Inside Star Citizen: Finding the North Star | Fall 2022

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] well builds can break for a ton of reasons it's not a point of Pride that you know I start to Rattle off a whole bunch of different things that break bills because my whole vocation is to create tools to create pipelines and create processes that don't break builds that are very very dependent but in a perfect world that might be the case but in the reality of things it can be so many things there can be a per force commit that completely destroys it there's so many different types of errors that can be a compilation error that fails the build there can be build errors that have nothing to do with the actual game data itself we're trying to move away from these kind of things but having assets single points of failures on certain assets so a good example is like in our facial data we use a thing called a DNA wrap deformer and it

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   literally just came up this last week that there was a raptor former attachment checked in that didn't have an LOD any face that was attaching this would fatal the entire game as soon as QA got into it every two seconds they were having a a fatal air which means the entire build sort of shut down on them and they couldn't proceed with their testing so this is one of the reasons that we put those asset validations and those things in place there is a lot of reason that builds fail um and you know part of the Tool's job is making sure that those don't happen so what is a build the easiest way to understand a build is everybody's heard of code compiling before and that is there's there's raw code that is written and then it gets run through a compiler and then out comes a binary or an executable as people would understand it um the same actually happens with our

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   assets so sometimes our assets come through and they'll be in an intermediate type format and then those will get sent over to the build system to be compressed in such a way that is actually a lot easier for us to deliver the build to uh users and for the bill to actually be able to run a lot quicker in order to distribute a version of the game to all the developers so we can continue producing the game we create what we call a build every well many times a day as work is completed it gets submitted to our source control system per force which is basically a way of just holding all of the assets all of the code everything that goes into producing the game this obviously is being done by hundreds of developers or in different Studios across the world so when a developer comes in in the morning they need to be able to depend on the build for the day and the first build of the day they're going to expect that all

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   the stuff that they checked in the night before is actually present in that build so that they can continue to iterate on what they've been working on so a build failing is a big deal it actually brings down the entirety of the company on that particular change list so there's a whole bunch of ways that we actually protect the build uh against failures like this we run the assets through something called asset validation and what this is is a pre-commit check you can also call it health checks for uh for the asset so we run these through what is this validation it checks for all the common errors that we would uh possibly make to the data and it's very important because uh when you're developing in the editor it can check what you're doing within that one level but it can't look at a holistic approach so the editor itself will produce various checks uh to make sure that what's exported uh is in good shape but the asset validator is very much a

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   complement to that checking things that they cannot check at that time and then if there's no errors it allows them to commit it if there is errors it tells him exactly what to do about it they go and fix it and then are able to commit again and we should be safe on the build so we had a tool in place uh since since I got here uh to cig actually and it started as a very very small little python script and over time as as with any tool it it got a little more robust but as it got robust it also got very confusing to continue to build out it's showing its age um there's been a lack of structure to it and it's been very difficult to maintain and to keep up to date so what we wanted to do was make sure that Not only was it just the tools team able to write asset validation but also the rest of the teams and what that required was a more robust framework is sort of a plug-in kind of approach

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   um so we moved it from python over to c-sharp and now we have much much broader um adoption for all the teams so that they can write their own levels of asset validation within the tool as well so of course a big win for the tools team here is that we don't need to create all these tests we can allow the experts in the other teams to do it for us other teams among the company as we've scaled up quite a bit comparatively to the older tools can actually write asset validation inside of this framework so this was a really important part of the new tool now it does everything that the old one already did but now our scalability is so much broader so as we continue to develop Star Citizen we're gonna have a more complicated systems and therefore have a more complicated assets and in particular dependencies between them get ever more convoluted so it's it's very important that we can have a scalable system that allows contribution from everybody to help

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   address the potential issues that this could incur so the exact same way as a player might be excited for a feature coming from a feature team within cig we have developers excited for a tool that may be coming from the tools developer within cig it's very much the same Paradigm so when we bring up new asset validation they appreciate having this because they need to know about those errors up front they don't want to wait for the build to fail for some producer to come to their desk and go why has this failed why has your asset not worked out for players especially this is going to matter for you because as you've been waiting for a PTU build or an eptu build these failed builds slow these things down and if we can't review them we can't QA internally that means a release doesn't go out so we're trying to NAB it right at the very beginning so that developer knowing that there is a problem before it hits the build before

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   it fails to the build and before it delays a release for you guys so the tools team is incredibly important as far as the develop helpers players and builds go and hopefully this means more builds will make it to players hands I hope you've enjoyed this brief look into the tools team and one of our products and hope you see you're getting the verse while much of star citizens continuing development is dedicated to creating gameplay systems like cargo and Salvage new locations like Rivers sand caves and crash sites missions like the new prison escape the auras and platform stuff the time trial races and everything else that's heading our way in the upcoming Alpha 318 the folks that are focused on the making and iteration of tools to help the very process of game creation itself are an essential element of the

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   of the Game Dev gumbo that we make here and we're always thrilled when we can give them a few minutes to shine but up next the long-awaited often rumored Polaris concept model internal layout rework now it's not a series of New Concept images like those that were created for the 600i we showcased a few weeks ago but this is a down in the rough 3D Max model look at the reworked concept mesh to explore the new internal layout so potential Pirates can begin plotting out out there boarding actions enjoy the Polaris is obviously a really really old concept it's been around for a very very long time it's one of the my early ships that we did the exterior concept out for the Polaris came out in I think 2017. uh lots of features have been

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    added to the game since then that we're not known about at that time or couldn't be planned for if they weren't known about like a lot of the older ships the interior just didn't fit it we couldn't get the size the scale or the metrics for how we would want it to appear to actually fit inside the frame that we had we've really now locked in how we want the interior layout what the impact of the exterior means and but it's still the same Polaris that everyone originally saw and and fell in love with it just means that now it's kind of fit for purpose whereas with the initial Concept in phase and an initial layout it wasn't quite where we needed it to be the exterior remains pretty much the same Beyond it has got larger to accommodate some of the Interior changes

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    the role is the same the key visuals are the same you may notice again some like panel line changes or turret updates but fundamentally you look at the the Polaris Now versus then it's almost indistinguishable aside from that scale change and the role remains identical to what it was before moving on the inside however we have a completely different story although there wasn't much seen for what the inside was going to look like we had to remove a lot of that and just start again we've fit the entirety of the Interior inside of it while taking into account the change in component sizes where I went from size zero all the way up to size 10 um whereas now we've got much more kind of uh distinct categorization of our components we've now got a capital Shield generator Capital power plant

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    Capital support the actual size of the ship and the scale of it especially For What It's rule is within the actual universe so talking layout we don't have concept images for every single room within the ship but I can give you an estimation of what you can expect from it so you start from the bridge which has been opened up a bit to give you a bit more space and visibility behind that we then have the Escape pod section where there's Escape pods for the crew to be able to quickly Evacuate the ship moving behind that we then have the Captain's Quarters and office as well as the seals office behind that again we then have the armory moving further back we have the crew bunk room and baths and showers across from that we then have the wreck area so it's where the food is it's

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    where the relaxation is for the actual crew of the ship moving back further we then come towards the center of the ship where the actual hanger of the Polaris is and that's had a bit of a size increase so it's very comfortable to fit things like a shaver in it now on the left and right hand side on one side you have the medical facilities on the other you have the Holden cells for any prisoners or wrong doers that you might get hold of and then moving back you then have the entrance of where engineering is which spans about two decks a small section of it is at the rear which houses some of the more standard components then the lower deck of engineering holds the large capsicle components for the Polaris moving back forward to then from the rear we then have the cargo halt moving forward from the cargo area we

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    then have the Torpedo Room which has all of the Torpedoes stored and an operation station if anyone needs to maintain any work down there so the viruses concept completes we're pretty happy with the updates to it internally and hope you are as well and now we are just at the point of scheduling when we can jump it into production it's naturally a large ship slightly larger than it was uh so it's not going to be a quick Endeavor but we think it's going to be a pretty fruitful one by the end of it the lessons that we've learned over the years from the evolution of making ships and their Interiors have all come into play when we've done the Polaris and I can't wait for people to be able to see it so what did we learn this week well we learned a bit about the build system how

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    it can break how it affects development and how the new asset validation tool and the work of the tools teams themselves aim to combat that day in and day out that the Polaris concept model internal layout rework is the last necessary step before that much beloved vehicle can move into production proper sometime in the future and that if you want more information about the process of ship creation and everything that's involved including a detailed breakdown of the newly revamped vehicle Pipeline and a Canada discussion of the where when and why of all things making spaceships be sure you check out this year's iae special edition Star Citizen live up on YouTube for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee we'll see you all here next week