Around the Verse: Episode 1.41 (2015.04.23)

23 April 201500:37:32867 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:02
[Music] hey everybody Welcome to episode 41 of around the verse I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm Ben Lesnik we hope you're enjoying the flyfree racing ships they'll be online through tomorrow yep and uh please get online in the forums to let us know which ships you'd like to uh fly free next the team is hard at work on the next patch Star Citizen Alpha 1.1.2 1.1.2 has a tutorial mode and sets the stage for Star Marine there's certainly a lot of backend work going into this uh you know getting the servers ready for uh start Marine in fact you a lot of you
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guys helped out with a stress test last week we really appreciate that and uh we're going to have another stress test in the future we'll announce it right here uh the tutorial mode though is also great it's going to teach uh new backers how to play Arena commander and uh hey we didn't have to go through that whole uh flight school thing at least I can fly um what was I GNA say it's your bir was your birthday yesterday it was thank you well I guess since now it's Thursday so was a week ago was your birthday a week ago yeah and you went to Star Wars celebration yes I I went and checked out the Star Wars Community it's a really good group of people we can learn some things from them uh lot had a great time cool now let's go to the Spectrum for news from around the verse [Applause]
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hi everyone I'm Darion vorick I'm Eric Karen Davis and we are some of the producers at the Santa Monica office of clad Imperium games here with our weekly update uh the first one well you notice there's a new person sitting next to me he is our new senior producer uh that we just hired today so he's going be working on some new processes such as uh I'll working on shotgun the new the shotgun software integration in the studio and helping us become lean and mean and efficient so uh we're looking forward to seeing what he's doing with us also or for those who don't know shotgun is is one of our Resource Management tools for all of our ship assets and things like that so as far as ships are concerned we're also uh plowing ahead with our whole series of ships and kind of correspond responding with that we've got our cargo system uh that one of our designers Kix is working
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on so hopefully we'll be able to Showcase that pretty soon um other than that I think that's pretty much all we got for this week just kind of want to introduce you guys to the new face and again I'm Darion I'm Eric so thanks guys hi I'm uh David langers senior producer at IL phonic sh Bard uh president of V fonic so this week uh well we had talked about last week's Sall and I know you guys are probably getting sort of sick of hearing about that we've been talking about it a lot lately uh just wanted to let you know that one of the reasons we've been focusing on that so much lately is it's sort of The Proving Ground for all the new things we're doing with Zer G movement um so that's
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that's why there's been so much work on it lately uh is it's sort of a a very big part of the game in getting Zerg loomo to feel just right um and so that's why you've been hearing so much about it as of late yeah one of the other things we're working on now too is uh we're kind of working on a lot of the weapon balancing the breeding a lot of the mechanics kind of coming together on the firing um and yeah we're getting to an almost pretty pretty good State uh to where everyone's really happy with it but the biggest thing we're doing now is refactoring the cryon hint system so there's a hint system that kind of helped recoil go to a certain way and we kind of you know it's a little bit of I guess a more dated system uh for doing recoil so we're kind of rewriting it a little bit more uh like a traditional kind of or well you know more of a modern recoil
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type system so uh so it's actually really cool I mean there'll probably be a little bit more info on it we're still kind of finding out what works best but we have a lot of like great examples uh both real world and and kind of also just you know about talking about it with the designers and everything so our main programmer on that that has has a lot of good information to go off of so yeah um yeah I guess the last thing we kind of wanted to bring up was uh I know you guys some of you guys have already heard about this uh from the monthly reports uh but we will be switching from fod to Wi for our audio system um and so that's uh a lot of that's on the UK audio team the guys over at Foundry 42 uh but as far as the FPS is concerned it's probably going to allow us to get a lot more uh a much better sounding uh soundscape so that you'll be able to
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hear things reverberate and Echo around the environment properly um and depending on where hallways are and where walls are and everything so uh we're looking forward to that as well but uh yep that's about it for this week uh thanks so much uh thanks for backing us again see you guys next week all right hey guys uh Jake Ross here associate producer the persistent universe and here with me this week I have Brian Brewer lead animator persistent universe and uh we got a little update for you on what the animation team has been doing lately Brian what you talk about that uh we are currently reworking our male skeleton to be a little bit better with motion capture especially all the data we're
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getting back from Imaginarium um that's kind of like the big push right now uh we're almost finished and we're getting ready to retarget all two ,000 plus 2,500 whatever animations that we have right we have a lot of animations in game uh we're also been working on grabby hands is what we've been calling it it's the ability to just go anywhere pick something up go someplace else set it down and then whenever you set it on you can pick that up and move it someplace else and set that down you you could literally open up a crate go around picking up stuff put it in the crate close the crate pick the crate up put it on your SHO ship fly the ship to some other star system unload the crate and then other people go oh look stuff in a crate let me grab
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it so uh that's that's pretty cool it's come along pretty it's great about grabby hands too is you'll be able to to decorate your hanger yeah right be like hey I want this trophy over here I want this this thing over there be able to move things around it be it'll be pretty cool when it's done yeah sounds great thanks guys um well I guess we'll see you guys again next week see you by hi I'm Lee banard I'm the audio director here at foundry42 on Star Citizen uh I'm not Lee banyard I'm Stephan Rutherford and I am uh one of the sound designers on the project I think you guys have probably seen me I was on episode 11 I think of around the verse cool well we're talking uh about
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the fol session we did recently for the FPS um basically we went down to a place called Pinewood Studios U which is kind of a world famous sort of post- production uh sort of facility for producing among other things um you know movies but also does a lot of the kind of services that we you know we can use in games as well including Foley down I think it was theater 1 with a guy called Glenn Glen gaffard heads up their digital audio um side so what we were doing down there is essentially coming up with uh sounds to picture or at least the foli arst was on our behalf um for uh FPS for various um armor types Etc which I'll let Stephan talk about a bit more that's his that's his thing yeah so we kind of went down there and the studio itself is really impressive
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they've got a huge sort of catalogue of all these different props that you can use and they're not the sort of props that you use on a um theater stage uh they don't look like they'd necessarily be useful um they're but they are specifically for their sort of sound qualities uh and so you'll pick these things up and you don't really know it just looks like a piece of metal junk or something and actually shake it a bit and you go oh wow this actually sounds really unique and cool and so what we did is we collected all these up and we did a few different characters one of which was this uh heavy marine and he has obviously plate metal on him like that and um so we got these uh metal lugs which are used on scaffolding quite weighty things we used that and shaking those gave about the right sort of Weights of his metal armor and then we used sort of a to give him the body we used some um I think it was some armor
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wasn't it from hockey arm armor like hockey type deer yeah yeah it was it was nice thick hockey armor so yeah that worked out really well yeah um I guess the other area that I've been working in on FBS has been the the guns um and those are obviously going really important for a firstperson shooter um obviously uh so um we've been working on setting up those in w our new audio engine um coming up with good implementation for those uh a sort particularly interesting area for me and hopefully for you guys as well is um the detail that we're hoping to put into the different environments um so obviously guns they so loud that they actually sound quite different uh depending on where they're fired um you know if
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wherever you are there's always a reever reverberance but I think guns in particular sound quite different because of how loud they are so we're actually going to be capturing the sounds of guns in lots of different environments um I'm a big fan of games like Battlefield and things like that and it's something they've they've done and it's become common place for them and uh so yes we're hoping to work with sound recorders to capture all that stuff okay I think that's probably got we got time for so um okay so I guess yeah we'll see you about the galaxy in space civilian yeah space civilian screen I'm on your sh shf you're falling away the whole time I'm shooting Sarah no I'm no it looks like I'm shooting sarus hold on hold on hold on
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hold on one second don't do anything like just just just float for a moment thanks for all the hard work guys uh you are doing amazing things now let's go over to Alexis who has a flare update from Behavior hey everyone I'm Alexis welcome back to subscribers Corner this week I'm going to be talking to Christine and Dave who are part of the team over at Behavior they work on your subscriber flare as well as many other things so we're going to ask them some questions today hey guys hello you want to introduce yourselves and tell everybody who you are sure I'm H Christine Marsh I'm the lead user interface designer here at Behavior work here on Star seon and I'm Dave Richard I'm the lead game designer here on working on star seon of
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course all right so I've got some questions from some folks on the forums uh helig would like to know there are some really interesting Hangar flare pieces do you decide what gets created and if so where does your inspiration come from all right so uh the the um the flares some of them are done entirely ER at Behavior others come from teamwork with uh you guys at cig and also we we get uh some help from the community people on my Twitter comes and say suggestion about fles uh people in The Forum as well and uh uh to answer the second part of the question the inspiration it it comes from all over the place of course um we have angers too so we think about what type of objects we' like to see in there ourselves and again also anything that we find in uh connects media like movies
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uh books or anything else that's really sci-fi and fits into that universe and that would make sense that you own in in that game all right Vox R would like to know what methods do you use to create the game flare in case of ships is it just scaling down the existing models or are there modifications to make sure that they fit so the um uh hanger flare development process is pretty much like the design figures out what we're going to make um once that's approved then it's sent to concept department and then they do a whole bunch of different sketches of how um they think that it would look like and then that's sent to the art team and uh where they develop the models um when it comes to the uh miniature ships um we uh the art team takes a look at the ships that um how
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they're built and then they check to see like how they can reduce the like you know do an optimization pass like reduce the amount of polyes check the textures you know kind of really reduce it um to a more uh miniature size and then uh oftentimes removing the interiors and uh then they are placed um inside the um the uh the cases um of course they're making sure that it's still like that the that the design hasn't strayed too far from the original Shi design and then there's a lighting pass and there's another optimization pass and then it's uh integrated and tested and then released and if I can add to that really quickly um there's also something really interesting about flares because sometime they um they are really ahead of the curve in in term of
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what have been done in the universe so for example we're currently doing uh the Shan plant so we haven't seen a lot about Shian in the game Universe right now so nothing is is quite built for this uh so we need to be sure that any concept we do about this guy and any other uh thing that doesn't exist in the universe right now will fit for what's going to be built in the future on Planet Side cool and that gon plant is very cool we've seen some some previews of it um all right Steve Hunter would like to know of all of the flare you've worked on what was the most fun for you or the satisfying all right um I have actually a couple that I like to mention uh there's the there's the locker which was really really fun and uh a big payoff I mean for us it's fun to see that uh the
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community is trying to find all the secrets around it there's still a lot that haven't been found or explained so this is this is really fun uh the um the ship models that TTS who were really fun to create the fiction around it the company and and all the all the the rapper is made and the box design and everything else has been really fun to do uh and the last one is the Laker cabinet uh we you guys haven't seen it yet but you will once you get the mob glass in game and you are able to scan every bottle but we have um we have uh the lore built around each of this these Spirit uh which is really interesting and it was also quite an achievement to build this uh this flare there's a lot of mechanic that didn't exist before like getting drunk uh so obviously that was was a lot of fun to build
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yeah yeah like a cabinet is pretty cool um I think my favorite one was the the fish tank um I loved the space crab and uh it's just it's really cute and I I like you know how I saw the whole process of how it was developed and like you know what would an alien space crab look like you know and yeah so that sold it for me awesome all right uh garyan would like to know what are the limits for the ERS I understand it could be fairly easy to make them but do you have specific limits um definitely uh we have to keep in mind that um the more flares we add to the hangers the more of an impact that will have on um performance um so we have you know some tricks up our sleeves on how to deal with that and
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we also have a a very uh talented art team who have a lot of experience and are pretty good at keeping things at the at the minimum that we need but at the Quality that we need also all right uh we have one more question from there coming for you they would like to know uh this is kind of a follow-up to what you were just saying in the future when people have hundreds possibly thousands of flare items how will it be handled in regards to Performance if there is a limit will users be able to customize which items do and do not show in game that's a really interesting question uh there's something we've been talking about for a while now which is called the room system and we're still working on it and it will come in the near future uh so when this comes in you will be able to go in your anger and pick up the flares and move them around place
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them in in other rooms add rooms to your anger and and customize everything like you want um so there's no real limit here uh of course we'll be careful that everything fits so that the game uh works perfectly for everyone uh but still the fact that you'll be able to place them as you want and place the one you want there and put the the others that you don't want in your uh in your cargo it will make a a different dynamic in your Wranger that's for sure and more personalized definitely yeah and uh do you guys want to give us a little preview of what's coming for next month's uh subscriber flare yeah okay so uh this one's really cool uh it's uh it's a new collection that we're starting it's called The pugy Collection uh so you will have a a piece of Ellis so a planet that has been destroyed by
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its by its Moon um so this this new collection called P py like I said is uh all sort of space Oddities that you'll be able to collect and put in your anger cool sounds very cool so thank you to Dave and Christine we're hoping to do more of these in the future uh we'll see you next time on subscribers Corner woohoo can't wait to get my space plant it's going to be good uh you fin going to be good delivering on those promises so space plant yes I actually want more than one space plant is that possible I can probably arrange that for you a whole raw with space plants Let's uh kick this over to Matthew Sherman and Mark abent who are going to be talking about everybody's favorite uh point of contention game balance hi everyone I'm Matt Sherman
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technical designer here at cig Los Angeles hi everyone Mark aank gameplay programmer cig laa and we're here today to talk to you about a upcoming system we announced in the March update uh our plans for a physically based damage system one of the issues with balance right now is all of our weapons all of our components are hand tuned values and we need to to make sure the damage system is as you know physics driven and and real as the rest of our ships and so to to do that we're shifting over to a physically based damage system and so Mark what's that going to mean for what is each shot becoming now so as Matt was saying like before all of our damage was like Hey we're going to make this this
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and this no reason it just felt right so now we're switching over to you know bullets being kinetic energy so depending upon how fast they're going is depending upon how much damage they do and you know also depends on how much mass so if you have a 9 millimeter and you're shooting a hornet The Hornet is what's that nothing but if you shoot another Hornet at a hornet I think it's going to recognize hey something hit me and you know depending on how fast shoot that Hornet at the other Hornet will determine if it just bumps it or now it's in the million pieces we're also doing something with the energy weapons where it's not based solely on the velocity but it's based on the energy density of this projectile so what that means is um unlike kinetic energy uh
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these projectiles when they hit they won't necessarily lose their damage when they slow down but um you get some interesting properties with those as well because you you'll treat them differently say with a shield um the kinetic will pass through maybe slow down which would we always been promising so now we're going to do it and but an energy will hit the shield and get absorbed more so it's like different characteristics gameplay wise that's what it's going to change I would say the biggest change is from Matt here when he had to go through the Excel sheet saying why does this do this yeah yeah so so that's probably the nicest thing we're going to be able to clean up with this we're we're going from a few abstract values on some things to a
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really clean unified system where everything really plays together so now uh a ballistic weapon you're you're really going to be looking at what's the the mass of the shot you're firing and how fast is the gun you know you're using able to fire it and that's going to be the big thing you're looking at to find out the force you're creating to shoot someone's ship and then for an energy weapon it's going to be the the power uh consumed per shot and then the heat that the shot generates to create that force and so you'll you'll easily be able to know what's causing your weapons to behave differently but now on a much nicer just you know physics driven system so thanks for checking out this look into the upcoming physically
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based damage system hope you guys are excited for it again I'm Matt sh Angeles Mark aent gameplay programmer hope you guys enjoy this little talk and hope to have that post up soon cheers thanks guys uh working towards a proper balance in Star seison is one of the most important things we do and it is a constant Evolution uh you know we see all these threads in the forums uh controller versus joystick versus Mouse versus keyboard or hornet versus aara um and we are working on all those things um never never never accept the current patch it's it's going to be different every time and now everybody's favorite bug Smashers well we haven't seen enough of this Mark aent guy hey everyone welcome back to bug Smashers where pop culture
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meets High Society AKA Jar Jar Binks Misa so Bugsy we home oh gosh bashes hey everyone we're here in my fancy Dancy test level um before I hop right in I am going to go to the code on this one straight away um so this bug had a deal with the turrets in I think it was 11a where they would when you spawn in they would randomly be rotated towards an asteroid or another player or the center of the map and you could never get them to focus onto your targets it
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would just lock on there and if you die and respond it would still occur um what was happening is in the our little visor um this determined where all of our weapons should look uh somehow um it was getting this remote entity and this remote entity gets passed in here from this little remote ID now unfort unfortunately this remote ID if we search for all the instances real quick only has one spot for the Declaration which is hey this is a variable of this type um a function to set and the function to get the entity now there is nowhere on here even if I search for the function call that
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says hey this is what this variable is going to be um so there is something here for a view but that's only if you're in a uh special case scenario other than that if you're in just like a normal Hornet it won't even happen but so nothing in here says hey this value should be this when you first create it as such if I put a break point on here and go into the game hop into the turret we will get a crazy value three 13 blah blah blah blah blah and this is supposed to be an entity ID which is way over the the maximum limit um so what's happening well if you don't initialize a variable in C++ um in classes you could get any value that was
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there in memory it could be 1 it could be 10 it could be negative million it could be 3 1 3 1 9 six blah so if this happens to be an actual legit entity see like I have this number on the top here which is 227 which is the Gladiator I have over here as you can see I can move my turret fine and dandy but if I set this remote entity to 227 and continue now my turret as you can see aimed directly at the Target on the the Gladiator even if I tell it hey I'm going to shoot elsewhere it's still moving it towards
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the Gladiator and if I stop the game this is simulating respawning go back into the game you notice my turret is still aiming at them that's problem number two um where we never actually reset this value so what we're going to do is in the Constructor when we actually create the the actor or the flare we're going to set this variable to be invalid and then when the player responds go to the fun revive we will also reset the variable here so now when you die respond
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or um just create the player everything will be back to normal and let's give that a try all right so we're back into our fun little level I will pop a breakpoint on this guy and we'll hop right in and what do you know our remote ID is zero as it should it's not some random bits of memory so as you can see in today's bug Smashers uninitialized variables are very very bad uh you can get random values and it could cause all sorts of chaos um other than today's bug there was actually one today with items not
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being able to take damage because of uninitialized variables so we have to be very careful but even still it's easy to um make one little slip up and have an uninitialized variable cause chaos those are also fun things to track down but hopefully with our mandatory code reviews now we should prevent these sort of things happening in the future hope you enjoyed till next time Jinks I'm dead I ship [Laughter]
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uhoh thanks Mark uh keep him flat time to talk animation with Steve Bender and Lance Powell um Lance pal supervisor and art director here at cig this is Steve Bender animation director Cloud Imperium and we're just going to have a quick little conversation about you that's what they tell me yes yes what do you do exactly you know every day I come into work and I wonder that exact question so I direct animation which means that it's a whole bunch of stuff so for instance uh motion capture I'll direct motion capture I was just in England for about uh 3 weeks I think it was and we shot the motion capture for stocked rifle for uh heavy armor characters using The
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Firestorm weapon for the vanel for um persistent Universe actions things within uh Tera in the AR Court bar we shot some really cool stuff with aircraft carriers like the shooters on the aircraft carriers that fire off Jets once I I'm done with that I come back in I do the selects those go out to the mocap Studio when they come back to us I then work with the team in implementing those animations so things like for instance um one of the actions that we're working on for FPS is we're doing Jukes so that we get solid weight shifts between how how characters move one direction to the other because in your typical firstperson shooter that weight
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shift is almost instantaneous uh we wanted to to sort of slow things down and get more of a realistic feel to the combat so we're getting those weight shifts with those Jukes and those those motion changes so this is part of what you're doing to up the Annie on the animation side absolutely uh for both FPS and pu absolutely U what what other things do you have coming down the pike well we're working on uh Arena Commander uh ship enters and exits and we what we did is we took all of the ships in the game and built them on set um it was It was kind of hard to get the thrusters working but uh eventually you know it all kind of uh are they flyable or not flyable well we tried but you know there's one
00:31:11
crash too many we actually had a um three different types of enters so we have a normal enter like you're just getting into your spaceship we have a combat enter which is as if you're scrambling units and we have emergency enters and exits so for instance you would use this as if you standing there and all of a sudden you turn around and there's a horde of vanuel chasing you it it's time to get in the plane you didn't know about them beforehand no okay uh or if you're in the plane and the thing's on fire and it's about to explode it's time to get out you didn't know about that before no we didn't know okay so how um uh can you talk about the the performance that you've been uh that you've captured in the past and how is it different than than the stuff that
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you're doing for c yeah so the things that we've captured in the past have been primarily concerned with uh in previous games more police slm military sort of sort of actions and they're all human so for the stuff that we're doing for cig um we still do have the military uh angle to this and we hired uh some military gentlemen to come in and and perform the motion capture for us but also mopping aliens so that uh there's a particular look that uh Chris was looking for and that we worked together in in preising this on set with a with an actor and uh from there we came to something that uh was was thought to be
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really solid for the vanuel and then we went and did the motion sets for it spaceships all the stuff in spaceships is new for me um I've done some some minor flight control animations and stuff like that before but just the the sheer size of some of these ships and the things that you can do in them is completely a new A New Concept and then as well in the persistent universe so in previous projects one of the things that I always tried to get in is this aspect that these aren't AI they're enemy character characters they they have lives they have names right his before he showed up with his gun his name might have been Bob and he had just
00:33:37
woken up maybe had an argument with his wife the day before or something he put on a uniform he comes out says freeze and you shoot him right which is kind of uncool right it's really uncool like it's like the the guys who worked on the Death Star when you blow that that damn thing up and you're like yeah exactly tropers those contractors on there yeah so I'm not Steve Bender animation director of cig and I'm not sure if I am either but uh we'll see you next time around the verse thank you animators that that Steve vendor is intense very games Con tickets are available now there's only a handful left so get one
00:34:24
while you can it's going to be a really great event we've got great people going there uh lots of cool stuff to show uh we're all very excited yes we are that's actually one of my favorite events that we did it it's my favorite I've been to uh so far I think that our German backers are incredible people uh pretty much universally pretty much everybody goes though oh yeah there was somebody cycling from Amsterdam there's a couple of people from South Africa I mean they come from everywhere stories you get from people are great and hats are here yes and I am team Snapback and I am and team velcro and both are going to be available starting tomorrow in the RSI pledge store they will be so hats yes people have been asking for these for a while so we had to sample them and test them and they're quite decent a lengthy uh testing process for hats the team is
00:35:15
hard at work on 1.1.2 which we intend to release with the PTU first no date yet so keep checking the Comm link for updates and the big news is that the hall series is uh hitting the pledge store tomorrow it's going to be concept sale with LTI and we're doing this one a little bit differently we are having uh not one but five ships the entire series from the uh small kind of starter level Hall a to the uh massive super cargo transport Hall e um pricing is available at the site right now and we're going to release all the details tomorrow but I will tell you that uh forget everything you've heard about space transports these are something different there is also going to be a cargo piece from the design team because we know you have questions you guys are going to see the uh the whole series and you're going to
00:36:03
be say you know what the heck is that and how does it work and we uh we intend to tell you sneak peek what is it Ben well check it out what's that spaceship and if you'd like to learn more about that sneak peek please tune in to reverse the verse at 1 p.m. Pacific on Twitch thanks for watching and to all subscribers for making this possible we will see you next week on around the what's that
00:37:13
spaceship one more time what's that spaceship one more what spaceship is that oh

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