Inside Star Citizen: River Song | Winter 2022

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:06

   rivers are more than just water they're a place to explore they're a place to find harvestables that you can pick up they're a place where everything is amplified versus the surrounding terrain and the very first river will be in 317 through the hills of microtech [Music] since this time last year we started to take rivers from what was a pretty tech demo to something we could release we thought we were ready to put the south in 316. we were pretty happy with what we had but we still needed some more changes to bring it ready to put out into the pu we started by doing a refactor all of our object scattering so we could have far more power and far more performance

2. 00:00:54

   when we're distributing objects across the planet one of the biggest things i wanted to improve as well was to increase the density around the rivers but without increasing the global density of our objects this was going to be difficult which led me to work on on-demand spawn points a system where we can pass a position to the biome builder and will automatically scatter appropriate assets at that location we now procedurally place on-demand spawn points along the length of the river and around the basin one of the major things that we had to add was dressing presets and which allow us to um add specific objects around locations like rivers and we also had to build the river mesh from the ground up which involves spline mesh building which took a long time

3. 00:01:42

   that did sadly mean that we missed 316 but it's all the better for it as we've worked on all of these different interactions for the player with the rivers for example as of 317 you may now walk down into rivers and oceans as long as you are wearing a helmet you may explore underwater keep your helmet on you won't drown you can now drive gravelev bikes over both oceans and rivers without just falling through and exploding we also have harvestables around the river's edge for you to explore and collect we also did a rework of our water caustic system meaning that there are water caustics thrown by the river and

4. 00:02:30

   its basin both onto objects above the water like your ship or trees or rocks and onto the surface below planet content team haven't had a full chance to take a visit of the oceans yet so while there are assets down there you can expect improvements in coming patches the next big improvement to rivers is going to be fizz areas so you can throw things into the river and watch them flow down as well as work on the foliage shader which is going to create more varied and seasonal foliage across our planets as well as just the in the future what i want is for an artist to be creating a planet and say okay i'm happy with the elevation let's create a river system and for it to be done and we're not quite at that stage

5. 00:03:19

   yet each river is maybe one or two clicks but it needs to be hundreds of rivers per planet without even thinking about it the river in 317 doesn't have any missions or qut markers to find it with so you will have to go exploring to find it although hopefully this video has been a help rivertech is more than just adding running water to the surface of our planets and moons it's the collective gathering of mesh and shader erosion and foliage traversal over under and through the surface and it's the harbinger of things like lava fields and roads and so much more and up next on this week's show a look at upcoming efforts to improve our reputation and hostility systems in alpha 317 and beyond we just got done running ninetails

6. 00:04:12

   zenna threat and jump town you seem to be really enjoying these dynamic events you're running bounty missions you're running assassinations all these things and we're really excited about that as a designer it's pretty difficult to look at these and not see all the little things that we can do to make this better to make these notches good but great and in order to do that in the near future we're going to be implementing some new features into the reputation and hostility systems with the current reputation system all of your relationships to npcs are static that means that essentially you can't become friends with the the criminals and you can't become enemies with uh the law enforcement in addition if you shoot someone just a single bullet can make it so that everyone around you suddenly starts raining hell down upon you and

7. 00:04:59

   that can be a pretty awful experience we're going to be looking to address that in a multitude of ways we're going to be looking to have reputation start driving and hostility so essentially how npcs react to you and how you see them as you become more and more friendly build up that affinity with npcs of a certain organization they will begin to shift their opinion of you you can actually do missions or content for nine tails and if you get to a certain point in their bar they will stop shooting at you and start just letting you go by and then eventually even start protecting you by the same measure if you start attacking law enforcement or committing too many crimes after a certain point uh crusader security is going to start hunting you

8. 00:05:46

   down and attacking you on site instead of waiting for you to commit a crime on the side of making it so that people don't attack you when you just fire a single bullet we're looking at in the slightly more distant future where if you are in the green zone with a organization if they really really like you then they actually have a larger threshold that you have to break over in order to cause them to want to attack you um we want we don't want it to be global so that players can't abuse it but we do want it to be something that is a bit of a benefit if you go and make friends with these people in 317 these changes are going to be largely invisible to players it's really more about at this point giving the feature and the tools to our developers that we can continue building the content that our players and our developers really want in 318 and onward this content will enable us to for

9. 00:06:37

   instance in xena threat make it so that you can actually be on the side of the xena threat instead of just trolling other players in addition for jump town this will help us to sort of patch some of the holes where players can exploit the system by grabbing a quick crime stat after they've already pulled out their packages and not have to actually fight people in order to get their drugs this also enables us to take a lot of our existing content for the lawful side and make criminal missions so that there is actually content in the game for criminals to do in the long term not just with these events and of course with additional dynamic events rolling out in the future we can start building with this into in mind from the start this feature will allow us to say that this event is going to have this faction versus this faction and players will be able to be on those

10. 00:07:25

    sides in a much more permanent and uh invested fashion so what did we learn this week well we learned that microtech's first river is the next step forward in the systemic tools that will allow developers to bring more texture hazard and opportunity to star citizen's planets and moons that the reputation system and its continuing development remain at the heart of enabling developers to create more meaningful and effective mission content and that upcoming hostility changes means maybe i won't get punished so quickly when i turn a friendly hello into accidental unintended friendly fire for inside star citizen i'm jared huckaby we'll see you all next week you