Inside Star Citizen: Track Star

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] thank you the public roadmap on the robertspace industries.com website is the place to check out the new features locations gameplay systems and Technologies currently being developed for both Star Citizen and Squadron 42 but as with all things in game development there are gaps small breaks quick moments when a single developer is forced to wait for another dependency to be finished before work on their primary or even secondary tasks may continue now these happen at every game Studio on every game project in development but the stories of what fills these in-between moments are ninja missions as animation director Steve Bender referred to them on last week's Star Citizen live are rarely if ever shared now with the team heads down

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   focusing on bringing Alpha 319 with its new content and continuing performance fixes to live servers within just the next two weeks and the staggered development of alpha 320 already well underway that we'll be exploring here as early as next week we hope you'll indulge us this week as we thought we'd dedicate this in between ISC to one of those in between tasks that gets so often overlooked one developer's work between tasks to build a sequel an expansion and a potential Evolution to the gray cat PTV buggy tracks to fill additional convention centers when big events like Invictus aren't running so here's Stefan damerow with an update to his one-person crusade to bring more fun to Star citizens original first ever working vehicle it's true my hangar module peeps will remember

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   so for the first raid track we thought of an interesting way to kind of fill up the convention center when there's no conventions happening there so Martin kind of did this track for the origin convention center with this kind of neon advertisement filled space and this track which you can race on with your PTV and later it was kind of handed over to me to kind of just wrap it up to the bug fixing and kind of just iron out the small problems so it can go live so our first racetrack was this kind of dark Moody space feel like uh up with neon advertisement lights very kind of commercialized space around the

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   racetrack uh so kind of after wrapping up the bug fixing of the first track I moved on to some other tasks but turned out that they kind of had just a bit of downtime in between so we thought it would be a nice idea to just kind of make a second race track since we have multiple convention centers so there's definitely some some space to fill there and I started to build this second race track kind of using the base that Martin built for the first one so it's still work in progress but let's take a look so for this new track obviously we want to kind of keep it different and create something new to give a bit of a different why Vibe compared to the previous one so we took the same basis

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   which is all the racetrack pieces but just kind of adjusted the stuff around it a bit so first thing you notice is obviously it has kind of a different dressing around it different styles so this one is this um snow-filled environment since this one will be placed on new beverage we thought it would be cool to kind of reflect that also on the interior bit and just kind of get a bit of a different mood so also the layout in here is different so you still have the main hall where a lot of the racing takes place but then you also move into these side sections which you have usually for conventions so we have

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   this other big room here to kind of play around with and use the space to also create a bit of interesting section for the track so from here you kind of just circle back into the main room again we have this nice interesting circular room where we definitely want to put something eye-catchy and cool here since it's kind of a prime spot for that so you drive around here and then it just leads you back into the kind of main hall again um so since I already mentioned the idea for the Thematic dressing for this kind

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   of from Microtech but also instantly ideas of how we can use this setting kind of popped up in my head so for example as you can see this is this very kind of hazy colds bit foggy space and so it would be cool to potentially kind of use some areas maybe to take a bit of vision away from the from the drivers and kind of use it to make it more interesting a lot of this stuff is still kind of in the very early idea phase so um not not everything in here might necessarily kind of end up in the final race track but this is just mostly just

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   throwing some ideas out there um another thing kind of associated to distressing would be these kind of icy patches of the track so these ones actually you your vehicle like has different grip on the surface so it's all a bit more kind of slippery harder to drive on so you want to be mindful you if you drive over these patches so for this area I just mainly tested it out so we want to obviously kind of keep it a bit more localized later to certain spaces and to to balance it out so it doesn't feel just like unfair and taking control away from the player too much another thing like an idea would be

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   these icicles which could either be just kind of a visual dressing element or maybe we could in the future physicalize and actually um make interactable for the players so they could reach down further into the kind of area where the people drive and then you could crash through them and kind of break them apart like drive there hey Steven yes adding obstacles that's like driving a gray cat is hard enough you don't think it's you don't think this is plenty challenge already um yeah well you know actually we got some some other stuff in mind which might make it even a bit more challenging let me show you what we got over here so these are obviously all still in a very

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    experimental stage so these are for now just ideas which which might or might not end up kind of in the final race track so these ones are basically just these kind of moving obstacles which make it a bit harder to navigate and drive around additionally we have over here some stuff like for example this one would be an idea that you kind of have this lift section on the track just to kind of make it a bit more interesting so obviously you want to kind of make it onto the platform be fast enough to race on because otherwise you'll kind of just

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    have to wait until next time the the piece goes down for you and lets you go up there then another idea would be here this kind of little jump pads so if I just get into the TV so as you drive over it just kind of throws you up into the air a bit that could be something cool potentially and let's see over here this could be basically just some moving pieces of the track so it's either like this ramp going up and down uh maybe even leading onto different

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    sections of the track or this piece which goes sideways obviously you need to think about the implementation there a bit this little kind of obstacle here which gives a bit of a warning before it comes up and kind of blocks off this section for the player this little moving obstacle which just kind of sort of drives on the track for a bit making it a lot harder to navigate around and then eventually just kind of goes off again could do some boost pads maybe so just a few get into your gray cat again

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    drive over it and it just kind of gives you a little boost then potentially some not quite zero g but a lot less gravity involved jumps over ramps so you get you could get sections of the track where the gravity just uh is a lot is a little bit turned down so you get like bigger and longer jumps all right and you've been you've been doing this in your spare time between tasks yeah so this is kind of just an in-between task while there's down time

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    on on the kind of bigger more important stuff and again like it's it's important to mention that the last stuff you saw is very much still kind of just in the idea phase so it might or might not end up uh like on on the next track um and it kind of just more sort of just as a starting point for discussion also with the other Departments of how easy it would be to implement something like this um so it's synced on servers between players so they're actually seeing the same thing happening at the same time and it's not just like localized to to one player's machine and it's completely in a different spot for someone else thanks for watching I gotta get back to

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    my real work now so what we learned this week we learned that in between tasks are where individual developers can contribute fun and off-the-wall ideas to the game while waiting for dependencies to resolve that one of the many ways this manifests is with quirky buggy racetracks and that's Stefan damrau sole architect of this endeavor in his downtime may have a rather sadistic side I hadn't anticipated after seeing some of those moving obstacles most developers do now remember to keep an eye out for Alpha 319 with its mining updates Salvage Mission modules tractor beam improvements new Louisville continuing performance improvements and more as it makes its way through PTU into the live testing environment in the coming weeks there's Invictus launch week immediately after that and possibly some jump town thrown in the mix somewhere between now

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    and then I probably should have paid more attention in the meetings for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thanks for letting us share our weekly behind the scenes look at the process of game development with you happy Star Wars Day May the fourth be with you and we'll see you all here next week yes hi I'd like to report an error with my order yes you sent me the wrong costume for Star Wars Day yes I ordered an X-Wing pilot yes X Wing pilot no yes I I suppose they do sound similar yes I'll hold