Inside Star Citizen: Paws and Claws

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   there are lots of ways to bring life to the worlds of Star Citizen whether that's the people that inhabit them the structures they build or the coffee cups and food wrapper Decor scattered across their desk but perhaps nothing quite as much as Nature's inhabitants now animals creatures fauna whatever you call them have been one of the long unfulfilled Promises of the persistent Universe since planets were first introduced in Alpha 3.0 and Point 23 patches later they've made their much anticipated debut with the first of a new herd of offerings that will continue in subsequent releases so let's go now to just some of the team members responsible for their creation and get just a small glimpse into what went into creation creatures are just going to

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   offer a whole different dimension to the game play they bring a sense of life to a world gives an environment a sense of that it's a lived in space there's a lot going on on the planets but it can feel at times like there's not a huge amount going on but with the introduction of creatures that all [Applause] changes we have now the ability to to create life wherever you look it just takes the game to another level of breathtaking it adds believability to the experience that I don't think any

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   feature so far has come to the level of adding immersion that fora has [Music] in Alpha 323 we're adding two new creatures one is the mar and one is the copion when you're kind of exploring these these planets

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   we are introducing a whole range of different creatures going forward into the future well you want to start off simple right you look at it you're like oh cool you know should we work on these big creatures straight away or you know should we you know ground down make sure the pipeline Works make sure the basics work what's more simple than you know a dog cat and a bird and ultimately you know the birds basically prove out these features that they can be done they are doable let's start with a mar bird so this is is a fairly simple creature and uh you'll see them flying around in flocks and it's it's really nice when you're just in your ship looking out the window and you see a bunch of birds and life on the surfaces where you wouldn't before I think the marok as a bird will add a sense of scale to the world like it it helps a lot to see a flock of bird

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   and add scale to anything that's bigger in the distance I think this is going to help a lot to that part if you're like walking along the planetary surface and you hear a core in the distance you're like Oh there's uh there's Mar over we can go we can go find them we can go see them with the creature designs we don't want to make anything that you look at you go oh that's a pigeon cuz we're a Sci-Fi game we want to make it a bit cooler and a bit weird and we don't want to spoil too much about where they are who they are what they're doing and things like that when it comes to creatures cuz we basically want the players to find them and we don't want to say hey they're on these specific locations on these specific things cuz they could turn up in areas that you wouldn't expect for we wanted the colorful variety of birds that we could use to fill the planets the creatures have different skin depending on the

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   biomes they're in so some are going to be more colorful some are little less colorfuls they're inspired by real life animals to some extent they have these like big like gulped chins they've got these nice flappy wings panss but they're they're also a bit hairless as well we kind of look at the reference of featherless Birds cuz for the first batch of creature we could not use a lot of feathers and fur so we went to a more skin type of creatures you know the those cats that don't have any hair they look a bit like that but in more of a bird form it's very odd the copon is essentially a hybrid between a dog and a cat it's got four eyes it's a nice chill social behavior which you can see you know you see them howling or you hear them howling you see

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   them walking around and kind of you know scratching themselves and themselves and things like that the copion has a variety of colors there's one that is more Savanah likee there's a one that's more Forest like so it can blend into the environment a bit better there's an Arctic one that uh has kind of the pattern of a snow leopard and then once you're in combat they're essentially they're faster than the player sprinting and they're usually in packs of like 10 to 14 visually they a nice kind of sleek slender look when you think of dogs you think of the more like worker dogs when somebody asks you know how big is this creature we reference the German Shepherd for example the cun was designed to have a nostyle look so it has horns it has big scales on on the

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   back overall we wanted something that you look at and you go oh yeah we know that's a predator and obviously you know you can tell things of predators by the way their eyes are shaped and how they move how their bone structure is how they're set up visually you can look at that and your brain From Evolution basically goes oh that is a predator and it's going to hurt me so the mar bird is what we call aoid aoid on the general level you have to imagine it's it's like a lot more stupid version of an actor right it's way less resource intensive its behaviors are far more simple and it's it's a lot easier to basically put in without performance costs boids is a system that was developed a while back but has been used to effect in lots of films and games it's based on three simple rules that

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   allow some very complex behaviors of what you might call flocking the three rules are that they maintain separation so they don't get too close to each other they remain aligned with each other so they'll follow other members of the pack that go in the same direction and cohesion are the three rules in boids that allow this flocking Behavior to be generated so that they are a group of of birds essentially stay together in a single area and you know they fly up they fly down they're intentionally made to be very simple and kind of what you'd expect from a bird especially if you're hunting them as well because we don't want individual birds flying all around the planet and things like that because we want to kind of keep them nicely clustered together in an area we go okay cool this is where the birds are so the copion is not a boid it's a fully

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    fledged NPC character when you look at the copium that's what we call an actor right and that has the more costly associations like being able to use like nav meshes being able to use Behavior trees and cuz Copans have to make decisions but Mars don't so Copan is an NBC preacher yes does a te pose on on chairs well firstly they're not going to be on chairs in the first place unless you low one into your spaceship and uh somehow magically put them on a chair no they're not going to te on chairs Sly you're going on the record me going to jump on a chair no I'm not going saying they're not going to jump on a chair the animated's task with the creatures is to breathe life into these

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    entities cuz these entities basically are just points in space that are moving around the mar when it's kind of flying across the sky as far as the game's concerned it's just a point in space just moving across the sky but the animators actually create that illusion of Life the first step in the process is um we have a look at the design dock we basically get an idea in the feel for what the designers are after for the creature we then try and kind of link that to CU these are alien creatures we kind of link that back to what is it like that already exists on Earth and for the marok it was things like a pelican that kind of creature so we then gathered the reference of pelicans doing doing all the things that we want the marok to do with that we will then try and kind of breathe that life that essence of that

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    creature into the into the mar so we went through many different iterations of like the poses that this copon um should be in very small details can kind of tell a whole different story about the copon in one case we were creating the aggressive Idol pose we had a pose that we thought was kind of really aggressive looking kind of down low and it was kind of ready to kind of pounce at you but one of the devs said like this kind of feels like it's playing with me it kind of feels like he's kind of should be wagging his tail so we just kind of changed a few very subtle things and all of a sudden like the whole feeling of that pose changes so there's there's many many different kind of decisions that we have to make to achieve that final result that we want that result of the copon being this aggressive thing that's out for your

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    blood one of the things we've been doing with copion is trying to get them to attack in packs and we do this by giving them some special formation code brings them together uh and makes them seem really cohesive in a different way from the boids you want to engage these things from distances as they are faster than the player when they are sprinting so these will essentially attack you and circle you in packs think a bit more Behavior akin to wolves if you come across the Copan outside in the wild the first thing you're probably want to going to do is back up really quickly as they all come charging at you and that can be really quite hazardous if you don't look Wy going and for down Ravine or something they've got two attacks which is this really scary pounce attack and then they've got a more short- ranged

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    attack so when the creature is kind of lunging towards you one of the versions of the animation we had was where it kind of leapt out to towards you and it had all of its claws out back feet front feet its jaws were open just to make it look as kind of aggressive and as dangerous as possible but it turns out that kind of made it look less dangerous because it was showing its belly so we basically adjusted the back end of the copon brought its paes in slightly and again that changes the the entire kind of feel when the silhouette of this thing coming towards you is just a pair of Jaws opening up ready to kind of clamp down on you and it makes it look a lot more aggressive and they hurt quite a lot you

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    know the average hit will take a quarter of your health off so you've got to kill these things before they come close to you which is a problem when you're in caves when you're in caves it's a close quarters environment and the Copans have the upper hand so you'll come across a Copan in a cave and they'll probably be doing some really cool little idle animation like scratching them elv or shaking themselves for fleases and if you uh surprise them for the first time and they're on their own they'll probably get a bit scared and run away and join the other Copans if you follow them then that's when you'll

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    probably get into trouble because a pack of three or four or more Copans attacking at the same time could be really quite deadly so with the marok it was a very iterative process and there was a lot of back and forth it started off with experimenting with morphing where you can take one source and morph it with another one and we did a lot of experimentation with using different types of birds like eagles and Hawks and owls and morphing it with nonanimal Source like more like textural squeaky sarky stuff so we started off quite grounded and taking sound that sounded quite a lot like ravens and

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    crows but we're going more towards a little bit more like dinosaures and a bit more screechy and more alien so yes trying to find that [Laughter] balance cion we wanted to make sure that it's it has a presence in the world you don't just hear it when it's attacking you you can hear it snuffling around and grunting when you're sneaking up on it they're howling they're communicating with each other we just wanted it to add life and presence to the world so the copion is a very mean looking predator and we wanted it to sound just as mean as it looks so we started off with a mix of sources from lions and tigers and all sorts of predatory mammals and mixing it

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    in with dogs and things like seals SE lions and trying to bring in an alien element as well with some non-literal sounds um I've got a recording of a wet balloon squeaking that I mix in at certain points just to give it a little bit of alien flavor so Wonder of our sound designers Chris has this beautiful spaniel that he recorded loads of sounds of at his house and we used a little bit of that sprinkled in just to give it that uh dog characteristic are you saying that you find sea lions and wet balloons terine it can be if you if you put them in the right order and their so the sounds of fear are sea

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    lions wet balloons and cocker spaniels we know some of you don't just want to pet the bird yeah watch the bird look at the bird enjoy the bird you know be one with the bird some of you want to murder the bird yeah so i' I've seen some people going up to the birds and punching them which is definitely a way to interact with wildlife and if you do that you will find a a pearl in their I think it's in the base of their mouth and essentially their it's made of like congealed NS and looks incredibly gross so if you manage to kill the

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    Copans you'll see the horn on them and you can loot that and it's basically valuable commodity of which you can sell on it's going to be exciting for the players to hunt out those creatures and find them in different environments whether they'll be in the middle of the trees or hiding in caves there's a bit of a challenge there but there's also that feeling of of Nature and and the wild that you're going to get kind of peering on creatures performing these kind of behaviors as though they're not being watched by by humans before but the the nice thing about this is it kind of leads into a wider gameplay Loop that we're you know looking at you know we talked about crafting quite a lot and this is an example of you know how crafting gameplay will come into it sobly the first step as we're looking at

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    you know more creatures and more variants and things like that but obviously we'll get in that further detail as we go on the creature forner in general obviously we've previously experimented we' previously played with things as you'll have seen but now we're in the active development of it so we have a really nice kind of idea of what we want for 1.0 and all the creatures we want for that and looking at how we can make the creatures in the future fit in the star sit in the universe so we've always been tinkering we've always been playing but you know now we have a pipeline that technology is working in and we've basically proven it out now so the future of creatures is a lot more easier and convenient to make than some of the more you know previous challenges I think is very exciting for us on the character team to tackle the creatures

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    it's uh something that the whole team is excited about we are very proud of the work that we do so animating a creature isn't an easy thing at all so obviously for the creatures we couldn't map so Hand keying the creatures it can be difficult to to raise the quality up to the the the level that the rest of the universe is at but I think as a as a team I think we've really managed to actually achieve that that level of quality that we're we're aiming for I think that the team's done a great job creatures definitely bring life to the the different PL environments that we have allow us to have a a different range of kind of gameplay situations where you've got characters attacking you in different ways and allowing us to show a more characterful range of

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    behaviors perhaps creatures they it's not just a static you know prop it's something that is alive and breathing and you can react to it and it will react to you and it just gives a bit of gameplay for the the player to engage in and as we go on the previous creatures that you've seen for example the space whale and the space cow those things are in active development right now and you can imagine with uh creatures that are this large the question is you know how do we loot them how do we do those things and that will be a very fun addition and the things will cooking up are very exciting so you'll see creatures in 323 and it's going to be an amazing experience adding true believability to the world Happy Hunting good luck

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    getting those horns and try not to switch the pearls they're a bit gross so what did we learn this week well we learned that it takes a Confluence of disciplines like art design animation Ai and more to bring these creatures to life that you don't actually have to hunt These Fine fauna but if you do there are rewards to be had and that Copans prefer the Tundras and savanas they're used to and may not behave well if you forcibly relocate them not that that has ever stopped any one of you for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared hucke thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week