Inside Cloud Imperium Games . Asteroid Hangar and Room System

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:10

   Hello everyone, welcome to another edition of Inside Cloud Imperium Games. This is where we take you behind the scenes to the various studios working on Star Citizen and sort of show you a little more in depth of the technology we're working on, the art, the concepts we're working on and show you how we're putting together this incredibly ambitious game. So today we've got a bit of a treat. We're going to go up to I would like to say sunny Montreal but at this time of year it's a bit chilly where Behavior's working most yeah on the planet side aspects of Star Citizen. So I'm going to pass you over to Sandy who is up in Montreal right now and she'll tell you more about it. Dave Richard, lead game designer. Stefan

2. 00:00:59

   Horberg. Level designer. Philip Ivanovich, deck lead artist. Gaumond Chevan, art director. Stefan Boucher, lead programmer. Guys, you brought some cold weather for me. This morning. Oh my gosh, walking here is freezing. So is this exciting for you guys and it's a different project from what you guys have been working on before? Yeah, it's incredible. We're creating a whole universe which is in a way super cool, in a way super worrisome in terms that we need to create a lot of assets to actually create those those living worlds. Their main focus right now is what we are calling the room system and the room system is going to be the foundation of all the locations on the the different planets you can land and it will also be

3. 00:01:47

   used on even bigger ships or space stations. At Behavior we've been tasked with the goal of creating the room system which basically consists of an easy way for our designers and artists to create various assets and to be able to reuse them throughout either the hangar, planet side locations or even spaceships for sake. What's great about the room system is that we'll be able to expand it only to hangars but also to planet side. So we'll be able to create dynamic locations like shops that change on the fly based on the economy. Even though CryEngine is a really powerful engine Star Citizen has been pushing its content creation pipeline to its limits requiring us to add new systems to help us remix and reuse our modular assets. To do that we've been

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   using a system called the seed system which allows us designers to create basically a group of objects but be able to change a subset of these objects easily without having to recreate basically copies all over the world of these objects. It's really cool with the prefabs that we can start with something that's very gray box that has no texture that just gives you an idea of a shape and with the prefabs all Phil would need to do is go into the engine and replace those shapes with the shapes that he would like. So this core tech is going to be used for the hangars and then also other areas like shops or bars or other locations on the planet side locations and the other bigger sort of spaceship

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   locations. So it's a completely new tech that we're building from the ground up. And the first application of the room system is the asteroid hangar which is the hangar for the people that don't really want to be in the sort of the I would say the safer areas of space or the more legitimate areas of space. So the asteroid hangar. What is the asteroid hangar? So it's a it's a hangar that will be found on some of the UEE location that we're building. So mostly lawless space. They're they're built so that they they're really small and they feel like you can you can hide there basically as a pirate or not. I'm I'm pretty sure like Caterpillar and

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   Constellation are currently the biggest we can fit. But then there's still you know much bigger ships out there. So it's also something that we need needed to think about when designing the the expansion. So at some point when the player will be able to you know expand you will be able to choose the type of room he needs for the type of ships he want to fit in. We have to keep going back and forth because the size of the Caterpillar is quite large as he's mentioned and we have to take into account extra size on each side of the Caterpillar as it takes off. Maybe not necessarily every takeoff would be smooth so your ship might move side to side and we wanted to avoid making the player go through this tiny rabbit hole. And crash inside his hangar or something.

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   Yeah, we we kind of don't want the player to die in his own hangar. Yeah, cuz that would be good. So the first step was to block out a general idea of what sizes we wanted. So we wanted to have like a stock hangar where you'd start and you'd have your first ship. And then we'd add on as extensions the larger pieces as they continue on and as they follow the contour of the asteroid hangar. We wanted to have something that that really did feel organic in terms of and like biological when you look at the asteroid hangar itself. And where it comes from and and and how it was placed. So it didn't just feel like it just appeared there. With this all in mind we wanted to keep the idea that we wanted to add on like room extensions, hangar customization to to the max to allow the players to really make this feel like their own home like housing

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   for their ship. That's essentially what that is. So when you look at the asteroid hangar now in terms of this this is the stock hangar where we wanted to have as you see here Cutlass. You have your command center and you have a the the ceiling door which would actually open up and you'd basically fly in from outside your asteroid hangar you'd fly through it and then you'd land inside this asteroid hangar. We want to make this as cool as possible for everybody that's that's involved. From this point you're going to be able to to expand yourself. You're going to go up to these nubs and basically use your MobiGlas and you're going to allow it to um make a new expansion. So you're going to add on a new ship, a new section. What that will also allow would be a new room expansion. So I'm talking about specialty rooms specifically. So what you've seen so far is a shooting

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   range and a course I guess trick course where you can use the buggy and you can jump through hoops and whatnot. So when you go in your hangar you will find some special spot. So basically at that point just like with the ships but for your hangar and using the MobiGlas you'll be able to access the hangar service and in augmented reality you'll be able to access that point, look for the rooms you want to add, buy it, install it and then there's going to be a construction time. So you can get out at this point, go with your ship in space and at some point you'll get a notice on your MobiGlas saying hey your hangar space is ready and then you'll be able to go in and and check your new space out. When we speak about asteroid we obviously invoke the idea of rocks and for the rocks we did a lot of research cuz we we had to find the perfect balance in between simplicity and

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    complexity. The rocks need to read well and needs to have a nice silhouette. So for the control room you can see that

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    it's a bit messy, cluster. We wanted that feeling of a real hangar like people are working so it there's oil, there's wires, it's messy and steams. Almost feel like a garage. So we should be ready like yesterday, right? I should get my Caterpillar into the hangar and away we go. I hope you all enjoyed that sneak peek at the room system in the asteroid hangar and we'll catch you next week at Inside Cloud Imperium Games.