Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Digital Underground

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:09

   [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse sponsored by consolidated Outland the dream redefined for the bottom era yeah I'm Mara Karen Davis and I'm Chris robust and in this episode we'll pick up where we left off last week with our behind-the-scenes look at the citizencon mission playthrough but as usual let's check in on our player community first yeah so registration is now open for the next crooks Cup an annual backer run in game racing event going into its fourth year yeah there are three different racing classes multiple ways to qualify and some pretty cool prizes yeah for all the info head to the crooks Cup website we've included a link in the episode description the finals are scheduled for

2. 00:00:57

   November 17th and 18th yes we also just announced the winners of our dual Halloween contests here we see the winning star citizen themed jack-o'-lantern and here's the winning entry in our fight contest dairy scab really cool very autistic all the above yes so as usual we had a ton of great submissions congratulations to the winners impressive work yeah and some really cool looking stuff three-three continues to see many fixes through each PTU patch and with stability improving QA is focusing on shoring up general gameplay and quality of life improvements meanwhile the development teams are looking past 3/3 and beginning to focus on planning for

3. 00:01:43

   alpha 3.4 and beyond look for more updates here on ATV in the coming weeks last week we dug into the mission design by looking at the development of the first half of the mission playthrough seen its citizen Khan yalli Presley and Gareth Bourne are back joined this week by Eddie here ditch and Ben Anders to shed light on the missions conclusion in the underground facility so if your underground facility came from really as having to figure out another like unique location for Hurston that made sense of the law that these guys are kind of pounding their planet from outer space and such they're not pounding the area around Louisville but anywhere else is like fair game we came up with underground bunker because it allowed us to have like it could be for mining because they also mined their planet to get the materials to create these

4. 00:02:32

   weapons so it gave us like one kind of set we build that we then just dress in in different ways but still make sense with Hurston dysfunction the underground facility was set up and almost exactly the same way as something like the rest stops at interiors have been set up we really wanted it to plug into the layout tool that's been used to create the rest stop so we've seen in previous ATVs you start with the library of rooms and then those rooms get configured in different ways so you can get a variety of layouts from the same set of rooms once I had that layout it was all about talking to the AI combat code guys and being like what are the actions the AI can take of course I can lay out this path it doesn't matter if I put like a massive wall in and expect the AI to bust

5. 00:03:20

   through it if they can't do that so I really had to take into consideration the skills and also the weapons there I had because of course you have different ranges and all of this stuff and the idea for that was that we'd have an end room and that really dictated the layout and all of the cover work and how the player and the AI navigate in that space as we've seen in the in the PDU we have combat era in Korea right now so Korea and the underground facilities were first test cases before that we only had test levels created by us which were just like white box levels our greatest challenge here was ensure that the AI played to a realistic standard this is our tier zero grunt behavior so this is your soldier that you would meet in any army so that means that the Patrol

6. 00:04:11

   alerts the other AI which are downstairs to basically call for reinforcements and space out and spread the fight across the underground facility so you won't get overwhelmed and it's still fun because that was the key thing for that location was it it was gonna be something you could actually go and do so it was imperative that it was a great play space we started out with a white box level and me and level designer start placing covers in there so we had lots of trial and error on how you would get into cover how you get out of cover and also ensure that they all react to the events accordingly and we just played the game over and over again to ensure when you approach this underground facility you actually had

7. 00:04:58

   proper pockets of resistance where you could fight the AI this iterators process like kept happening over a couple of weeks and then we involved our art team to actually make sure that the gray boxes we placed represent something in the game actually those cubes have to largely remain in exactly the same place all the way through to final so it becomes a challenge from an art point of view to integrate that kind of level of exact metrics nicely into the environment you end up doing some architectural tweaks you build sort of nice sets of props that kind of look organic and natural and hopefully not too obviously like cover so yeah that was that was one of the bigger challenges we had and I guess the third one is just generally the theming of the space the thing to consider with using

8. 00:05:47

   the layout system is that all of the rooms can connect from different places and of course if the entrance is here and you come out there that always needs to be somewhere you can go as a player you come through you can see the AI you know what they're doing and there's somewhere for you to move and you can clearly plan a path and how to beat them but then of course the entrance could be up here as well so what we really needed to do was maintain that story in that route throughout the whole structure no matter where you came in and in order to do that we needed it to be readable and you need to know where you were going so that's why we ended up with these big yellow stripes along the ground that led you down to this final room the one you saw in the demo is actually just one that we built in a particular way and it now leaves Vai Department to kind of figure out how it is but we can these things together in a way that does

9. 00:06:36

   allow AI for to move from room to room no matter where those rooms get stuck together and the challenge became to how to put a twist on existing assets to make them feel a bit more newer a bit more technical a little bit more as if this is an operational facility whereas Levski is a little more abundant a little more ramshackle a little more rusty so we have a lot of stuff we do I mean there's a lot of it comes down to lighting but just color palettes and and the newness of things that material read of things helps a lot with that kind of kind of stuff I think there's a lot of scope to go forwards in the future with building out their a set of library and stuff so we can do a lot more sort of complex underground spaces when we come to do bigger facilities and stuff I'd love to start seeing more more rooms

10. 00:07:24

    added more lay outside of the ER and and with the tech that we have we should be able to do that quite easily so will we see that mission in the PU oh it definitely I said that in the in the opening keynote we did at citizencon and I think the other idea is that we're gonna have multiple underground facility missions and the layout of the places are not necessarily going to be always the same them they'll be sort of put together in different ways it's part of the procedural generation it's sort of a first stage of what we'll do for underground facilities and caves which are also on our roadmap and no longer term we're gonna definitely be expanding that so it's just the beginning there's still quite a lot to work to be done on

11. 00:08:13

    the AI itself we just have AI right now in Korea we want to get it into derelict that you could get in space you get on the ground we'd probably want to have AI in outposts of around the near outposts on planets or moons and also in facilities like this so I think it's so it's gonna add a lot I mean it's gonna be fun to be able to engage you know AI in the game with your friends you don't always want to have people forced into PvP you want it there for people to have the depth to do and it can be fun but also you want to have also confront PvE encounters and so that's one of our big priorities you'll sort of start to see you know outside of the technical stuff we talked about server meshing and assistance right yeah yeah the AI is our real big thing we need to get it dialed

12. 00:09:02

    in and polished really well for squadron and we need it for the PSO so that's a that's a large focus in house food cool awesome well I think you answered literally every question I was gonna ask so I think that just about does it for us you can catch another new episode of reverse reverse live tomorrow on Twitch yeah I remember we're still releasing the citizen comm panels to our YouTube channel so go check out the ones that you've missed a huge thank you to our subscribers for sponsoring the shows and another huge thank you to our backers for doing what you do thank you very much yes until next time we'll see you thanks for watching for the latest and

13. 00:09:50

    greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at