Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Pathfinder | 3.4 Ep. 7

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:02

   [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm Eric Kon Davis and I'm Josh Herman today we're teaching NPCs how not to run into things having a quick chat about network service updates checking in with the VFX team for a look at lia's cryog geysers and more but first It's Hammer Time M the community

2. 00:00:51

   loves their hammerheads and recently the Omega protectorate Corporation from our French Community got 50 players together for a massive Hammerhead Showdown it's some pretty cool stuff moving on to development one of the foundations of FPS gameplay is creating believable movement in the AI of the NPCs to that end the animation and AI teams have been working together on collision avoidance for NPCs in fps situations cool yeah here's senior animation programmer Adam rowski and Lead AI programmer Franchesco Ruchi with more recently we've been looking at improving collision avoidance with the AI with players they tend to be really unpredictable and so we have to be quite reactive Ive we need to make the animations work in a slightly different way because we just don't know what they're going to do at any point in time but with AI it's a different story because we sort of look

3. 00:01:39

   in advance a little bit and make up a nicer path for them to follow but sometimes they need to be reactive too and one of those cases is with collision avoidance so we'll have the AI just nicely moving along following his path and then all of a sudden the collision avoidance system will detect that he's going to run into another character or run into a player and it will just suddenly say hey I need you to suddenly move over in this direction right now or you're going to have a collision so what we do at the in the case is like when the moment is active we allow the object collision avoidance code to kick in and calculate of the guys that are around you where to go effectively to avoid each other so mathematically we try to calculate how far are we with a

4. 00:02:27

   collision so we basically predict with your speed and my speed when in time are going to collide and do we have enough time to avoid each other and you know how harsh the avoidance needs to be the collision avoidance code that we use is called Oram that is for optimal reciprocal collision avoidance uh basically it tries to find the optimal value for our speeds to avoid each other we now have it tell The Locomotion system hey I I need you to make this adjustment as well as you can then what we're doing is we're rebuilding the path around where the AI is moving taking that avoidance into account we can check on the nav mesh make sure that it's looking nice we can change the animations that they're playing we can do all sorts of extra planning because that system knows what's going on we can

5. 00:03:15

   then pass that across to the clients and then the client will just follow what it says so the hope is this will make them generally move better stay in sync better it can decide what animations would look best and generally try to rebuild a nice path around the AI and then be able to keep it clamped onto the path which is what we're aiming for so this is what the new system is going to do and we hope that that will make uh desynchronizations a less of an issue in future and there's a few other cool things that we can do with this now that we know that they're always clamped to that path on the Star Citizen public road map you can find a variety of features and improvements our teams around the world are working on let's check in with lead Network programmer Clive Johnson who's going to tell us about some of the upcoming network service improvements slated for Alpha

6. 00:04:03

   3.5 for uh 3.5 the network team are working on uh object container streaming stalls we introduced object container streaming in 3.4 and you may have noticed that particularly when Quantum traveling there's a couple of points during the process where you'll get some hitches the first of these is as you leaving your point of origin behind you uh and all the entities there get streamed out and then you'll get another one a bit later on when you're arriving at your destination and the new set of entities gets streamed in the work that we're focusing on is the the network part of these stores and there's some other causes but these These are tested out to other teams there's a few different issues there and we're trying to minimize reduce the stores as much as we can and eliminate them uh wherever possible the other thing we're working on for 35 is the async disconnect

7. 00:04:52

   refactor um that's basically changing our disconnection code which previously assumed that everything could be cleaned up in the frame but with the is due to OCS again it takes um multiple frames now to get rid of the entities uh so we're just kind of making that code more robust and that should fix some uh some server crashes and client crashes that we've had hopefully an occasional bug where uh people can get stuck on an infinite loading screen when they quitting back to front end as always the public road map is your tool to see what's coming up in the development of Star Citizen yeah in past episodes we've gotten a look at the cryog geysers on AR corpse Moon Lia and we explored VFX work on damage Thruster effects well Daniel and Jacob from the VFX team are back with updates on both check it out at the moment I'm working on two eix assets uh

8. 00:05:41

   one is um the snow effect atmosphere effect and the second one are the geysers gazer effect is made out of steam and water the small drop of water coming out of the gazer are transforming into snow because of the coldness of the lyia Moon the effect is not a easy one to make it has to look good in different types of environment in ecosystems in some type of ecosystems we have uh much more wind and in less in others less wind what I did is put some more speed and turbulence so in this case uh we have movement even if there is no wind over there what I was trying to achieve with the Gaz effect is to make it look a little bit more different

9. 00:06:29

   than the normal ones than the earth that we see everywhere this is latest station of the damage Thruster effects from previously shown a few weeks ago uh things have changed quite a bit since then everything's looking a lot more appropriate for star citiz and and like it fits a lot better since then on the tech side we've had a debug slider implemented for me to use this allows me to alter the health of the Thruster in real time so I can see how the effect would progress throughout the thrusters damage this uh increases iteration time a lot more and allows me to sort of see where I would want to have some artistic flares now and then so maybe when you're at thrusters at 50% Health we'd want a bunch of smoke coming out and then for them on to be really chaotic all the way up to just before your thrusters are

10. 00:07:16

    about to be destroyed so that it's really obvious you need to pay attention right now something bad's happening so we saw those a month ago on ATV yep in early early R&D y pretty cool it is pretty cool I like that when we released that stuff on ATV that we get that feedback from the backers and we're able to incorporate it yeah totally I mean ATV is oh you know it's not just about updating the news right it's also about showing stuff early showing stuff often and then getting feedback and putting right in development that's true yeah so I think that's it for this week make sure you tune in to twitch.tv/ starcitizen tomorrow at 12:00 p.m Pacific for a new episode of reverse the verse live Jared will be sitting down with vehicle pipeline director John crew to answer your questions about the recently revealed Argos SRV and thanks to our subscribers for sponsoring the shows and thank you to each and every backer for supporting development until

11. 00:08:03

    next time we'll see you around the verse 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. robertsspaceindustries.com thank you very much for watching