Inside Star Citizen: Driving Force | Winter 2021

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:04

   so ever since i was like a kid really i was interested in cars and that interesting cars went to building them and then i ended up kind of racing competitive esports for a while and that kind of got me into the game industry which allowed me to combine pretty much all my passions really that i have about vehicles and build them in video games that's basically dream come true for me i've been a fan of both planes and spaceships and cars in equally for years it's definitely something that i am invested in and i really want to make it good and everything my background is physics and so spaceship physics are grand vehicle physics it's all physics to me it's it's excellent and it's a lot of fun you know making the ground vehicles

2. 00:00:54

   better they give us this ability to have a more varied experience in gameplay like they're never obviously gonna match the maneuverability and abilities of a spaceship but they serve a different purpose with a spaceship you can fly around you can get an overview of the planet but if you go down on the ground you get a much greater sense of the detail and the skill the universe at the moment i've been supporting the work that bjarni's been doing on ground vehicles which is really really exciting the the physics model entire model that he's been working on is one of the most interesting things i've seen in a while so right now we're working on a more physically based tire model it's actually built on empirical data so like real-world data from from tires so the tire model uh handles how the

3. 00:01:42

   the wheel contacts to the ground and um so we simulate that actually with uh this curve that um that is calculated from the the slip of the wheel now the slip of the wheel is actually is how how fast the wheel is turning how fast the engine turns the wheel relative to the ground that's moving beneath it the tire model that we're using right now works fine but it's a little bit too arcadey and we want to explore moving into a more physical based one so each of the ground vehicles all are like wildly different ground vehicles right having more flexibility over how you can tune the vehicles and a more physically accurate way to tune

4. 00:02:30

   the vehicles will result in a more believable experience that is easier for us to achieve and as a result it's kind of pushed us to improve the system so the result for the player is that you will see more vehicles that are behaving in the way that you expect um they sort of interact with the terrain much more correctly you can slide them and also have periods of grip and so on that is what you expect and it's easier for us to achieve that so you'll get that more often so each of the ground vehicles you know all the ground vehicles we've made so far have have very different roles [Music] uh where can the rock improve grand fields because it was the first kind of ground vehicle to have a specific kind of

5. 00:03:17

   purpose and place where it needed to be because it had to be placed in difficult places to mine um so we definitely kind of look back over the technology we had and we definitely made some improvements there it definitely feels better across the surface and also it's the first ground vehicle that we properly tuned the camera for that we had developed previously for the spaceships so we've got camera that communicates when the vehicle is sliding when you're flying around the corners in that vehicle you can really feel the grip that it has we're also working on the tank at the moment um this has been a big driving force behind a lot of the improvements we're making so we've got access now to a lot more parameters and it's the first vehicle to use the track physics which we have so it's not steering by wheels turning um it's

6. 00:04:05

   steering by difference in speed between the different treads tech that's come with a tank is just some more fine-tuning options now that we didn't have before and that drastically improves the feel and also the ability of the ground vehicles to do things as well we're also working on the new cyclone mt which is you know kind of made us look at the kind of missile experience that we have with the ground vehicles and how it drastically changes the needs of the missiles and how they aim it's also basically highlighted the fact that we also need to massively change how we communicate the ground vehicle experience um you know overall with the ui you know because we don't have ui for the ground vehicles right now um you know to the same standard as the ships

7. 00:04:51

   it's quite fair to say that the um it's probably my favorite um it's probably one of my favorite vehicles the cyclone so adding kind of missiles to that just adds an element of kind of funny destruction for me so as far as going because moving forward where we go is um we start with a core thai model improvement which will drastically improve the kind of overall physics that drives the ground vehicle they're basically on top of that we've already done some work on the camera system but we need to create more of a bespoke experience with camera so you know we're looking at improvements the car camera system and that all come just from a more realistic physics base we're definitely not going to go full simulation here and require you to have a full steering wheel set up but we want

8. 00:05:38

   the same feelings and emotions to be expressed with the ground vehicle so it feels right and then a big part of the ground vehicle experience that we would definitely want to improve is the lack of the hood to be fair to be frank with you um and also just bring the ground vehicles up to the same standards in terms of all the systems then in the future add the missile operator mode ui as well so you'll have all the same systems that the ships do and then someday we'll have coordinates of the compass on the hood as well so um you don't get lost because i get lost quite a lot on the planets but that's just because i end up landing somewhere random and you know just go for a drive and i just watch the sunset go down star citizen is more than just a space game it's a means to explore the cosmos and make your way through the universe charting a path that's uniquely your own and wherever that path happens to take

9. 00:06:26

   you you're likely to need a ground vehicle at some point along the way but when you're not adventuring maybe you'll spend your time in your hab your outpost or your local hospital let's take a look now at how some of those are progressing and more in this week's sprint report starting things off this week let's begin with some smaller updates from the eu pu feature team who just completed a sprint on bug fixes and visual updates to existing systems like the refinery kiosks including this new welcome splash screen and a fix to the close window button well wasn't working before they also added an auto log out for those people who go to the library and like to leave their email open for anyone else to see they also continue to work on the mining ui in line with the new sub components

10. 00:07:14

    we talked about last week the new additions allow for the display of precise benefits from each component and also work for the previous consumables as well so players can better and more knowledgeably tune their mining experience they're also working on animating the scan bars as part of an overall push to expose more and more information to the player members of the modular content team recently completed a sprint on the non-commercial overlays for refinery decks coming to alpha 313 what you're seeing here at the moment is a pre-lighting pass which always does a lot to sell the proper mood and atmosphere of industrial areas like this what they did here was take some of the more common traversal areas in several of the stations

11. 00:08:02

    and began ripping out many of the adverts that were present exposing more of the layered industrial guts that were previously hidden to the player from underneath also gone are some of the seating areas plants decor and other amenities found in the larger stations and a more utilitarian and functional space is left in its wake now this isn't being applied to every station but only a few select smaller ones with refinery decks in an effort to distinguish them a bit more from their flashier more commercialized cousins now it may be a bit flat looking at the moment but once the lighting pass changes are in it'll begin to bring out the personality a bit more in the smaller more industrialized stations if you remember our segment on the

12. 00:08:51

    interaction zoo with calyx from last year you may be excited to hear that folks from the lighting team have begun to dig into his toy box of technical knickknacks and play things to set up a habitation test bed of their own starting with splitting all of the existing lighting into sectional circuits that can be controlled or affected by the player individually such as a proximity sensor in the foyer to light and delight the entrance a master control panel with different lighting states for the entire hab localized controls for each distinct area like the kitchen or the bunk and then in case you still weren't able to set exactly the mood you're looking for control of the individualized prop lights

13. 00:09:38

    like lamps giving players unprecedented control of how they light their own space the next step in this prototyping is to explore integrating the destructible and replaceable colored lights from the interaction zoo providing even more customization options for players going forward let's check in on the continuing white box progress of hospitals by stepping into new babbage once more and seeing where they're at now this is the view when you leave the service ward and enter the lobby and right off the bat we can see the ceiling has been altered since the last we saw it to reveal even more of the aspire grand up above the pharmacy is still on the right but now on the left we have new information and security stations as well

14. 00:10:27

    now if we head back into the wards themselves we can find nice communal areas like this gorgeous view of the new babbage skyline off to the left and right leads to nurse and doctor and trio stations and many of the kinds of areas you'd expect to find in a fully functioning hospital now even though this is still in white box phase you can imagine what it'll look like with new babbage's trademark signage helping to distinguish between the various recovery rooms surgical theaters storage areas blood labs and more and if you play like i do you're gonna spend a lot of time here so it's important that it can handle the load did i make that same joke last time you bet i did it's a test to see if anybody's paying attention to what's being said here

15. 00:11:16

    fidelity immersion bespoke the hospital will really punch above its weight class now it wouldn't be a sprint report these days without a continuing look at the progress of our colonialism outposts so here's a look at further whitefox progress most of the work this sprint was in determining all the things whitebox is normally used for such as working out how all the various modules will connect and function with one another figuring out how to set up the necessary vis areas while adapting for the sloped exterior walls continuing to work out all the necessary run time environment probes needed to allow lighting from the exterior to creep in through the windows to the interior and potentially the other way around as well

16. 00:12:03

    basically it's work preserving the necessary modularity so that these outposts can work in multiple configurations while adapting the blendtec to properly allow for spill into each room without noticeable lines everywhere folks also want to take another pass at this bathroom area which is currently feeling a bit too much like a spaceship and not what we'd expect to see in a frontier outpost they're also working with design to mark out interactable areas or future spaces for players to customize their space further with equipment or even decorative flare all their own the social space in the sender has gone through several iterations in the last couple weeks as things sometimes do it began to balloon in size before it was decided to bring it back in to a more intimate setting here we see

17. 00:12:51

    one of the various connection collars that can link to a number of different modules including this garage we first showed a couple weeks ago the current thinking here is that there should be an airlock here so that the garage can be depressurized if necessary on certain planets or moons as well as a hatch up above for the very same reason ultimately it's just nice to follow along with the continued progress of these outposts that'll first be used in npc settlements across stanton and pyro and then eventually be rolled out to player use after that finally before we let you go this week there are sprints and then there are tiny experiments devs do from time to time to see what's possible and recently someone on the vfx team tried revisiting our existing lightning effects ahead of some expected work on pyro

18. 00:13:40

    and then combining that with our new and upcoming emissive particle lighting system to see if they could improve the look of one of star citizen's oldest assets the dying star from arena commander now this is literally a vfx doodle done during a meeting but it's got others excited about the possibilities not just in improving existing maps like arena commander but applications elsewhere like in gas clouds in the persistent universe and at the center of the forthcoming pyro system which was the inspiration for arena commander's map to begin with so what we learned this week well we learned that there are many ways left to improve the ground vehicle experience in star citizen and that some of those are already underway right now that there's a new cyclone variant on the way and driving improvements for all

19. 00:14:27

    alongside development of the nova tank and the recently released grey cat rock that habs may someday let you light up your life any way you want and that those outposts just can't come soon enough but they'll be worth the wait for inside star citizen i'm jared huckabee see you all next week