so things like U volumetric clouds and all this kind of stuff um but to have moving weather patterns and things like that within the planets uh that'll be something for another time I think um but I do think that that's going to be one of the one of the pieces we want to do um I I think it'll be amazing so the second piece of this question is um do I think that the current procedural Tech will be capable of generating the Flor and fauna at the Fidelity that we are um yeah absolutely that's the goal the art is still making the asset so the Fidelity will be it's just a matter of this procedural Tech deciding to poate the plants and the animals right but I don't see any reason that we can't have the same

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    visual Fidelity that we have for the rest of the game and and that's that's the drive that's the direction right and and all of us had worked on we've all worked on uh you know little levels that have been hand authored so much and our goal with this whole system is to be able to make an entire world at that same level of fidelity right um we want to have um you know trees that look like Crisis we want to have we want to have um um animals and things like that within them um absolutely we want them to be at that exact same Fidelity and do I think it's possible absolutely with most of the stuff that we've seen in the last little while absolutely just have to be smart about how you author your art and as long as you go for you know a very technical practical approach and optimized approach I think uh it's really quite no and that's it and to be

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    honest too U the other thing with it is that you know generating um um forests trees uh even animals and things like that and getting them all placed on the planet is difficult yes but there's harder types of planets to do one of the more one of the more difficult and you've worked on things around this um is like a procedural City type Planet so what what then do we do and how do we keep that Fidelity for a planet that's covered in an entire city um that's a lot trickier um I think anyways yeah well you know it's just AAG you make everything as modulars possible and then you could you know who knows what you can do right exactly um with the right gameplay code so I hope that answer the question I know we're being a bit obtuse um but it's only because we haven't yeah yeah and they're all you know they're happening it's it's it's all a moving product um all right now

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    we're going to get to a more difficult uh question and a long one so stay with me with localized physics grids being in the game have you considered using them uh for more unorthodox means oh that's cool for example spaceships are stations with varing directions of gravity all of a sudden I think A Space Odyssey you know when you're like the EXA um I'd be thinking of something like circular space stations or space stations where the ground just continues up a wall uh Inception style or spaceships where one uh one deck and uh the direction of gravity would Point outwards so the hall would act as the floor how cool would it be to look up and see people hanging from the ceiling doing their normal business speaking of circular gravity are planets going to be basically enormous localized physics grids or is there more to them if so can you explain

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    a bit about how they are going to work in that regard all right so these guys are always sneaking two questions in aren't they there's always like a there's there's like a main one oh but by the way 20 for theed Planet something right well it's such a co question and you can see why it spawns more questions yeah I'm super happy uh um that everybody's so into into the planets because that's going to be such a huge unique point to Star Citizen anyways um so the first question question really is about localized physics grids and using them in a more unorthodox way uh we've done this internally a lot actually uh you can have a lot of fun with the physics grids um doing a circular space station is very much possible um so that way you can have a localized direction of gravity all throughout the localized physics grid which is quite cool the other thing again this is something that Chris Rain had worked a lot on um is that we've got a sparse voxal

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    representation of the physics grid meaning uh we can shape it how we want um so we do give we we give the system a model gets as close as possible to this particular piece of geometry now uh the higher poy that geometry is the more expensive uh the more difficult that check is to make um but absolutely we've done this kind of stuff internally we've even messed with uh you know magnetic boots grab boots y so so and I think we actually took them out of the build for a little while just because the animations look so weird on them um but we'll be putting those right back in so not only will you have the localized physics rate of say just like he's talking about like a like a circular space station or something like this but you'll also be able to uh uh magnetically connect yourself via your mag boots or whatever which is probably super helpful on the outside of the ship right to get around especially for the bigger ships sure totally um and it's

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    also kind of fun I mean it's it's a neat thing to mess around with just like he says you know somebody's just going about their day-to-day business and they're hanging upside down from you or something like this um but yeah that technology lets us do all that all this kind of work um and then speaking of circular gravities are planets going to be basically enormous localized physical grids or is there a lot is there something more to them there's a lot more um to the planets one of the one of the tricky Parts again um and I think I talked about this in another tend for the developers is that we can't possibly store every single um um piece of physics Collision on the server all the time right so this is something that we've got to generate at at on the client side at runtime somehow um so they're not big physics grids essentially um they've got to have they they have their own gravity

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    it's completely implemented independently of a physics grid uses the same concept I suppose uh but it's not a physics grid um entirely it' be far too large um and uh yeah it's not even close to as granular as as what we it's different than what when you enter a ship for example right where you set up your your box it's very very different and again like if you think about it right you've got a you've got a very different shape you've got a sphere and everything's got to be a a local gravity to to the center of the sphere whereas in a local physics or you can and then everything is just going that direction but uh yeah it's a little bit more difficult to do on a uh on a planetary scale but it's not a big physics grid um it's a it's a lot it's and not to not to be condescending at all it's a lot more complicated

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    unfortunately than that um I wish it was easy is enough as just making a big physics grid um but that wouldn't really work for what we need definitely not all right um what sort of navigation can we expect for planets Maps GPS beacons uh and that's asked by armored uh citizen um that's a cool name I'd imagine probably all the above right yeah we're going to need all the above like um and I consider sort of maps and GPS kind of the same sort of thing GPS is just a function within a map yeah right so it's just telling you where you are within these Maps uh beacons absolutely so so you guys get an idea we're working on all the gameplay related to this so the first step of that gameplay and it's something that I showed in the procedural planic Tech demo um is the approach I mean uh if if Landing is going to take you 30 35 minutes uh because I mean we looked up how long an

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    actual transition between uh for Earth Landings right how long atmosphere to ground really takes and it takes a long time um if if we make it take that exact same amount of time oh you're going to land one time and you'll never do it again over um there'll be you just you're going to need half an hour of gameplay just to get down to the planet surface so that do really work out so one of the things that we're working on is is the Quantum travel beacons uh where you end up with uh where you end up close to the planet enough that you can land within a reasonable amount of time how many beacons we put on whether that's automatic whether you whether you manually do this all yourself since it's all completely seamless of course we want it to be manual but we also don't want it to take so long to do that you'll never want a hind to your gameplay right exactly so then once you get on the planet right we need some

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    level of um where are you I mean Global M isn't that the hardest thing is it's huge and even when you're working on it you get lost sometimes and I put my own in there sometimes I'm just put around right so we're going to need uh all these um and we've talked a lot about this and really what it's going to come down to is really our first gameplay implementation of all of it uh which has happening as we speak so uh this is something that we're working on internally I don't know when you're going to see it um but we're basically solving all these problems right now like as simple as okay you're in zero g with your ship you've transitioned now into gravity where the have local gravity now and you've got physics and everything so how does the ship flight change how does it feel right is it fun um that's really what matters so once we get there then we'll be giving you your

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    Maps GPS's beacons all over the planet things like this so I expect that you'll have that your map changes too cuz you go from space which is there is no ground to yeah and it's all 3D uh it's like a 3D map to to needing some have a horizon to where I am yeah exactly so cool all right next question which upcoming feature gives you the biggest headache so far which will probably be the hardest nut to crack except the new except the new item system are you serious put the guy knew the guy knew he's like they're going to answer it it's the new item system I mean it's so I wonder is the guy's name Drew or drug or du D Dr Dr Dru Dru Dru I don't know I could barely read awful um okay so which uh features Beyond item Port because the

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    item Port one is really tricky and yeah I'm trying to answer with item Port right well I'm just going to go ahead and do it uh it's the item Port system and we can go into other the new but I want to talk about it anyways because it is the biggest headache so far because we're working on it all the time and you're working on it constantly so the biggest thing that we're deing with right now is all the characters for example are going through a major transitional phase they're going from what uh krych used as cdfs which is a type of uh XML where you tie all your items together into a uh sophisticated item support system and you've currently been working with the engineers on building this tool and uh so now we're going to be able to build uh characters as items uh with this new um item Port system which is super helpful but at the same time it's difficult because you're trying to support everything that previously existed because you don't

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    want to break everything for design and cinematics but yet you want to push forward and use the new tech so like there's it's kind of difficult to support both you do have to make the transition right it's one of those Infamous problems where where you've done everything right when you have exactly what you start started with with which seems to make no sense so like visually right um and and and and Forest Nails the hits the nail right on the head with this one um again the the the CDF setup was was great for krych um it's it's really hard to maintain you know hundreds of characters with that sort of system the the other thing that didn't work for us on a on a on a coding side on a programming side is that the um every independent uh piece of the character actually needs some sort of component code to go with it and it needs persistence right and it needs persistence exactly so um because of the

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    new item uh layout uh we can actually have different code running on different functions running on different um pieces of the of the character itself rather than you being one character as a whole you're actually a collection of a a lot of different uh gameplay components that are being updated uh differently than than other things so we kind of didn't really answer his question except the new item system so beyond the new item system what else kind of hurts us like the character one is though um I would honestly say just the full scale um because we're doing the full scale uh solar systems now um and that's something that I really think is going to end up out to the community uh sooner rather than later um is the full sizee solar system itself um I think that's going to be the the hardest nut to crack um we've already got all the support in

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    it but it's all the extraneous stuff that we haven't thought of yet or we haven't even seen um so we've got QA starting to run it through these full scales tests and then not only will we have full scale but likely at somewhat I I don't know if it's going to be the same time but I'd like to see this happen kind of all together is we put one of the procedural planets within there now I call it procedural it's going to be like the designer control Planet so we put one of the planets in to the full solar scale the full solar system scale Call It Whatever um and then we see all the problems that that brings right and we've got to start we're combining fixing these full systems or full solar systems with procedural planets with the player customization and and the back end right that persistence so your your character

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    is your character you know going forward um and all these things comeing together once which are all 100% necessary for this project but how awesome will that be because that how great is it going to be cuz that's really we've done so much of the of you know of the development for art and the content and sure and we're always do all this stuff a smaller scale version right smaller scale this is this is finally this is what brings it together right all takes all these things we working on the last couple years and finally exactly puts those final pieces together so it's super excited but we like anything we know it's not going to be easy it it will be a headache and it will be difficult but we will achieve it and it will and it will um it will be conquered and it will be awesome um but you know there will be problems uh yeah but you guys will seen this sooner rather than later for sure yeah cuz we're doing the testing now yeah we're doing the testing now awesome

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    um any chance you could how did they know about the new item system I want to ask I'm going to ask you first I bet you Chris talks about it all the time you think this one of our Turtle plays asked this question just to mess with us oh you think so maybe I would think so probably ex here's another internal question potentially no I'm just joking this one was by Solas Solas um any chance you can give an update on the female model what has caused him to be held up for so long after the male model was released what are the current issues that stop the models from being available in the verse so I can blame all kinds of departments if you want I mean I mean Steve will be super happy so Steve Bender right now is in Frankfurt you know my partner in crime there we all we all have a office

35. 00:27:13

    that it's all sort of shared so I'm going to blame Steve on this one I'm going to say that animation is behind no um and that's not really the problem actually we've had there's a lot of hurdles a couple different things on the mesh which I'll let Forest answer but on the uh on the animation techn ology sort of side uh what we really want is a completely finished mail um and and that doesn't mean mesh that doesn't mean necessarily uh um uh like outfits and things like this what it means is everything to do with animation so um we've got most of it right we've got lots of firsters stuff holding weapons we've got cover we've finally now got mantling and vating so basically one's mantling vating cover Locomotion ships uh what else am I missing I'm missing something and AI sort of interactions

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    anyways once those are all done for the mail then we can basically just plug a female into it um there's a there's a there's a technical implementation side of this where um we actually have to plug the whole bunch of stuff within mannequin if any of the asset names are different between a male and a female and sometimes we've done this uh that's going to cause a problem within mannequin but we actually want to use the exact same logic that a male does to the female cuz we don't want to be fixing two different bugs and here's the thing right we yeah exactly we don't want to make the same mistake twice and we don't want to make the same mistake in parallel with each other and that's it so uh the one thing that we are doing is we are figuring out every single thing that goes right and goes wrong and figuring out our complete process and then uh taking the female character and having a much smoother transition and making sure that

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    everything works properly with everything we've learned from the the m exctly and then that way a female implementation is easy um it does doesn't take us nearly as much time because a lot of it is oh how do we do the mail okay let's do it the same oh how do we do the mail okay let's do it the same so that's what's going to solve all our problems for that uh the other thing that this gives us a huge benefit for is the vuel it's going to be the exact same process um so once that male is completely locked down U for the Squad 42 aspect of it vaulting manling all the animation then females you know it's it's not done but um we've got all the assets it's just a matter of plugging it in yeah and uh you know we we're still doing some Polish to the actual female uh herself the body you know that's you know we want to make sure that that corre 4K nether region texture map really oh never Outsource

38. 00:29:40

    that was an interesting never Outsource characters yeah if you Outsource characters just be prepared to get stuff back you never know what you're going to get expecting they don't want me to talk about it but a 4K nether region I think you can figure out what that means 4K texture for that I just don't get it um and then there's the obviously you know you know the rigs and everything that you got to solve so yes um but the the female model is is coming along and I'm personally very excited to have it cuz we've already had some clothing made for it and we want to get that um and I think that's going to you know kind of fall into the customization too we had to figure out how the players are going to uh be able to customize themselves with all their items and stuff and uh the Mel had a series of clothes already so we're were able to tackle that challenge and figure it out and uh now we can move on to the female so I'm super excited that is coming very soon

39. 00:30:28

    right and just to give you a you know uh a full sort of a look on this um you know the females uh we've already got them locomoting around uh we've got a bunch within Squadron 42 that are that are that are specific to Squadron 42 so they all work um it's just a matter of you not having seen them within the persistent Universe yet because when we give them to you we want to have the customization like you said we want to have all the same outfits as the male we basically don't want to take anything away from the female right and then there's the whole you know we have all our heads right so we've been solving you know you have your body but then you have these head scans how do the head scans fit on the body you have to match up the topology the skin the skin tone which is a whole which is a challenge so there's just a lot of things and you know we're trying to do it one step at a time and make sure that we don't make the you know same mistake twice sure and as efficient as possible yeah when they

40. 00:31:15

    come online you know uh they'll be fully featured so we won't just kind of build them up slowly it just be all at once yeah exactly all right will there be barber shops in game or places to alter our character's appearance for aesthetic purposes or in a ex an expanded capacity a not so legal purpose that sounds Shady so legal purpose so is that like change your appearance so you can get away with a crime yeah right or is that like you know I don't know I think that there will be I we've been working a lot on hair uh you know recently that's that's been a big topic because no matter how great your head scans look you still need hair right and that's well that's our biggest problem right the current hair that we had worked on and even some of the tech we're fighting with a bit um is is that's what's bringing not down but

41. 00:32:06

    uh lowering the quality yeah I mean Bringing Down the heads a little bit right you take a look at the head you take a look at the the the face texture we've got of the crazy wrinkles we've got por mapping we've got all this crazy stuff um and then you've kind of got hair which is has on it maybe some directional maps that uh just can't you know you know there's a lot of elements still missing right you know get that nice Rim lighting you know I'm sure we've all seen the Paragon demo where they have all the hair strands well they got this awesome spline stuff that looks just amazing I love I love to look one of those things you always want you know all this Tech but you know you still have to uh commit to um where you're at and work with the tools that you have right and then to get it done and then you know further down the road map you can always try to you know stay on top of um what everybody else is doing and and um you know keep to the same uh

42. 00:32:54

    technical standards that the visual standards really right I mean we've got to be up um and you know we've got to be one of the best games out there and uh we don't want to give you any old technology kind of the thing and we don't want to we don't want to make the the the faces that we spent so so long on right look look worse um so the actual question is is you know are there going to be barber shops that's a design question I have no idea about barber shops what I do know is that you'll be modifying your face uh in a medical facility of some sort right yeah like reconstructive surgery exactly so whether whether you're doing your hair at the same time uh that's a great question probably I would guess I would imagine anything like you know that has to do with the head with with your face so facial hair or whatever else so I guess you have to get plastic surgery to shave maybe fair enough I mean yeah we

43. 00:33:43

    are in La kind of pretty normal um but there there's a lot of problems to solve uh with the hair like uh like forest was saying um even down to just having different head sizes I mean all the heads are a different size so how do you stop yourself from making every single um haircut for every single head so if I have one haircut made for one head but obviously when you are customizing your character you're going to want to have access to all the different hair but what if you chose MPC shaped head n as opposed to MPC head 55 or even if you've controlled it through a modifier or something or a blend shape whatever we end up doing how do you make sure that the hair stays attached to the head when the head changes size that's the thing um and and those are those are those are problems that we're solving and to give you an idea of that particular one uh

44. 00:34:30

    how we want to do this is that we have a we have an actual Scout Map we hold all the morph targets for every single head within the scal map or we keep offsets of every single joint that we need to offset when we're customizing the face so that we actually only make one model that contains all the morph targets for every single head uh and then the hair cards on top of that um those are going to have to move around and we've kind of started playing around with it right like we we realized very early you know eyelashes for example right you make eyelashes and you're like wait a minute everyone has a slightly different size socket for you know in the head right so how do you make you can't just make we have 120 heads you can't just make one set of eyelashes to fit all the eye shapes right so all of a sudden you got to figure out that's where our technical animators come in yeah and you know the technical art team we've got a really awesome technical art team and one of the one of the things that our team is

45. 00:35:17

    the best at um and I you know I say this and I'm super proud of the guys for being able to always do this is these massive script updates that will affect all the assets together so one of the hardest things about this game is the sheer scope of it right like how many heads we've got we got over 100 heads how many character bodies we got we've got hundreds of these um you can't go in manually open up Maya tweak one close it save there's too much you open up my closet safe it would take you all year um but we've got guys like Mark McCall John rigs Gage um uh matat TR writing scripts that that are that are a batch uh that are a batch process to it so to give you an example Mark McCall made the eyelashes right so one thing we don't get delivered eyelashes with the faces it's a problem because they look pretty

46. 00:36:05

    funny without eyelashes um especially the females right so what he's done is he has actually got a script that builds the eyelash geometry not only does it build the eyelash geometry but it checks the head that it's working on builds the geometry skins it on exports the process puts it into a CDF and it's done that's how you manage right CU you want to have your artist spend the time on and eyelashes because if you could have them spend time on one eyelash they're going to look really good if they have to spend their time on 120 eyelashes you're going to have a very low quality right set of ey and you're going to have an artist that's going to want and we have this visual bar so yeah totally so you want to you want to have you know artists concentrate on single elements and then you have your technical artists populate those single elements in a very smart approach to save the labor time so we can concentrate on the visual

47. 00:36:52

    Fidelity and not the uh the art labor actual labor labor itself right sure but this is where bugs come from so to give you guys an idea asset bugs this is usually what happens so like you'll do a batch process like this you'll check you have to spot check a whole bunch of them you'll maybe have QA check every single one of them uh but you'll spot check a couple and then there'll be one that didn't work correctly or uh one that you know somebody's PC lagged out for half a second or whatever I mean um this is where the asset bugs come from it's not like somebody was sitting there they looked at it it's you know whatever the faces exploded and they're like yeah that's good you know and exported it it's usually something that somebody hasn't actually physically touched yeah yeah totally all right cool uh we got one more question by Fallon just curious about how procedural generation more procedural Planet question and I love

48. 00:37:41

    that will work on planets with large bodies of waters oceans and how will that affect performance is it hard to render so much water or easier on the side of the player also space Wells excellent question the space Wells but I do know working with oceans in the past it is Shader driven so I think that it is uh achievable with without killing performance yeah absolutely and um again um the Carson wiel is one of the U I mean he's he's he's unsung uh he's very quiet um unless he's very angry uh but he's written he's written white papers for the engine he was there from the gecko and he's actually working within this he's actually training uh one of the one of our Junior Graphics

49. 00:38:28

    programmers to do this particular Implement implementation so him and a a gentleman by the name of Thiago who went to ID software I believe and worked on the worked on Doom um worked on our oceans originally within the cry engine right and I I I think I can go out on a limb and say the oceans within the cry engine were one of the biggest the best features within the engine it looked the best we had scattering through the waves all this crazy stuff that that eventually you know go under water the volumetrics oh so I think you can um expect at least that level of fidelity um but what's tricky again about water is how um uh first of all the Highlight changes at a distance so when you're approaching a planet the water's got to got to highlight it's got to it's got to react very different specularity wise to the actual surface of is just exactly um

50. 00:39:18

    then when you get up close right you want to see waves but you don't want to see it tiling everywhere right um so we've got this real big scale problem that we're going to have to deal with damic desolation on the stuff um being able to have displaced waves and things like this and then additionally if we want to go under the water which a ship to design should be able to do right let's hope that design says that ships are submarines also to me to me if a ship can go into outer space it can go under freaking water right I think it should be able to go under water but whatever I mean we'll we'll see where that goes with the design that's a design thing um but I think that should happen I'm going to get back to my desk if you go underwater space I'm going to have a task to get back to my desk to make sure that the jetpack is uh supports underwater as well oh oh that's

51. 00:40:07

    a good point right and then oh wow because I mean what a Pandora's box right because you get under and it's like you open the back of the cutless what happens right shouldn't water flow in right but is a local physics rid like like pushing water out I don't know there's all sorts of crazy suine though is is built to withstand the extreme weight and pressure that the water puts on and I don't think that a ship needs to withstand that same amount of pressure in out of space yeah I'm not sure wouldn't you think that a missile hitting the side of your ship has a lot of pressure feel like a blows it up right I don't know anyways I don't know so whether or not you go under waterer I don't know ABS did it to the Enterprise I think it was kind of dumb what what put it underwater yeah I think that was fine it's got Shields are you talking about Voyager home yeah no the one where uh uh isn't Voyager home

52. 00:40:55

    it's underwater no no yeah that's shot that's shot when he's coming out of the water the new the new Star J did with the enterpris hiding under water yeah and then it comes out of it and yeah it was cool but it didn't make any sense um but it didn't make any sense fair enough um sorry so can chips go underwater if the Enterprise can do it I'll show you yeah right and again this will be a design debate and as you see there's a couple different couple different mindsets I'm sure all the players are going to go yeah absolutely they need to go underwater right CU other people be like no finish the game n we can do like hunt for ated October things one ping only I'm more interested in the space Wells personally yeah and the space Wells right um we talked a little bit earlier in a different different question about fauna anyways so space whales Mega fauna I think we're going to have to support something like this

53. 00:41:43

    right um whether it's whether it's whales or big big things on the on the on the ground uh walking around yeah sure space whales do it you heard it here so so that put pretty much like pushes CH you want to hear my my uh space well joke yeah I do so a space well walks into a bar and he sits down to against next to another space wall yeah and the the space wall goes okay and then the Spaceball looks over he goes man you are wasted you're wasted all right thank you for to another episode of 10 for the developers Sean Tracy for Stefan um we'd

54. 00:42:33

    like to thank the uh subscribers uh over and over and over again because we love you and again without you we would not be here so thank you so much for everything and your contributions and we're going to get back to work and keep making this game for you hell yeah we'll get the females done right now let's go do it and the space wealth thank you so much all right thank you thanks guys hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh 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]