Inside Star Citizen: What Lies Beneath | Summer 2019

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] the star citizen universe is one whose destiny is to expand throughout the cosmos beyond its planets and moons through nebula and jump points into the star systems that fill our galaxy with the upcoming off of 3.7 we're taking a look within going deep below the surface to explore the cavernous depths of Stantons planets and moons from top to bottom this week we're exploring the work bringing these new cave systems online from the procedural tech that makes it possible first revealed on SCL earlier this year - the way designers use those tools for making a traversable layout suitable to a variety of gameplay needs then finally how lighting and audio designers set the mood and create an atmosphere that brings the whole thing to life so I'm up clearly Sherman Lewis fight it was for

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   unhappy when standard mass came problem on the last inside star citizen we were showing the entire R&D phase that we have done so since then we have actually finished up all of our assets yeah we've also involved all the other departments a bit more yeah are actually quite happy since all the building blocks are now in as we are now able to generate a full cave we had our caves being procedure generated by the layer tool which is also used by the truck stops and those truck stops they float on space they don't have the planet and the terrain as a context to them so that's why it was tricky for us to embed these entrances caves nicely on the terrain and and have them generate it so

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   they they don't you know dip on under the planet's surface and then it dip out again that would be quite problematic yes the contents that gets created by the layer tool needed more information in order to work with those caves and since the caves have to be put on planets we use the placement tool that has been used for the outposts before we actually managed to make it work and now we are able to use the procedure layer tool together with a procedural placement tool on planets which is a quite nice heads-up thing for the future whenever we want to create more content the harvestable and my Nobles who are scattered on tech points that are also procedurally scattered out in in the caves so yeah actually it's not not just going to be empty caves

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   that you walk in and out but there's actually things to find stuff to do right resources together they're using our new organic shader which allows us to go for a much higher fidelity you know much better definition in terms of shape so it should be quite a level up in terms of quality for our geological assets we planned to add a little bit more break up to our rocky archetype of caves that means we have plant route based elements that we overlay to break up the cold and and harsh rocky angular surface so you know even though it's all procedural we have a decent amount of control which which means that we can determine a cavern to be you know

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   completely covered in roots or have these glowworms sitting at the roof and also the man-made content those are basically abandoned camps that other NPCs left and you are now able to discover that kind of stuff so sometimes you might even find some dead NPCs in there like people who try to explore it but then survive procedural dead people yeah in the very first couple playtests we realized that it's really difficult to tell where one should go where you could climb on to and stuff like that so we had to find a solution visually and the solution for that actually was for us to add another element which was like a little lichen layer on top of our rocks

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   and wherever that lichen is we kind of try to navigate the player and lead the player towards the actual navigatable path if we spend a lot of time walking through our own caves and I've got lost myself as well many times so maybe maybe it will help with the orientation you know because then you get in and you don't get lost and maybe you can find you sit yourself out we're trying to push out four three seven and have the players test what we have right now the very first version of the caves that you know has the most necessary elements in it to make up such cave but for the future it means that we have this this very big nice to have list of ideas and elements definitely want to tackle them in the future for sure because it's way

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   too exciting stuff with the tech developed by Patrick and Florian and others on the planetary content team the process of implementing caves then moves on to designers to create and ensure properly traversable layouts that can be used for interesting combat future missions and the upcoming FPS mining gameplay feature for initial release we are aiming for on four entrances so we have uncharted and charted caves there's also another secret variant I won't mention so the mood you looking for in the cave is very close very tight very scary and dark and very labyrinth fines for creating case we use the same technology that we use for creating rest stops so what that is is we create a rule set of rooms to be that a connecting room that has two to three

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   connectors on which we can connect corridors and then the technology randomly generates whether that has a connecting corridor on it or just a cap and then we can go from there and you can extrapolate that into a massive cave and we can create graphs within graphs within graphs and it can just explode into big beautiful interior spaces so things you have to consider for traversal is making sure there's a good sprinkling of gameplay elements small spaces large space is really tight littles places you have to squeeze around so you would be cooling under things commando crawling under things mantling up over stuff so there's a really sense of a different height so we really have to generate the graph and very carefully curate the order of the space and jump into game mode after we've generated it to make sure it feels right really feels like you're plunging

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   through a cave when we're generating case we have to consider the potential for FPS combat so that would be making sure there's large open spaces that can hold more people of course because if you're fighting there's more than one person and then when it comes to FS mining we also have to think about where we want to spread the resources throughout the cave so that you have richer potentially denser veins deeper in the cave so you're rewarded for traversing through it but for future releases we'll be looking for a massive sinkholes that you can land your ships in and also huge cave entities that you can drive the ground vehicles into the players will notice there's areas of the caves that look lived in and we aim to put AI there in the future so we can use those and missions and for other starts exciting adventures we're really hoping people enjoy the caves because they bring a big opportunity for nice small

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    tight spaces that we don't usually explore in started soon once Gareth is validated a layout that works for all gameplay needs it falls to our lighting artists to create an atmosphere that can both showcase the mysterious and unknown depths of the of any planet or moon and present this new endeavor in an effective manner that allows you to see where you're going without breaking the mood okay before we start with anything with the lighting we always to figure out what is the part that we need to focus on most so for caves the corners and the big rooms are the parts that we need to focus on because it's very important to tell the player where you at we always give them

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    a little bit of hint from the lighting like if there's a corner to the to the left then we just put the lights to the to the left of the bit corner so you can see how there's a light coming through the left hand side so it give you a hint that okay maybe I can go that way maybe I can just turn that to figure out where to go next and also it's pretty dark so it's very tricky to balance because you want it to be there release that you want to be dark but you also need to help the player not to get lost in in the case so that's the biggest challenge the atmosphere a little bit specular is especially on the cave rocks there's some kind of parameters that which gives me a lot of control like for example

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    when declare to get closer to the feel light they'll feel light will disappear and surrounding you it's gonna be pretty dark but you know other few lights are still on so we use that kind of technology like little tricks to keep you dark surrounding you give you like this tiny and scary kind of feeling glowing warms aren't nice they are beautiful they're like a mystery we work with VFX team they apply those particles on the rocks when they finish their job I just added those few lights to support these VFX so yeah when you go deeper down into the cave maybe you are encountered this kind of area with flowing forms all over the

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    ceiling above you which is I think it's pretty nice effect and there are special experiments for the players the flashlight is pretty tricky because it's so strong at the moment so it's kind of like flattening everything so all the work from the environment might be washed away because of that strong light so the lighting team is working very closely with the engineering team as well to improve the torch light making more subtle and even when you have the torch on you you are able to see what's the cave looks like and still give you that kind of cinematic and the moody cave so yeah that's what we are trying to fix

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    but Arthur's lighting only gets us halfway to where we're going as creating the proper soundscape is equally as important in adding character and flavor to these new subterranean environments that's where James from the audio team comes in as he takes the reins and brings the audible universe of star citizen to the cavernous reaches below so the idea behind the caves was to create a more eerie mood so by then as I designed a bunch of drone sounds and then a bunch of like one shots and things like that and the trigger randomly through the caves and the deeper end of the cave you go the more of the one shot you get and the drones dock down and sound just to give up more of eerie connect creepy vibe so I made the actual 80s is visible here so you can see how the

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    sound has been placed around the map one of the challenges we faced with us as the markups different from other locations so we couldn't use like room shapes to markup so these have got to have quick tight attenuation radiuses so the songs don't bleed out through the map so the idea behind the sounds for rooms like this is to have a lot of drones police surrounded the area and also filled the space over with one shots one of the problems we had for areas like this is that it sounded too low passed and too basic so to bring out some high-end I've added some one shot so like rocks falling and things like that and water drips in the distance and it just helps to make the space feel a

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    bit more Airy and add a bit of life to the area well so still sending a little bit creepy so this is what the caves look like from the outside as you can see they don't look like very much but when we put these lights on you can see that this is the basic room layout so the floor actually goes like stuck on the bottom part here and then I mark all the audio up in here so you can see a place these speakers around the area and these play like one shots debris falling water drips and drone sounds as well so the idea is when you move around the room the sound changes because you get closer to these speakers here so as I go over here you get lesser these ones over here which would be one

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    choice and joins so it just gives a Tibetan movement so all although the room system looked a little bit confusing once we actually end the caves themselves when all they're all procedurally generated it does make sense why I would normally do is I'd walk through these caves and listen to their transition between the rooms and then decide if I need to go back to the other room system and make any changes to one of the considerations of the caves was the actual reverb so as you can see here I've actually designed my own reverb sample for this this is based on the room system which encompasses the

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    entire cave itself further down the line I'd like to break this up in a more granular pieces so we can serve reverb on small corridors and small parts of the cave just so there's a big variety I hope this gives you a good idea of how the song design in the caves is done when we add the mission givers and NPCs to the case it's going to create new challenges things like how the voices are going to work in the case with the new reverb system and other things that go along with that like what props are going to be there this is going to present new challenges for the sound design team they'll look forward to sharing with you so what we learned this week if anything I hope we learned that creating these news cave systems is a collaborative endeavor involving even more than the four teams you saw here that a star citizen continues to expand into the Stars there are plenty of

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    opportunities for exploration and experience beneath the surface of our planets and moons and that you can write an intro to the show about Plato's allegory of the cave but the social media person is going to talk you out of it and he's almost certainly right to our subscribers our thanks for making each and every show like this possible and to everyone in the star citizen universe we'll see you next week for a first look at FPS mining and other features of Alpha 3.7 until next time thanks for watching for the latest and 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 www.uvu.edu/library