Star Citizen: Around The Verse 3.7 – Austin

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] Hello. Welcome to episode 7 of Around the Verse, our weekly update behind the scenes of Star Citizen. I'm Chris Roberts. And I'm Sandy Gardner. We are another week closer to Citizen Con. Yes, we are. Pressure on. Pressure is on. Uh, so on today's episode, we go out to the Austin office for an update on Star Citizen's first data runner, and we'll also check in with the UK audio team to showcase the music logic system we're building. Yeah, pretty excited by that one. Uh, but first, we're going to go out to John Erskin to explain what else they've been working on in Austin. We have our senior audio designer, Jason Cobb. He's going to show a detailed look at some of the sounds that he's been crafting that were actually requested by many of our players. So, I've been working on the sound of

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   debris that you fly through if you are behind a ship that explodes in the game. Um, during dog fighting, we've had a lot of really great explosions visually and sonically, but we're lacking uh any sort of feedback for flying through the debris cloud that remains. Uh, so I've been working on sounds for that that aspect. Um, and to do that, um, you know, it's really not feasible to have a physical particle for every bit of debris that is generated. So, what I do is I take all of the output I generate one by one and drop them into a a digital audio workstation where I can set up an effects chain of a reverb for the front and a reverb for the back. Um, I'm using altterverb in this case, um, model of a saikorski. So when we play

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   the the output of all these generated files, they're very dry, but then when I enable the the effects, they start to take on some character of, you know, impacting a hull, and I can adjust some of the the qualities of of that. So, we've got the the front and the back here. Um, you can sort of start to place these impacts in into more of a space. And so I would take take all of these this output and render it through an effect and that can be one ship. And then maybe we need a slightly larger sounding ship. Well, we're going have to render it through another effect. Um there's a chance we might be able to do the effects part in real time, but for

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   right now in the prototyping, we're just hard baking the assets with reverb in them. So now into game play. Let's check this out. I'm going to solo just the explosion and the debris cloud so that we don't have to listen against uh the other the ship noise mainly just to isolate for this test. It seems like maybe the debris clouds lasting a little bit longer than it should, but it's hard to tell. You you want to hear something as you as you get around it, but you don't want it to last too long. Although that's not so big a

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   [Applause] deal. So, you can see that the random position of the particles and the randomness of the of the pre-baked sounds kind of works usually. Um, there's a few times where you'll see a large chunk go past your screen and you'll hear a sound. You're like, "Oh my god, that was perfect." Or there's other times you'll see the trunk go by and not hear a sound and it's like, "Well, okay, maybe it didn't hit me." So now I'm basically sitting still. This really doesn't happen in gameplay much though, so it's not really a valid test. I suppose it's possible you could be still next to an explosion just by happen stance. So, we need it to work in all

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   cases. Now, you can also tell that the debris clouds may be a little bit loud compared to the explosion. So, the mixing and the fine tuning is stuff that we'll definitely do. And I can do a demonstration of that right now. I think that when you are in the explosion and then fly away, it lasts a little bit long, but this is a a level of um decoration of polish that that really adds to immersion in that um prior we we've had these great explosions and and you kind of see it happen and if you play through

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   it, you're really not hearing much. It's just sort of like, okay, there was the explosion, but where's where's the rest of it? I see all this this noise, all this scattered noise, but but I'm really hearing it. I don't really feel like it's affecting the ship at all. So, this is just one of those tiny little um details that um a surprising amount of work goes into it, but it it's u just adds one other little complete flushing out of the experience of dog fighting. So, that um you have a little more visceral reaction to that. Yes, there there was there used to be a ship there and now it's a bunch of tiny bits and I just ran through them all. It's something that uh we didn't have before and that when we put it in, hopefully it'll it'll help people have a little more joy out of the kill they just did. Thanks, Jason. That's really great.

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   It's amazing the level of detail that goes into making these sounds, things people might not normally think about. That's the things that really makes Star Citizen great. It's that level of detail and attention to detail that really sets it apart. Next up, we have a report from the DevOps team. We're going to talk about the various things we're working on and show you a little bit about what happens behind the scenes to make Star Citizen run. Well, the DevOps team is made up of three main functions here as we're uh configured in Austin. We have uh a build ops section of our team, live ops, and uh publishing. And all of this makes what we call DevOps. They're small groups, so we bundle it all into the same uh overall term of DevOps. So the

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   build ops team is basically managing and configuring the systems that we use to put all the builds together that are used in the company. And those are the builds that once they pass QA will also make it out to the PTU and also make it to our live service. So that's a little bit of an overview on the build ops. The live ops team does a lot of the tools and automation systems that we use in our live publishing operations. These are things that would automate the buildout of the services that we use on the PTU or the lives. They're also building the tools that we use for internal development. This could be how we interact with our source code. This

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    could be how we deliver builds internally throughout the company to the QA testers and the engineers, pretty much everyone. And then we also have the publishing team which does the actual publishing of the game. This is the fun part where we take what's been approved by QA and our leads throughout the company and we can uh this team will publish that throughout the uh process through PTU and then eventually to the live service. This includes everything from taking the build in its raw state, bundling it up, sending it out to the servers and then managing the whole patch production process. So, I I feel like DevOps is kind of like Scotty to to make a Star Trek reference, you know. Um, you've got all these

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    different crew on the ship that all have their own different jobs and things like that. You know, you obviously need the medic to make sure that the crew members are healthy. You need the captain to guide the ship. You know, Chris Roberts is kind of the captain. You've got all these different roles, but if the ship doesn't run, if it doesn't move, and, you know, the sort of work core is is is broken, then it doesn't go anywhere. And so I view us as kind of being the the guys that are, you know, sort of banging on in the engine room helping to make sure that the ship still runs. Um it's it's a very critical part of the mission. So what's happening in the current patching system is the the data that goes in that's changed is compressed into these large pack files that are then bundled up and put into the patch. Well, the problem with that is that even if there's only three files

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    that changed in a two gig file size, once they're recompressed, the patcher sees this as one giant two gig file. If you make these changes across a large number of files, you wind up with a 20 gig patch. So what we're doing is we're breaking all of this apart so that now we can act the patcher can actually look at only the files that have changed not the big bundles of change. This way we're hoping that we can deliver we're really hoping for 10% of the overall payload that we're delivering now. So that would be a 90% reduction in patch size. I think a lot of people are going to be happy about this. I think it's going to get a lot more people into the PTU because they can get in faster. It's going to help a lot of people out on the edges in the in

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    the extreme areas that have maybe low bandwidth or maybe a data cap. So, it's a it's something that's really difficult for us because this actually goes down to the core of how the game engine actually loads files off the disk. So, we're making changes to the engine itself with the help of our team in Germany, who's of course that's what they do. Uh, this will allow us to be able to make use of this new patching process. And I'm expecting this uh this is going to be a big deal for the game, for all the players, and it's really going to help us on delivery times with all these publishes. Older tools we would use to deploy things, uh, manage configuration for them. uh they're interesting at the time. Uh

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    there's been a whole lot of work, whole lot of development, but the new tools that we're rolling out really make it easy for us to change things very quickly. Uh and when I say quickly, I mean sometimes you'll be waiting on this these tools for even minutes just to change a line in some server somewhere. So now it's it really feels like we can just issue commands the whole deployment and they all just obey. It's really great. Well, I think I think that a lot of what we do, it's so behind the scenes. Most people don't ever get a chance to see all the little nuts and bolts of how all this works. What does it take to set up a server? What does it take to run 50, 100, 150 servers and keep them all running and keep them all talking and keep the network security

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    up? These are the type of things that we do and it's really fulfilling work because without this backend infrastructure that we're building and the automation to keep it going fast, I don't think we would be able to move as fast as Chris wants us to move and as fast as the game development is moving. And that's a rewarding experience. Thanks guys. That was great. This patch size reduction is really going to make a big difference for all of our players and especially all of our developers who actually have to patch the game multiple times a day. It's going to make a big difference. Now it's back to you Chris and Sandy. Thanks John. Uh DevOps and live ops are definitely some of the unsung heroes that make Star Citizen Go. So thank you guys for your hard work. Uh so when we last saw the Drake Herald on ship shape

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    back in May, it was entering the modeling phase. It's come a long way since then. Is heading into its final art pass. We've actually been doing a lot of break ships recently for some reason. I don't know why. Yeah. And the Herald's been an interesting one to watch. It has definitely been one of our more divisive ships. Uh well, yeah, maybe. Um we'll sat down with Josh and the rest of the team to see what makes uh this courier run. With 26, we're excited to release the Drake Herald and it's our first infrarunnership. Uh what that really is going to mean is you're going to have these big data banks on the outside of the ship. They're going to have a lot of volume to store, you know, intel assets. Uh this will be stuff you know uh you know locations of where research data might be found, mining sites, salvage locations, a ship blackbox, you know,

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    any any of the intangible you could think of is kind of what we're we're looking at with intel and and what an inferrunner is going to be carrying around. So uh one thing when flying around in the Herald that players are going to notice is that the ship is really really fast. It has, I think, the biggest engines per mass on a ship so far. So, uh, if anybody knows what a a funny car is or a dragster, it's very dragster. I would assume you're going to see a lot of these in races. Um, like I said, uh, they're hard to catch, super fast. Uh, we got it loaded as well. the players can expect uh uh lots and lots of counter measures. So with all the

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    ships, pretty much any asset uh this ship uh when I read the specs, the design, the intent of the ship, I usually break out a few keywords and those will be my motif for the ship. or for this ship I used speed uh science tech uh evasion also the the motif of Drake had to be integrated in when designing the ship which is uh bare bones um it's it's wires exposed it's uh trellis work it's uh it's not as as fancy as some of your other uh other branded ships uh some of the redesign was in part to make sure that we could get everything uh built to like the metric standards that we need for how

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    big guns are, how big components are, uh how much space a player needs to actually walk in and through the ship. Um, one thing that always looks great in in a lot of sci-fi movies are these nice, you know, creepy crammed corridors, but unfortunately with a lot of game logic, it's like, well, no, we we've got to make a little bit more space so your average standing guy can can get through and move around stuff. Uh, and so you can definitely see that with the interior of the Herald where uh just the comm station in the back. uh the the seat for that's going to slide you in and out as you're using the station to optimize the space as much as possible. Uh but then also some of that back wall area was restructured a bit to open up enough room to make sure that

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    even if that seat's extended and someone's getting out of it, uh another player or an NPC can walk behind that seat cleanly without having to, you know, clip into the walls or bounce all over the place. when we start the design process for the uh vehicle destruction system, we come in and I will talk with art and design and we will sort of work out in 2D and 3D how to tear apart the ship. Uh so to start that I would say for example I would look under the model. Now damage comes in sort of layers right? Um there's a bunch of different features that work together. There is the exterior hole of the ship. Underneath the exterior hole of the ship, there is an underlying sort of damage skin and gubbins. Now, the reason we have this is because now we've added

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    a damage shader that you've probably seen that creates a sort of warping metal sort of effect, and you can punch through and you can see through the ship that consists of the outer shell, the underlying goubbins, and the actual geometry. Now, all these need to sort of blend together at the end of the day. So, part of my process is to check for all the different parts of geometry. I want to check for what are called UVs. UVs are what the texture is placed on that creates the actual visual of the asset. And then we also have another layer called UV2s. And these are what the damage shader actually works on. Um we can see that in the editor here over in the top left corner. These would be the UV2s. This is what the damage map shader is actually applied to. So when I shoot the ship, there will be ripples and distortion and metal bending. Um in conjunction with that, I also have to create little sort of explosive charges

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    around the ship. Now, most of my work is preliminary. Basically, I take the model and I set it up for destruction. So, I'll break off the pieces. I'll make sure all the checks and balances are there and I will prep the work for other people. So, for example, the particle guys, um, I would come up with them next and I would set these things up called helpers. And helpers are little green cubes. They have direction. They point X, Y, and Z. And they're basically a little explosive charge. Now, what I did here is I set up sort of little group of them. And this group of them is just a bunch of different effects that are generalized and used on different ships. explosions, sparks, fire, etc., etc. So, when a piece takes 100% damage, it pops off, the explosion activates, and creates more shader damage. So, it's kind of layers. You're peppering the ship with your own guns. You're coming in. Um, parts are exploding off. It's all melting. And at the end of the day,

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    you should have a pretty broken looking ship. So, if we come in, I'll start hiding some pieces. So, I will come over here. We've gone into Max and we've done some initial ship setup. We've checked that the mesh has UV2s. We've checked that the mesh has underlying geometry for the shader to show underneath when bullet holes are taken into effect. Uh the shader is pretty cool with the damage system in that the shader actually lets you poke holes in the meshes with what are called vertex colors. So when I go into max, I go onto the mesh and I start setting areas where there's translucency, transparency, etc., etc. for damage to shoot through. Not every area does need to be shot through, though. You need to make sure that you're not wasting extra geometry, costing performance, adding, you know, internal structure to places that don't need it. But you also want to make sure

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    that every piece blows off, has a neat effect, looks pretty cool when it's flying off, so on so forth. Um, as you see, some pieces are floating away. Some pieces are kind of just sitting around. Uh, those are called vectors, and those are little force pushes that are set in the XML that tells the piece how hard it should fly off the ship and in what direction. Um, as I come in, I just keep going around the ship looking for areas that are not working correctly. So, this area, for example, is working correctly. We see we are getting bullet holes. The procedural system is working. UV2s are working, so on so forth. But an area that I know it doesn't really work is up here. If we take a look, we see we're kind of getting a bullet hole, but nothing really going on there. Well, that means I have to go back into Max and kind of figure out why. Maybe repro the UV2s, so on and so forth. Like I was saying, testing different weapon

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    types, seeing how they affect the damage, testing different lighting conditions, making sure all the pieces blow off, all that fun stuff. But, uh, pretty much in closing, that's how we put together some of the damage. Uh, it's a mix between 3D Studio Max, XML, and the Cry Engine. Uh it's a very iterative process going back and forth until it's refined and then you hand it off to the professionals at the end and they sort of tweak the graphic uh sort of V effects. They tweak the explosions, health, damage, and lighting. So that's it. Hope you enjoyed. There you go. I'm pretty excited about the potential of uh more non-combat focused specialy ships in Star Citizen, especially as we move towards 30 and the full persistent universe. And it's faster than an M50 in a straight line. That's what I That's what I heard. In cruise mode.

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    While it's been another week of development, it's also been another week of amazing fan content. Yep. Uh so, let's go to Tyler Witken uh to present this week's community update. Hey everyone, Tyler Witkin, community manager in the Austin, Texas studio, here to bring you this week's community update. Last week, the Origin M50 won the title of Galactic Tour's fan favorite flyer, landing at a spot in our pledge store for one week. Just a reminder that there's only 24 hours left on that sale. And the battle continues this week, this time between the Super Hornet and the Vanguard Warden. Look out for those results on the website tomorrow. Tomorrow also brings a whole new issue of Jump Point for subscribers. This time taking a deeper look at the Anvil Terrapin. Definitely worth checking out. Also, last Saturday we had

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    a blast at the Austin Bar Citizen. And just as a reminder, there's another Bar Citizen this Saturday. This time in Orlando, Florida. Find out all the details at tinyurl.com/fab barcitizen. This week's RSI newsletter coming out tomorrow features an extra special sneak peek from Evo Herzog in our Frankfurt studio showcasing some of the work done behind head stabilization and FPS, which you can watch in 60 frames per second. So, make sure to catch that in the newsletter tomorrow. Lastly, it's time for this week's MVP award. A huge congratulations goes to Jay Corin for his detailed efforts in creating a travel guide for Citizen Con. This was actually brought to my attention by our events manager, and I can see why. So, I highly encourage anybody who's traveling to Citizen Con this year, check out the guide. Congratulations again, Jorin. You're this week's MVP. Thanks again,

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    everyone, for all your support, and we'll see you in the verse. Few weeks ago, we profiled some of the dynamic sound effects as we walked through our crashed ship demo. Yeah. So, now we're going to shift our focus to music. Ross Trenza, senior sound designer at Wimslow, is going to give us a inside look on the new music logic system, which I'm pretty excited by. Hey, I'm Ross. Hello there. I'm Sam. I'm going to describe how the interactive music system works in uh in Star Citizen. So from the code side, we've got a system that will basically driven off music events. The way it works is that Ross can decide what happens when the music events occur. So if he wants the the event when your ship gets hit by

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    a bullet, if he wants that to be really significant, then he can decide how that happens uh by using the uh datadriven tools that we've uh provided for him. Whatever you're doing, we're making sure that the music system knows what you're doing and is responding in a way that's appropriate and cool and cinematic. So, um, I'll show you some examples. So, uh, a really nice example we're working on at the moment is the ambient music. This is when there's not really, you know, any combat or anything going on. We're just exploring spaces and stuff. At the moment, we're hearing some FPS music. So this is just the the engine knows that we're on foot. It's playing sort of a slightly synthy, slightly tense underscore. It's very ambient. Then as you move into the ship aerospace, it'll slowly transition to a

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    more grand kind of exploration kind of feel to the music and that's based on the conditions we know. We know that you're in the ship now and we know that the engines are starting, that kind of thing. You get out of the ship. Uh if we were in space now and we wanted to EVA directly into space, it would work there as well. But we're going to take a cool little jump off the platform here, just cuz it's a great example. As you head towards the ed edge of the platform and go for a big leap out into space, you'll hear the music transition. There we go. And now we got this really cool ethereal almost craft workesque ambient music. All of this by Pedro. And see this is all based on conditions that Sam Hall and I have been

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    working on. We know we're floating. We know that we're not in any immediate danger. So we've got this beautiful exploratory quite sort of a sense of wonder music playing. As we come back down, we'll land back on the platform. We know that again, no danger at the moment, just FPS, no threats. We go into an FPS ambient music. You can hear this system the most is when you're you're dog fighting. So, here we have a few pirates coming in. Immediately, we'll be getting some uh some tension music. That's based on the fact we have some unknown guys approaching. So, the systems told us two guys have just arrived. Why does everybody have to fight? They seem to be a threat. So that's pushed up the tension parameter. Now I'm starting to fire on

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    them and they're returning fire. We'll start to really see the the system ramp up. Now the intensity number, which is the real backbone of this system, is going to start going crazy as your shield gets is getting hit. You're hitting the guys. These numbers are constantly being fed in. Stop now. As that number rises, we move through way out of the ambient area into low action, medium action, eventually high action, which is really crazy. If you eventually manage to take out one of these guys, you get a boost to the mood parameter, which is kind of the Y-axis. Here we go. We also get a little uh sting there that plays whenever you kill one of the bad guys. There's the engine has a chance to play a little uh victory

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    sting. Tada. Yeah, we've had a boost that's pushed us into the hero state now. So, the music's kind of gone all heroic. We've got big brass sections. And that'll swell back down again cuz all these parameters all decay back down to like a a stasis. There we go. Another guy getting taken out there. The uh the code of Sam Hall. But what he's provided me with which is incredibly valuable is all this debug information. Uh this tells me everything that's going on from uh we have all the stings which is like momentary events that could happen. This is things like ships passing by as you might have heard there that sometimes get a like a little little trumpety sting when a ship passes by to successfully hitting bad guys your

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    ship getting blown up all manner of parameters. That's our momentaries. And then we have the long-term information. We have the the ship's intensity. That's the big number that that's our backbone. The mood and all manner of other parameters that we can use to feed into the system in any combination of those. And you can see we're getting information in about events here. So we have we've hit the shield to the ship. So that's good. That feeds into it. Yep. The player's ship has been hit and returning. So this this this constant feed of information, that's what I can rely on to to tweak the numbers in a music logic system to make sure you know the system doesn't go too crazy uh go up into high action too fast or anything like that. Now we saw a ship destroyed and that gives us a cool little momentary

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    spin. All of this, although we're seeing this in the flight mode at the moment, we're working on it for uh for 2.6 six to make sure that these numbers translate into the FPS game mode and eventually also just in EVA combat as well. So no matter what you're doing, uh this stuff is always appropriate and the music will will shift to suit the EVA or the FPS environment. We have a theoretical example just to show you using some console commands. Here we can simulate what it'll be like when uh we have EVA combat working in conjunction with the music logic. So, I'll throw in some numbers here. And just like we saw with the pirates attacking a ship when the music

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    logic was going nuts, I'll be simulating the player getting attacked or or attacking the enemy. And we'll see that that the EVA music, that gentle kind of craft workesque music starts ramping up in this cool kind of coral way. All of this, again, this is all Pedro's beautiful music. And just like the flight combat music, we have heroic EVA music, we have grim EVA music. Exactly the same setup, just with a whole different mood to the music and a different set of actual music loops. And the same thing here now with uh with FPS. This is something we'll be seeing very soon. This is same system again, but this time we're getting uh

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    hit by it could be pirates attacking us and rum foot. So music is a bit more personal, a bit more synthy and dark. You get that kind of grand space music for the space flight a little more tense and synthetic for FPS. So again, you can hear that music swelling and falling. This will be a constant background between all these systems. And as you move through different parts of the galaxy, the the whole the whole overall suite of music will move from one set to another, but there will be an understandable language across all of it that you'll kind of get used to. And this will be on its feet and working forever. It's a a system that's self-managing and autonomous really and will just work, which is awesome. So

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    that's music logic. That's uh what Sam Hall and I have been building in DataForge. We're really really proud of uh how far it's come. It's going to be available in 2.6 and uh that'll be just the beginning. It's just going to get bigger and bigger and grander and grander, but uh hope you enjoyed it. Thanks very much, Ross. That is super cool and it's going to be an exciting addition to the game and I'm really looking forward to that. Uh yep. So, that music logic system is actually an evolution of a dynamic music system that I first created for Wing Commander called Origin FX. Uh, obviously it's a lot more powerful and robust, but u very cool. It definitely gives the player a more personalized experience and everybody's going to feel like they're they're in their own movie or something. Very cool, which is the point of it. There we go. Well, that's it for today's show. Check out Reverse Verse tomorrow for your chance to ask the Austin team

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    questions about today's features as well as some exclusive videos. Also, Ben Lesnik will be hosting a live playthrough of Wing Commander 2 to celebrate its 25th anniversary of release. Wow. That'll be on Saturday the 17th. So, tune in if you can. As always, a big thank you to our subscribers whose monthly contributions uh help us produce video like this. And thank you as always to all of our backers for the opportunity to be here in the first place. Yeah. Thank you guys. Next week we'll head out to our Frankfurt office. So make sure to tune in for that one. Yes. So that's the show for this week. Uh thank you all for watching and 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.