Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Eclipsing the Competition

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hello and welcome to round the verse our weekly look at star citizens development I'm Sean Tracy and I'm Josh Herman in this episode we have a shipshape focus on Aegis eclipse the newly Declassified stealth bomber unveiled by the uee last week but before that let's go to Frankfurt for a studio update hello everyone my name is Brian Chambers and I'm the development director of Frankfurt office of Foundry 42 this past month the team welcomed a few new members bringing us up to a total of now 74 employees we routinely have visitors to the office and this month was no exception with people here from both our us and UK offices most of the senior production staff uh from across all the offices came together in one place for their annual Summit had some intensive

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   meetings and discuss both ongoing and upcoming plans and we found that a few days face to face without distraction it can actually go a long way so let's kick off this month with checking in with the AI team the AI team has worked on numerous items uh over the past few weeks and I'll just mention a few and show you a few things uh they started a Sprint focused on human combat with the end goal of improving all the combat work done in the previous months into something that represents our final quality they're initially focusing on all the shooting functionalities making sure the basic controls for accuracy and friendly fire implemented correctly they're also diving into uh the improving the behaviors related to the

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   first initial reactions of something non-friendly seen or heard from a wide range of distances they also finished converting the ship AI to a newer updated version meaning that weapons Shields and counter measures now work with the new SC item 2.0 system for now it also supports the old ships to avoid any compatibility issues that may creep up this is part of an ongoing effort to move ships away from kythera AI Control and brings us one step closer to fully switching to subsumption based AI for all the shifts both ship and vehicle seats can be controlled by either players NPCs or an AI module the past month the AI team did some work on the AI modules uh the AI

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   module represents an item that can be attached to a seat any seat of a spaceship or tourret and execute a behavior logic defined with a subsumption editor you might think of it as a piece of custom software that can be instructed to take control of the same items that are available to player sitting in the same seat it might work for example as an autopilot or autonomously take control of a turret and fired an enemy Target this features crucial and multi- Cru ships where the pilot might assign specific activities to the AI modules instead of another player NPC the system design guys have been pushing forward with the air traffic control system adding conversations with the traffic controller and a smart system for allocating landing pads for

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   Pilots wanting to land or take off they also updated all doors to version 2.0 which now makes them modular and a lot easier to implement each door having switchable loadouts ability to connect two rooms so air can travel between them and generally a lot more functionality needed for new systems that are already in the works such as breaching and and hacking they also started reworking locks so they can work better with the room and Atmospheric systems they did some rough prototyping work on Dynamic Advertising which will contextually fill in the in-game panels and Screen throughout stations with content that's reflecting the interests of the player that enters its proximity

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   the same system could be used for showing large scale broadcasts and warnings throughout the Universe based on what's happening in the game at that specific moment moment either globally or locally our lead lighting artist Chris has been continuing work on the surface outposts particularly on the habitation sets as well as keeping in sync with the UK environment art team with all their

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   updates to assets and dressing one issue lighting has been trying to solve for 3.0 is how to improve the amount of visibility On the Dark Side of moons previously without any interest objects in the sky relying solely on Cube Maps would mean that the planet's surface would be visibly too dark and the player really wouldn't be able to see any detail in the environment around them so Chris worked with the engineers to add another layer of atmospheric glow in a Radiance the glow allows us to brighten the atmosphere given a nice gradient that shows the shape of the Horizon and gives some depth in front of the player and the radiance uh gives us a base level of brightness on the actual surface geometry so the player can faintly see themselves as well as the

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   surface around them finally he's also Al been providing support for s42 environment lighting and helping set visual benchmarks for each of the levels the engine team recently implemented the initial version of our new IO scheduler this system will improve streaming performance as textures meshes sounds Etc are constantly being streamed in and evicted based on what's being used to stay within a certain memory budget eventually it'll also allow the job manager to better utilize CP U cores in cases where streaming jobs are waiting for Io moreover it lays the groundwork for a version of the scheduler specifically D designed for SSD drives to exploit their Superior random dis access properties that will allow for

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   multiple concurrent data streams with high throughput all in all this ensures all data is available in time for complex scene surrender without having to wait for lods and all the related artifacts uh meanwhile the incremental Patcher moved into an internal phase of QA testing as previously discussed the system is designed to deliver builds incrementally to devs and Gamers alike so every time you update the game you'll only need to download what has actually changed or been added since the last time and this update process will therefore be a lot lot faster we also revived our internal memory analysis tool for Linux uh called memory play this was to help us find out and fix memory leaks on server instances much

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    faster memory leaks are one of the contributing factors for Server stability and we want fixed as quick as possible to make sure our servers can run for a long long time without any issues on the rendering side several improvements have been made to the atmosphere and night skies as I mentioned in the lighting update the night side of the planets and moons now exhibit more details due to in scattered Moonlight and a visible Sky gradient in the distance when close to the terrain surface we're also looking into additional improvements for stronger groundbased Haze to further increase visual cues for scene readability and to make our lighting artist happy they also continued working on the object container streaming Soul Ed as well as plan Ed and rewrite of the living entity

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    code AS previously mentioned is on track the environment our team continue to work on the Leb ski exterior in combination with the level designers both Art and Design regularly work closely together to verify that the art that's being created is made in a way that doesn't break any portion of the design the last layout changes for left ski are coming in and the set dressing pass is close to being complete [Music] the area around leki is also being

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    populated with slightly larger mining structures than what we previously had since the lefki exterior is grown a lot over the past few weeks it's also going through an optimization pass with the artists looking into reducing memory consumption wherever applicable and making each individual asset as efficient as possible the terrain of Delmar is getting polished up and both the assets and rocks are all being finalized we're also setting up the specific asset scattering presets for the different ecosystem systems to populate the asteroids with defined objects the planet Tech has gotten a couple of new features recently the overall amount of materials that can be

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    used on the Trin has increased significantly therefore new materials are being created for the moons to make the surfaces even more diverse from one another along with that the moons also got a performance boost by optimizing which assets are being drawn in the surface of the procedure entities at any given time the tech art team worked on multiple

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    mannequin tasks including animations for both usables and the cinematics team mannequin is a tool within lumber yard that allows us to construct complex interactive character animations fairly easy the they also refined some of the earlier shown pipeline tools by adding new features and fixing bugs to make them easier to use and more dependable they did a handful of additional things such as prototyping Vandal weapon some physical simulation R&D for weapons and Bug fixes to name a few the VFX team in Frankfurt has been continuing to work on particles for the planet effects one of the new features we recently implemented are animated decals this now allows us to project certain animated textures on objects so it'll

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    follow the Contours of those objects instead of having them on a flat plane that is roughly aligned to the surface this helps to integrate a certain effects into the world a lot more efficiently and with much better results than what we could do previously the VFX team in Frankfurt also grew by one member this month he'll primarily be focused on the large amount of cinematics work that needs to be done for squadron 42 including soft and rigid body simulations as well as destruction particle effects and the scene setups to go along with those the QA team this month grew by one member John Lang he got up to speed fast and soon became a primary point of contact for any Game Dev client issues in Frankfurt ensuring that he knows the current state of Game

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    Dev at any given time he's also been heavily involved in various system testing this month such such as a new stamina system currently being worked on in both Frankfurt and UK offices together with Glenn Neil they were able to begin the initial testing pass in an effort to gather data for our game programmers to use for bug fixes and overall improvements to the system QA teams also been working on testing the Patcher itself the editor server connections and the Star Citizen client using the new pack system in order to catch crashes and differences between builds pulled with the old Patcher versus the new Patcher it's an ongoing test that they perform daily to stay on top of any potential issues that arise from build to build additionally

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    they also spent time testing various multiplayer issues for the Stanton system which included Moon Collision testing they work extremely close with the engineers and test very specific things in a very specific way to get the data that the engineers are after the engineers then take those findings to work out fixes for issues and to also improve things such as stability and potential memory issue this month the FPS weapons team was primarily focused on R&D efforts for weapon skins they spent time prototyping camouflage patterns decals and material variations this will set us up for future weapon customization and allow us to quickly and easily create special

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    one-off variants when we want the ship weapons artists are currently working on the preacher armant Distortion scatter gun S1 to S3 and started work on the apocalypse arms ballistic scatter gun S1 to S3 this past month the cinematics team focused on previous Pipeline with the goal of getting most of the cinematics into the game regardless of their current state either polished or rough this will help designers and director alike get a better idea of the overall flow and pacing for the full playthrough of Squadron 42 within the next few weeks they'll be working closely with facial and audio team to get a full representation of performances working in engine they also spent some time getting a small motion capture system

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    set up in one of our common areas with help from Kyle Moody from the UK for those that don't know motion capture or map allows us to capture an actor's MO itions then map them to a digital character it's a way for us to quickly generate a Bas animation for the animators to then modify if they need we set up 11 optit Track cameras in total which gave us a small capture volume of roughly 3 m squared the cinematics team will primary primarily use it to capture background characters for individual scenes as well as transition animations to help link animations that are not quite aligning can also be used to capture quick animations that we can use for outstanding R&D tasks from our animation engineers and save the animator some time the system won't be

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    set up permanently but once we have a small list of animations that we want the team can set it up in about an hour and quickly get what we need the game programming team in Frankfurt has grown over the past few months team is currently at three people with one lead and two regulars this month they did a pass on improving the functionality of doors then started working on air locks both the doors and air locks need to be set up as simplified as much as possible and integrated with the latest changes of item 2.0 system they also added a few small features to the weapons such as the ability to have different muzzle flash effects or different vent effects based on the current fire mode as well as fixed numerous bugs they also started

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    planning the work needed for the improved weapons system this new system is based on the item 2.0 system and will allow the designers to create a wider variety of weapons more easily it'll also address technical issues such as client side prediction and server Authority it's still in the research phase and it is a long-term effort however we're confident that we're on the right track and implementation can begin within the next few weeks so that wraps it up for Frankfurt this month appreciate all the support you enable us to do what we love to do and I will be back next month with another update see in the verse a lot of interesting stuff in that update imagine being stuck on the dark

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    side of a moon when they didn't add that atmospheric glow uh it might be pretty pretty realistic but not very good for visibility yeah and that's a good example of how game design works we figure out a way for one sun to light an entire system only to create this new problem so considering how our the environment and art teams work to make this game look beautiful it' be a shame if you couldn't see any of the textures in that yeah exactly uh but let's talk about something that's supposed to be hard to see the agis eclipse mhm this new stealth bomber has several great features including different Wing positions for atmospheric and space flight here's a ship shape for more details on this exciting new ship my name is Paul Jones uh I'm one of the art directors here at Foundry 42 I'm Jeff from Tech design technical designer

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    that made the eclipse or made the spec for the eclipse AES is meant to be one of the older companies you know sort of law basically generally sort of long long sweeping lines you know quite clean sort of body you know always well thought out not gbly not like it's not industrial you know there's a certain level of clean industrial design that have gone into these the eclipse was the first chip I got to actually create in Tech design so been in Tech design for about a year now and I've picked up a lot of other people's ships like the Argo and the Idis but this was the first ship I was given the design brief of we want to make um a stealth bomber it needs to like have Echoes of other ships like the B2 bomber and then I just got to sort of to run with it most people have a certain idea in the head of what a stealth bomber is and we haven't really strayed far from that you know we

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    you know that's always the sort of way in Star CTI and you know you often deal with things that people familiar with and then you advance it basically originally sort of started with the Avenger sort of sweeping lines basically and then as we've developed kind of we kind of shifted away from that and went more towards a sort of you know saber styling basically initially we I kind of envisaged it being um a descendant of the Avenger so it would have lots of the similar tellings the Avenger the smooth shape the um like the long profile but as the the ship design went along the ship became a bit more angular much like the likes of the saber you know in the sort of in the uh concept process you know we we're starting with will we start with a rough shape we then started pushing towards uh sabber styling and then it was you know it's

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    always really about that top profile that sort of Delta cockpit and then your intakes and so we've you know we started off with the traditional two intakes and then we sort of decided to sort of BCT them and then have two intakes on the top two intakes on the bottom see what that does and then I was like okay I don't like that so let's try four on the four on the top which make you know a real sort of striking feature of the ship and then that was that was pretty much it that was it that was kind of like okay that's that's the one we're going for cuz this is meant to be stealth bomber of the future kind of sort of felt it worked it worked better to sort of push in that direction so this even more so than the saber is going to be a very stealthy vessel but unlike the saber it's no dog fighter you know we stuck fairly close to the brief and you know we gave Chris's option of

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    you know slightly Wilder ones you know ones that were sort of entering probably more into Batman territory maybe basically Chris is like oh know I like you know like this one from there off we go basically it's uh how can we take something familiar how can we advance it but still keep it recognizable the eclipse is uh it's very much a military ship I was looking at a lot of the stealth Fighters obviously that exist uh the B2 was a very heavy inspiration for the design of the ship uh look just looking at the the ship from the front you have this clean profile where you've got the wings and it just kind of bulbs out of the body a bit and that's kind of what I wanted to worko with the eclipse cuz having it loaded with loads of bombs and loads of guns dangling off it all over the place it it wouldn't look stealthy and in a way that minimalist design is kind of menacing you know you'll see the shape coming and you'll know immediately what it is currently the way stealth works is your ship has a cross-section and that's kind of how

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    easy you are to detect and basically yeah a lot of that's radar one of the one of the guys in QA actually used to play with the uh the Hornet ghost where you could turn off load your systems like you know your engines and you can turn off your Shield generators and it reduces loads of your signatures so much that you can only detect it when you're looking basically directly at it and that was one of his favorite strategies in Arena commander and that that's kind of the sort of thing I was kind of thinking of with with the eclipse is when you're flying towards a Target if you knowly where they are you fly towards them and you go dark a bit you know you'll turn off any systems you don't need right now and then when you get closer light everything up and try and get them you know we've got a Bombay that holds three torpedos their size N9 is the same as the Retaliator um and while a lot of the space on the interior Retaliator uh occupied with its torpedo vaye in the eclipse we had to kind of tone it down a bit keep it a lot more compact so we've

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    uh We've created a new uh torpedo firing mechanism basically which is just like a it's like a tube inside the ship which will have three Torpedoes inside it and it'll fire one torpedo and then rotate and you can fire another one and then sort of also featuring in sort of functionality adding to the ship partway through the process so it's got multiple configurations basically of the Wings when the ship is uh um in atmosphere the wings the wings actually sort of fall back a bit and when it's in atmosphere they'll fold out fully so it's got the full flat profile and it's got a handful of little fins to on the nose and towards the back and they'll be popping out basically and to give the guys that it it flies better in atmosphere and if we can we we'll definitely be giving it that kind of um that kind of profile and update but in space all this stuff's going to pop back in and the wing is going to tuck back a little bit um and

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    which should make its profile just slightly smaller so it'll be slightly harder to shoot slightly harder to detect you know and then the other defining feature was basically its Landing State so it's very you know we've it's quite a wide ship and so it wasn't going to work for a lot of Landing areas and so this basically kind of riffs off a lot of what of the military do anyway on like aircraft carriers so we've got folding Wings it isn't you know it isn't quite they don't fold over as far as military we've kept you know we've gone for a very certain sort of graphic style cuts a very noticeable sort of silhouette and then the landing gear is sort of part of the folded Wings it's one of those that like it's going to have a niche it's definitely not going to be you know you're not going to you're not going to have it like a hornet and take it basically anywhere and see what you can do if you take this off fighting regular Pirates near a station you wasting your

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    time cuz those size n Torpedoes are going to take forever in a day to hit they're going to take forever to lock on you've only got two size two guns and this ship doesn't it doesn't like it can dog fight at a pinch but it's no dog fighter it's one of the key things I kind of wanted to stress is it's kind of not so much ponderous but definitely it's not agile but then if you do know where a big Target is if you can get a constellation on its own you can kill it it's going to be a really cool ship to watch sort of just come in and then Wings fold up and then it sit on the ground so looks really intimidating which is kind of what we were driving for what you want is a stealth bomber isn't it you want something that's going to cause trouble and look like it too great work guys if you want to add this stealth ship to your Fleet the agis eclipse is on sale until Friday June 2nd

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    and subscribers can also learn more about the AIS Eclipse by checking out the latest edition of jump point and visiting the Vault for some concept images awesome we also answered some questions about the eclipse earlier this week so check at the ship Q&A for more information so that's it for this episode of ATV a big thanks to all of our backers for your support we couldn't build a game like this without you and thanks for watching we'll see you around the verse thank you for watching so if you want to

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    keep up with the latest and greatest Star Citizen of Squadron 42's development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon