Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Engine Trails and VFX Particle Effects

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] Hello and welcome to another episode of Around the Verse, our weekly look at Star Citizen's ongoing development. I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm Chris Roberts. So today we're going to take a look at the work that went into creating engine trails, atmospheric entry effects, and some of the other cool visuals uh we are planning for 3.0. But first, let's head to Austin for a studio update. Hey guys, Jake Ross here, producer in Austin. The wheels are in motion on several features here in Austin. Let's dive right in and see what's been going on this month. On the design side, we've been doing a new pass on the proc fixer tool, which is the master Excel sheet where all of our pricing structure is laid out. We've got a bunch of new assets that have come online and our designer working on it, Pete McKay, uh, has all the new ships, new items, new armor suits, and some other FPS goodies.

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   So, Pete has been working to make sure they all fall within the pricing balance of the game, as well as balancing them to the most recent design pass of the items. What's really exciting about this now, as opposed to 6 months ago, is that we're getting far enough with the overall design of the items in the game to better understand the gameplay implication of the items. Although this has required us to go back and make another pass through the items to bring older items in line, we're now able to more accurately predict where their base prices should sit. On top of this, as we are getting new missions in the game, we are doing an additional pass on mission rewards, insurance prices, and respawn timers. We are also setting up the shop inventories utilizing the new shop tech from LA Engineering Team. In addition, we are getting NPCs into some of the main hub areas of our PU landing zones. Uh, junior designer Robert Gaither has been focusing on Grim Hex in order to

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   prove out the behaviors. Uh, but the plan is to extend these general behaviors to the other landing zones like Port Olsar and Levki. The overall goal here is to start to create a general sense of ambience and start to bring the levels to life. Finally, we have Miles Ehart. Getting Miles Ehart, our mission giver, into the game has required a lot of collaboration and work from several different teams. The usables team has created the tech that allows us to link extraneous objects such as the bar stool to other usables, the high bar table, and still register items on the table properly, such as Echart's glass. The mission system team has given us the ability to look for missions with the Echart tag, figure out what is currently available for players, and pass those via subumption to the player's mission log for acceptance or rejection. Between the AI and FPS programmers, they have created an animation technique we're calling

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   feather blending that will allow us to blend between usable object animations, such as a generic sitting animation for a bar stool and the animations related to the mission giver conversations. The Subsumption tech and programming team have been facilitating all of this through the Subsumption tools and by the game code that goes with it. Overall, we've made a lot of progress in the last few weeks and we are looking forward to polishing this up for the 3.0 release. On the art side of things here in Austin, Josh Coons, our ship artist, has been working with the tech art team to finish creating the LODs and the damage pass of the Compass Black. He was also busy making tweaks to the cockpit area and the rotating necess based on the tech art feedback and wishes. He has now moved on to creating an awesome looking renders and videos which will be used on the website and various marketing

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   events. We can now say that the formerly top secret project that lead ship artist Chris Smith has been working on is the Gian Knox bike. Starting around March, he has been tirelessly modeling and texturing uh this bike from the beginning to the end. In the last month, he has been working with many team members on creating the incredible artwork for the brochure and slick marketing release video for this new ship, as well as an interview on how it all came together. The server engineering team has been working closely with DevOps to integrate and test diffusion in a QA environment. So far things are looking good. The team has started working with gameplay engineering to show them how to best utilize the features that diffusion can offer. We will continue to work with them over the next few months to identify new and old gameplay features that will be best suited as diffusion services. In time we will move much more of the feature logic in diffusion

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   services allowing for higher scalability and optimal perform performance. This month in the PU animation team we are starting on the NPC usables for counters. This will include working with our shopkeepers and bartenders NPCs and collaborating with designing to bring these elements to life. Once these are complete, a player would be able to walk into a shop to buy merchandise from NPCs that sell weapons, spacuits, clothing, ship parts, and other such things. This will incorporate our Wildline system as well with face animation and audio captured at our mocap shoots. To complete these features, we needed to capture a few transition elements that were missing. So, we shuffled some desks around and set up a quick mocap shoot in our office. Along with the bartender, we are also getting the usable for the bar stool up and running. Once this is done, a player will be able to go and sit at a bar stool and order a drink. Finally, we

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   finished the carry system animations. As a player, you can now pick up a standardized box and walk around with it. So, now we have all the needed tech to expand this mechanic to pick up a wide range of things and carry it wherever needed. On the ship animation side in Austin, we are wrapping up setting up the standard for the cockpit experience, as well as polishing and creating new improved animations for our next release. In addition to various bug fixes within the cockpit, we are working with the design and programming teams to bring the same level interactions you get in the cockpits to the man turrets in the ships. This includes geforce reactions, hit reactions, as well as a G-lock pass out and wake up sequence for when you're pulling too many G's. The DevOps team is quietly adding more hardware and increasing network capacity to handle necessary increase in build activity connected to the 30 release.

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   Everything is growing in size, which means increasing demands on the build system and its various subsystems. Meanwhile, the live ops team has completed the build out of the latest server size expansion, supporting the latest rev of shopping and subumption. They're still tuning and making adjustments, but it's always excited to exciting to see the new services coming online. For June, Austin QA has been all hands- on deck, testing new features in preparing for 300. Major testing items for our group include new overhauled Star Marine weapons, testing of the Crusader moons, Levki, new missions, the improved Moby Glass interface and apps, particularly the star map, and ships. Lots of ships. Many ships have come online for item 2. So, each of them requires a complete sweep for issues, as well as a review of old issues such as animation and ship idling to see what may have carried over in the new implementation. Stability and performance has been a major focus as well with Austin QA working closely with

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   our UK counterparts to conduct regular play tests and captures. Two42 testing has been working closely with the rest of the team as new tech means new bugs that are often shared between both groups of testers. We've continued providing additional support for the animation team here in Austin as well, handling mocap file cleanup, supporting setup and tear down for pickup shoots, and other tasks that free up our animators to handle the more important items. Our normal engine and editor testing has kicked into high gear as the surge of new tools and tech from developers at all four studios means we are constantly checking shelf check-ins and binaries for problems. Making sure everything is ready to go before it gets checked in and turned over to the rest of the company to use is very important. This has included changes to resource manage management for objects and planets, new build distribution tools, server changes to support subumption, as well as network code improvements and a

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    refactor of the material manager. The player relations team continues to prepare for upcoming 3 work and can't wait to give to the backers the new player experience that will go on the website and match the new content coming up in the game. They'll also be adding to the Evocati ranks in the coming weeks and are excited to announce two new hires in addition to more headcount in Austin Manchester and our Frankfurt studio. Work continues at a breakneck pace and so does our excitement about the upcoming release. Thanks for tuning in and for all your support. See you guys in the verse. Hey guys, this is Benuel with Turbulent and this is our update. So we've moved 036A version of Spectrum up to the PTU for regression testing. This first first release in this branch is only for testing all of the backend

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    changes that we've made in order to we're preparing the groundwork for desktop integration. And so we've changed all of our actions which are the core of how this application is functioning. So we've transferred to a new standard. This will help us manage how we we do desktop uh release of spectrum which will be able to have a window in the overlay and a window on your desktop at the same time but by sharing all the resources. And so this is we're laying the groundwork for this. So this first release on PTU is only for regression testing and uh we're going to be throwing in new features into 036. The first one being the new form editor and so we're introducing uh drafts. Uh so when you create new posts in a thread uh we will uh save your draft so you can go and back to browsing and then come back and complete your draft for every thread. Uh we're going to allow you to do inline images. And so uh we we're

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    changing all of the way the markup processing is working in the editor, adding more markdown support for more styling like styling of links, inline images, uh so you're not forced to use the frame that we have for all the images or when you make galleries. And so that's gonna we're hoping that this uh is what you guys wanted. So, uh, we've done a lot of work on the editor on that front. Uh, another major feature in, uh, 036A is custom roles. That's the big feature. And so, we've been working hard at creating the new member lists that you can see directly from your spectrum, uh, or management part. Uh, then you'll be able to change roles of your users, uh, you know, simply by visiting their profiles. And so the custom roles system basically allow you to create new roles that have their custom set of permissions on top of the ones that are provided by the org system. And so this should give you guys

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    a lot of flexibility in how you assign people to groups uh how you let them see specific sub forums or sub chats uh within your orgs. What goes with this is also an update to mini profiles. We're not happy with the way mini profiles have been working uh up to now and so we've been changing that. Uh so we're going to a more compact setup that will have a set of actions uh on all of them. Uh one thing that we're trying to implement at the same time as we're bringing these new uh member profiles in is we're going to be reimpporting we're reimplementing post counts. And so now you'll be able to see post counts uh for all the users on the system. So you'll be able to see how many posts they've made, how many replies they've created. Uh and we're also introducing the concept of karma. Uh so when people upvote content that you've created, you gain karma and that is uh that is shown in in your spectrum mini profile. This

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    new succinct profile also will have an hot link to message people. So you don't have to click on them and click on bright message. You can just message them directly. So this this is our 036 version. We're going to be starting to merge our branches very soon. More ground work on the back end on voice. Uh so we're really hard at work right now working the transmission part of our voice infrastructure. how we're going to be able to have, you know, servers directing and routing people to different voice servers, how that's going to work and what kind of data channel we're going to have because we have additional data to carry uh in this project, not just voice. And so we need to be able to carry these data channels as well. And so we're we're looking at how we're going to be doing that. So there's a lot of there's resources dedicated to that right now. Totally unrelated to Spectrum, we've been working for 3 uh for a new uh system to handle crashes. We've we've developed

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    years ago uh a system called panic that tracks your client crashes and so uh we needed to basically reintegrate that to be get more visibility on it. And so we've integrated our panic system uh with the Sentry which uh which is a super nice UI that we're using on the Spectrum side already but that we're now going to be using on the game side uh that will allow us to track your client crashes you know see the repro counts assign those to developers link them to JR issues uh view regression so we get regression notifications and all this stuff uh from the game crashes. Uh so we've developed a custom SDK integration with Sentry. Uh it's going to be super good for testing. It's going to help developers in the testing phases for 3. So we're super excited about that cuz that work is completed. Um otherwise our main teams are working on welcome to SC

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    the new uh Star Citizen website revamp. And so uh that's progressing. We're now in full coding mode. Uh most of the design work is finished on all you know mobile and tablets and everything. And so we're right now we're developing and so we don't have anything to show yet but you know soon hopefully. And so, uh, that's our turbine and update for this this month. Thank you guys. Cutless Blacks looking pretty good. Josh has done a great job updating the ship. Yeah. No, he definitely has. I mean, the ship team in Austin's killing it. Chris Smith recently finished the Knox, which went on sale uh this past uh Friday and uh, you know, it's pretty much done. We've been flying it around on moons and we're looking forward to getting in your guys' hands in the very near future. So the but I would say the incredible attention uh does not stop just at ships. Our VFX team has been hard at

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    work to get other cool effects like engine trails ready for the 3.0 release. Let's catch up with our VFX team to see all the impressive effects they've been creating. I'm Mike Snowden. I'm the visual effects director. We get to play with lots of particles of which there are many uh in Star Citizen from a kind of whisper of steam from a mug on a table to a capital ship exploding. There'll be effects needed for both of those things and anything in between as well. The challenge with VFX is is maintaining that the level of fidelity, the kind of quality, the visual quality that that that Star Citizen requires. Maintaining that across that kind of range of scale, seeing these kind of things up close versus seeing them way way off in the distance and making sure they always

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    look good. Uh there's lots of challenges both artistically but also um optimization wise as well making sure that they run efficiently in the game. I'm currently setting up the the engine trails and entry and and um exit effects for the atmosphere. Basically guys going through each ship um setting up the particle libraries for each ship and setting the correct color values for each manufacturer. Chris was a is a big fan of the engine trails um for gameplay reasons primarily but you know it's something that is very much a part of the Star Citizen dream I guess um he always kind of saw the engine trails being a part of that there's also going to be atmospheric entry effects for ships and anything actually not just ships but objects that are passing through atmosphere exit effects as well when ships are actually leaving the atmosphere contrails when vehicles and ships are moving around at speed on the

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    planets so those are the three kind of things that we think about when we're talking about atmospheric flight effects. When we were looking at the challenges that things like engine trails were going to give us, we essentially knew that we couldn't really do it with the current tech we've got. Um, we had various attempts at doing so. We essentially identified what the problems were with the current tech. All kinds of things really. The old system was uh completely uh based on one thread. So, it's a very linear system. Started very small and was built upon built upon and it became kind of a a monster. I was jumping from one part to the other part to the other part and it was really was a mess. The old system was computing each particle on the CPU each frame and then it had to sort of download all this data to the G graphic

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    card every frame. To make these engine trails a reality in in Star Citizen, we had to bring together a team of people. It's not something that we could solve on our own as VFX artists. So we had to involve um graphics programmers to give us the features that our editor needs that we to kind of build these kind of engine trails. Lots and lots of particles for for example. So one thing that we didn't have in the editor was GPU particles with the support of the tech team and the code team. We're all working together to generate this this GPU particle system which is essentially the driving force of these trails and entry and exit effects because at the moment we can only put a certain amount of CPU particles on screen before it affects the CPU. Of course to speed up the system we have to reorganize the design uh based on how how a modern modern PC works. Data can take like a

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    slow path and a fast path. And part of this is also to reduce the amount of data that the CPU has to upload to the GPU each frame. We can do it in a way where we only uploads when when the particle is born, the data gets uploaded. In some cases, we don't even have to the the data just need to be uploaded once and then it can sort of manage it itself on on the GPU without the the C CPU have to having to intervene very much. we have we have these two concept of uh deterministic and non-deterministic uh particles well not deterministic and nondeterministic states and the most of the states are deterministic which means that you you only need to upload them on birth well maybe some states can even state buffers can even be shared among

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    uh multiple uh emitters and emitters is the the point or the area where new particles get get spawned from. So, so by separate doing this separation, you only need to update the states that are nondeterministic for all the other states. Well, you still need to know the state as a particular point in time, but but it's much faster to to compute. You not don't actually need to store the state. you can just sort of uh derive these formulas making those trails behave correctly through the gameplay and kind of react to what the ship's doing. That's where we needed the the game coder to um give us the kind of the hooks to trigger these effects. The code I write is made very generic. So, uh it's made so that all kinds of particles

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    can be set up. So currently we're using the the engine trails as a test for this system, but it's supposed to cater to every kind of particle you can imagine. If it needs to be enabled, disabled, or the strength adjusted during game play, then the system should be able to handle that. I built up the system completely with data forge live preview in mind. So whenever you change anything in data forge, everything will be reloaded, will be adjusted to whatever you've set in data forge. So the game will have a live preview as the the feature says. So it allows VFX artists to more easily iterate over their VFX setup. Most of the time VFX artists will say like this should change a little bit. This should

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    be thicker or thinner. It should be different. Then uh either I make it possible for them to do it themselves. So add a property to data forge. So so they can uh drag a slider make it thinner or thicker. But uh sometimes I'll have to go in code get some other strength from uh like the thrust source strength or the boost strength and add it in a formula so they can use it better. When all the effects are complete that we will be able to lay down the foundation of setting up new effects. Today for example I I finished the code for first iteration of collisions. Nondeterministic particles can like yeah you can shoot them into a scene and it will bounce off the the geometry in the scene. We have another feature and that's fields. It's a way to

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    to compute the field around around the geometrical shape. So we we want to use this on on the ships. when you pass when you pass through particles, they will sort of get transformed along the field. The great thing about um engine trails and atmosphere is that even on the moons, it's going to be an atmosphere. Um so you're going to see in 3.0, there's going to be the three moons. Um they're going to have certain levels of atmosphere. They'll they'll vary, but you know, you're going to get some really nice kind of subtle atmospheric entry effects. with engine trails. Knowing where someone is is going to be so useful if you're flying around in a group, if you're, you know, not necessarily fighting against each other, if you're just flying around in a in a convoy or whatever, it's going to be really nice to be able to see where people are going. But also in combat as well, you're going to get a nice sense

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    of kind of the visceral sense, I guess, with engine trails. That's going to provide quite a different experience to what we've currently got. For the player, they will notice this is the performance is is much better. With this new system, you can have I don't know you can have 10 or 100 of this effect and it still runs. Uh also we will have certain GPU features that wasn't just wasn't possible and it wasn't implemented in the whole system and in general our intention is that the the visual quality will be yeah much much better. It would be much cooler, much more dynamic effects. It's really great to be able to focus on um really cool new things that we can use again ac across the game really. The the hooks that we've got from game code now are going to help us drive all kinds of new new features and effects. The graphics

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    side of things. The the new the new particle system itself is going to enable us to kind of create more stuff as well. So where we had maybe 100 sparks before, we're going to be able to have a thousand sparks. And as a VFX artist, it's kind of exciting to be able to do that, especially on the scope of our game. Wow. Okay. So, pretty cool. Um, you know, we built a whole new uh GPU particle system so we can have, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of particles uh in a way that the old CPU system uh couldn't handle. And one of the main reasons for this was to be able to do things like engine trails, contrails, and various other effects that require, you know, a

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    high amount of particles. And I I really think it'll make a big difference to space combat when you can sort of see the well, even in the atmospheric combat, you can see where the ships are moving and what direction they're going. And you, it's almost like you have a pretty cool vista. We showed it in some of the B-roll where you could sort of see this battle happening in the distance and engine trails and explosions. and I think it'll add a lot to the texture of space combat in Star Citizen and also Squadron 42. Um, so that's uh some of the cool stuff that's made possible by you guys. And that's it for today's episode. Thanks to all of our backers. It's your support that allows us to build the game we've always dreamed of. Yes. And thanks to our subscribers for making shows like this possible. July subscribers ship of the month will be the consolation. So be sure to crew up and take it out for a spin. Last month's ship, the

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    Caterpillar, will be on sale for subscribers this weekend only. So, grab yours before it's too late. Yes. And don't forget to tune in tomorrow for a special happy hour where the community team will be answering your burning questions. Hopefully, I'm not sure if that's about entry or re-entry or whatever um about Star Citizen. And until next week, we'll see you around the verse. Thank you for watching. So, if you want

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    to keep up with the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42's development, please follow us on our social media channels. See you soon.