Inside Star Citizen: Q3 Follow Up | Summer 2022

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:04

   it's a time of change here at Star Citizen the Frankfurt office has moved into their new digs the Winslow office prepares to migrate to Manchester starting next week our citizencon presentations are looming just nine days away and much of the focus of our development teams at present is in preparing for the upcoming Alpha 318 with persistent entity streaming that serves as the foundation not only of server meshing in Alpha 4.0 but everything else in the persistent universe as well and since Alpha 318 is now scheduled to arrive in the first half of November and ISC enters its regularly scheduled Hiatus the next few weeks we thought we'd take the opportunity to try something new with our last episode of the quarter a follow-up to each of the 318 related feature segments that we've done this

2. 00:00:51

   quarter looking at how they've continued to grow since we last showed them to you answering your questions that you had after watching and rolling them all into one big super sized report that we're calling the ISC follow-up because we're we're really really good at naming things enjoy so since updating you on the rivers earlier this year I've been focusing on the visual quality of the rivers themselves so when you explore them they are looking better than ever I think the biggest visual change I've introduced to the rivers is the new Cliff spawn points previously where we had steep edges along the river we just had the terrain texture that we get on steeper parts of the terrain but I wanted to kind of increase the visual Fidelity of this by spawning Cliff

3. 00:01:38

   meshes along the edge of it so that's exactly what we've done for the cliff mesh spawn points we add a new spawn point at the height of where the terrain would have been if the river wasn't there so that we can control where the top of the cliff is relative to the edge of the terrain near it and that's these red spawn points you can see here when I turn these back off you can see we have Cliff meshes that look as if they're the right height you can walk onto them from this terrain here while still providing a nice kind of closed-in gorge for this River and actually we were so happy with the results of adding additional spawn points around these gorgey areas that we decided to add more spawn points along

4. 00:02:25

   the edge of normal Rivers as well so that we can get rocks right along the edge of the water to break up the silhouette between the terrain and the water you can see those points here and when I turn back on the scattering you can see what that looks like so as you can see that really helps to break up the silhouette of the water but also makes the whole area feel denser and more real another visual Improvement I've worked on for the river is using more splines for the river modifiers instead of just a single Central spline along the path of the river we now have a spline for where each of the edges can be and this gives us much finer control over how the terrain should dip down into the river which is what actually matters rather than the depth at the middle for most cases but it also means that we eliminate some of the effects we were getting at sharp bends what we used to

5. 00:03:14

   get at the sharp Bend of a river was a pinching effect in the middle here where the terrain would jump from referencing a point somewhere here on the spline to reference single point somewhere here on the spline so you can see that they're basically equal distance from a point over here so we'd either be referencing the terrain from one or the other without ever kind of passing through this middle bit now that we have a spline for each Edge we can pick which Edge is closer and then more closely reference that when picking the final height for that part of the terrain and it just means that the the edges of our rivers are much much cleaner we're getting much less in terms of artifacting that we were seeing before and the overall result is just a lot better in my opinion [Music] I'm really really excited to see all of the new Rivers come into 318 very very

6. 00:04:04

   soon put a lot of work into improving the visual quality of the rivers as well as improving the tooling for our artists to be able to place more and more interesting Rivers our Tech artists have been hard at work for the object presets for the for the rivers to make the make sure that we're getting really really cool distributions of objects around them and I just think what we're going to see in 318 is going to be A Cut Above what we've had so far and I'm really looking forward to it thanks all foreign we spoke about the PTV racetrack it's been mostly just bug fixing for the most part it's been like the usual occasional Collision issue we had to fix up um also there was like instances where

7. 00:04:55

   rqa testers just took the card and went off the of the track and like drove into the elevators and got into other parts of the level so I kind of had to go around and fence off all the areas where people could leave the track also just in some cases on like inside the track there was a little shortcuts that could be taken so also these ones had to unfortunately block them off so nobody can gain an unfair advantage one of the things we didn't discuss last time is where the buggies actually come from so this they're not something the players bring themselves into the space there is this little side section of the track where they spawn and you take them and then just kind of bring them over to

8. 00:05:42

   the to the starting line and start from there and when they're destroyed then they basically respawn in that section again so there's always eight buggies for the players I can't wait to see what place uh we'll do with it once they get it in their hands it's the last time we spoke Korea has changed a lot in its environment uh we've been sort of building opened sort of breathing new life into it making it on par with uh some of our locations in terms of branding and sort of how we want the player to move through the space with this cs1 and two crimes that one and two are no longer going to be things that get you shocked or get you you know

9. 00:06:32

   stop you from landing at a location these fines will essentially just be like mini slaps on the wrists law enforcement or comment on them when they stop you and tell you to go pay you find off but they're not going to be as big of a a meaning as they once was alongside this we've also added uh other ways for the players to get rid of their sort of criminality to find kiosks that you can find all around now have a button that allows you to surrender to law enforcement this gives you the 20 discount of your time served when you go into prison uh and as always this is gonna go live and we're going to continue iterating on it reading feedback and making improvements so when the first video released and we

10. 00:07:21

    was talking about cluster I was watching HC vertigo um and he pretty much nailed the mission and who was given it so uh I'm not gonna spoil it I don't want to let you know but uh yeah if you want to find out who it is go check out he Virgo since the last time we talked about clasher and the new updates to that things are going along nicely we have ai walking about uh they have Loot on them uh they're making the environment feel more alive the black spot is in the mission is working in the mission we've added roots coming out of the wall so that even though people might know how to beeline it out of there now they have to figure out how to get to this place they've never been to before and break the route they're normally used to and then have to rejoin which is the difficult part because we always make

11. 00:08:09

    the rejoining bit harder and they can fall all the way down or you know whatever so that's it for the updates to clasha uh check it out when you get a chance caves changed since we last spoke about them just on my fixes and some Polish work so yeah they're done so it's been a couple of weeks since the last time we talked about the Daymark crash site and since then we've mostly been polishing and debugging we had a go no-go during which everything went smoothly we actually noticed during play tests that the missions were too easy so we just did some tweaking we added some AI on the level art side they were working on some lods so how far the objects are

12. 00:08:59

    going to display we did the better navigation pass for AI and for the player um and I think we tweaked a little bit the cave but there's just a crash chip in there nothing else we've also been working in integrating all the missions so there's going to be three missions on the Denmark crash site there's going to be a kill specific a kill all and a delivery missions where you need to go in and uh gather some crates and deliver them uh We've also been working on changing up the AI That's there because currently it's the nine tails and we wanted to add a little bit more diversity in there so we're working on adding in the sand Nomads which are probably not going to be here for this release but possibly the next one

13. 00:09:49

    since we last talked about The Siege Verizon Mission last week uh I forgot to mention there's also submissions just coming to the islands that the siege of horizon takes place on so these missions are going to take place on the islands when Siege isn't active uh the missions we have you doing will take you from building to building eliminating a number of enemies or maybe taking out a high value Target these missions are currently just like a prototype they're very basic they're just kind of exploring what direction we want to go at for these and other Islands so these will be another small addition when 318 goes live so there were some questions after we

14. 00:10:36

    released our last ISC where we talked about Hull scraping and uh there are some things that I can clarify from our position so what makes a reclaimer more profitable or better for in comparison to the vulture for t0 there is no real difference so the only difference there is you have more space to store your your script of Home material but the proper differences only come with Savage T1 so once we talk about munching and uh actually uh like converting proper ship debris into smaller bits the size of the the reclaimers definitely an advantage here some comments were all all asking about how can we use the scraper beam in an

15. 00:11:26

    offensive manner technically you can but you have to make sure that the target ship has its Shield deactivated so as long as another ship is shielded you will not be able to touch the Hub because there's like this energy field that is protecting the hull so there were also some questions on the repair side and sadly this repair iteration isn't the full fleshed out repair that you might need if your ship is fully destroyed so if you lost the wing the wing is lost if you lost your engine the engine is lost so your your magically repair gun that right now is taking the hull material to create new Hull material so it this gun isn't able to 3D print you an engine a fully functional Engine with all its its

16. 00:12:15

    parts so what it does is just cover up of like your Hull so it increases your health of the ship again but only to a degree where it is reasonable in comparison to to what the hull actually stands for so the material that you gather with the vehicle can be converted into the material that you use for your multi-tool to repair ships there's one more thing so we saw that you were already asking for what about players that are not interested in any combat scenario or in awaiting others to shoot themselves to shreds and then picking up the debris pieces for for profit from the hull scraping

17. 00:13:04

    well we have a solution for for for you and um well the miners of you might already know it so we we will expand our harvestable system uh to also facilitate to spawn fresh derelicts and what our fresh derelicts basically they are just the husks of existing ships that have a probability to spawn in Asteroid Fields or like basically around all the LaGrange points and you will be able to find them using scanning and then approach them like you would do with a minable and then scrape off their home and that is coming in Alpha 380. so what did we learn this week well we

18. 00:13:51

    learned that when you show a feature the very first week of the Season there's lots of room for additional improvements like we saw with rivertech that QA can be just as squirrely as players when testing the arena racetrack that Curry is looking pretty fresh with its Crusader makeover and that changes to the law system will make crime Stat one and two less Troublesome to deal with in the future in theory and that while Hall stripping won't be the offensive weapon some folks were theorizing using the harvestable system to generate non-combat wrecks will be a welcome addition to the more peaceful minded citizens out there now don't forget that citizencon is next Saturday October 8th at 8 A.M Pacific 3 P.M UTC it's shaping up to be a really informative quarter day and not just visual updates that you've come to expect but more design and gameplay

19. 00:14:39

    presentations that'll lead the way in the star citizens future where inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee we'll see you next week at citizen gun