Squadron 42: Around the Verse - Scanners Aglow, Torpedoes in Tow

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:13

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm eric kieron davis and I'm Dave haddock this week we're going to take a look at the design and implementation of ship scanning and radar systems and go to jerod for some details on the Aegis Eclipse that's right but first let's check in with Phil Miller for our monthly squadron 42 project update thanks guys hello and welcome to another squadron 42 update the weapon system is be receiving an overhaul and right now a lot of attention is being put on recoil weapon field is of course incredibly important in any FPS experience and squadron 42 features a lot of unforeseen sequences where this new recoil will be seen a lot so a ton of work goes into a seemingly small part of the overall package a lot of everyday players may even take for granted this started out as an animation in Maher focusing on the bearing p8

2. 00:01:01

   assault rifle as a starting point for the visual golfer animation the variations of random surrounded to each shot the amount the weapon kicks back the horizontal and vertical movements of the weapon this new system allows us to define a base recoil for each weapon but the player effects it depending on their position their state under the stats as you can see a lot more customization goes into this than you might think ship AI continues to come along with recent focus being put on smoothing out takeoffs and landings on the interest drink some can flight formations to make designers lives a little bit easier a lot of progress has been made in this last area as we termined just how AI prioritizes targets based on threat level chance and personal character bias the ship AI teams also continue to iterate on fighter and gunship behavior with constant feedback from QA along

3. 00:01:49

   with a lot of back-end improvements helping to steadily improve combat in general also in the works is Odin systems space scaping part of our recent focus and s42 development has been working on our space scene overworld or as we call it within the project our space scape through development on the coil the engineers have been busy building the amazing gas cloud tech but it isn't just confined to the mysterious coil it's also being used throughout the campaign to create nebula another pockets of interest in space you can use this as a tool to drive the narrative forward in particular areas build areas in space much like a conventional interior level controlling color density and the style of simulation could add a huge amount of potential variety to the space cape from angry aggressive simulations let the coil to softer more serene bodies of gas

4. 00:02:37

   just floating in space this gives both art and design a great math scope to make our space scenes look amazing and convey a message or mood to the player from a design standpoint we enter strike advance between plausibility reality and cool looking visuals this tech once perfected here in squadron 42 will also be applied to various systems in star citizen's PU the proper team continues to turn our control room sets for chem line with even more computers screens and other monitoring gauges of filling other pieces to really sell the abandon vibe we have done a damage pass screen damaged variants of each asset adding flexibility and reused to the same worker started on scrap house for an upcoming location we can't go into too many details but we are in early days on building out the texture set and geometry visual targets are now being built up on chem line along with several

5. 00:03:24

   of the s 42 locations the full concept our support to provide direction for the art and design team ship emergency and distress states are being iterated on and polished with critically damaged ships still in space environments now looking suitably being up this is separate to the fully destroyed versions that have previously been seen crashed on planet work continues on the bengal carry as well the new locations being built out in their final states these include a brick that although visually different as you would expect from a different manufacturer still echoes the functionality of the idris because at the end of the day a brick is a break the animation team have been working

6. 00:04:12

   towards getting variations into the NPC combat says alongside the train nursery sets we have been developing out the visual language for the untrained NPCs the trained combatants will be confident in their actions decisive and a much more difficult archetype to kill the untrained sets will be more skittish and wild interactions with this in mind we've been paying particular focus to how the different groups interact with the cover objects as an example of this the Train military sets will switch hands when entering the left side of cover whereas untrained NPCs will remain right-handed this allows the train set to be more concealed when stepping down firing versus the more wild and disciplined and train set there are also stark differences in the fare extensor said the train military will take versus their civilian counterparts details like these what we aim to deliver to give a

7. 00:04:59

   fully fleshed out variety and believability to both friendly and enemy assets for squadron 42 and star citizen we're currently still in an implementation stages we continue to expand the AI combat behaviour as we lock down all the technical details more will take another animation pass to really tighten up the visuals on all the combat assets the character art team occurring additional hero costumes for our major characters such as graves played by John rhys-davies a lot of effort goes into the styling the best 42 scary to infer their personality and history graves Jackie's from his old days when he was parked hundred eighteen squadron button-up shirt work pants and heavy boots paying the picture of a professional manager a security who works on a rugged mining base under us have even added an extra little weight to this once trimmed Navy pilot I know that feeling to emphasize his advancing years so that's it for this month we'll

8. 00:05:48

   see you in June for another s42 update now back to you in the studio thanks Phil an advantage of developing squadron 42 alongside star citizen is that many features and mechanic can be shared which we saw with a few of the items covered in this update that's right and one of the features that we'll be factoring into both games very soon are the shipboard scanning and radar systems yes a lot of the early focus for these mechanics relates to the misc prospector and mining with that feature right around the corner in the PU but eventually all ships will have scanning functionality including those highlighted in squadron 42 let's learn more from the designers themselves in this week's feature today we're going to be talking about some improvements we've made to the radar system regarding two adjoining

9. 00:06:37

   systems specifically our ping system and our scanning system right now in the game you can see active targets that are within what we're calling our passive radar range so that's your normal radar what we wanted to do though is because the distances are so vast I want to give you a way to get some info about things that weren't within your passive radar range one way we incorporated that is by introducing a ping mechanic so when you do a ping it sends out a wave that is larger than your your passive radar radius and it returns to you the signal values of items that are outside of that range and within this larger ping range

10. 00:07:26

    and these are you'll I'm sure discovered that whether they're friendly or not by whether they come they turn and fire on you or whether it's a stationary or whether you're able to interact with them and then as you flap to them holding your cursor over them will eventually give you some information that's relevant that's important about that ship so things like a ship owner faction what ship type it is then we're going to be expanding that gameplay after this this first year of of implication so we can do things like HBO scan like the crew manifests how many how many crew members are on board what cargo do they have are they worth commandeering yeah John take them out take their cargo are they some kind of are the affection based you know do I really want to attack them and upset a

11. 00:08:15

    particular faction so we can make decisions about that the cool thing is the way that we design this whole infrastructure is if we have a vehicle we could provide four bits of surface information on that it's name its health its status and it's faction and then as you scan further into the detailed scan you can uncover the crew there's our health you can uncover sub items you can uncover car go and you can build it in this big manifest and then with this manifest you could store it for later and maybe in the future who knows maybe for information running you could package this information up and then sell it if you'd like and the that idea is that you could send out a big wave of history energy game game logic it sends out a

12. 00:09:07

    big pulse and you light it you light up like a Christmas ball so it's kind of a dangerous thing to do it's not doing she's radar but it's dangerous to use the ping because you've now shown the world where you are it's also good for stealth gameplay since everything is based on how much power you're using and how much Energy's getting turned to your we call heat or infrared if you throttle your settings down so they're not consuming its much power and they're not generating as much heat your radar signature goes down because it goes down people aren't able to detect you at greater distances so if you turn it all the way down you could go under the cover of people's radar but you're

13. 00:09:55

    limiting yourself you know you're throttling all your power down your shields might be down your weapons might not be a powerful so if someone sends out that ping pulse wave and detects you they could go immediately fly over there and start dropping all sorts of lasers on you before you have a chance however since he lit up like light bulb you know hey there's someone out there I don't know if he found me but he's searching so it gives that interesting gameplay where the predator is searching for the prey and the prey doesn't know if he should run or fight type of deal scanning may not be the friendliest section in the world and so as you do go up to a ship and then you scan them you know the entire crew should be alerted hey you're being actively scanned so what you do from that point can be up to

14. 00:10:43

    you is this an aggressive aggressive action are they friendly you know why the heck are they scanning me all right if they're looking over my cargo then we can incorporate gameplay where you get informed of that and then you can you can take evasive action you can counter-attack them in the PU radar and scanning and also use remaining right now radar finds only minor bull rocks we added we artificially added some non my noble rocks in the mix just to create a bit of element of do I find it do I not find it but this is only for longer distance as you get closer the radar will be able to better understand if it's a minor ball or not my noble and to eliminate the ones that are not mindful you don't have to scan it until

15. 00:11:32

    you get close so you already know you have a minor bull rock when you're pretty much in visual range and at that point is just about finding out how good over my nipple rock is is is there something super valuable in there or is it just something that you work for one hour and get just pennies for it radar was mainly used to find in order to find objects in the universe whether they're hidden thing that players have to find or ship or a wreck or something like this and scanning is the finding of a finding of details of what that object is made of what's what the components are so you'd be a ping find out where general generally where things are if I have to them as you get close enough to them so that they're in your passive radar range and so they're now active entities if you fly up to them close

16. 00:12:19

    enough in this case we have the prospector working this way you can go up to it you'll switch to your your mining UI and then as you hover your cursor your flight cursor over the the this mining resource target over time there'll be a little indicator that shows you what percentage of the that scanning abilities at and as you progress through the scanning indicator you know you eventually give you exactly what the resources available in that mining entity are so that'll give you an idea of hey this is worth mining or you know what this isn't exactly what I was looking for let's go find other targets when you get to that point do another ping get some more general information about where things around you and then start heading off toward those targets I

17. 00:13:07

    know the mission guys are really excited they want to start using this post 3 2 because 3 2 is mostly gonna is all gonna focus on the mining aspect but after that we want to start opening it up to all the ships other than the prospector to use it than the general scanning so you can start scanning whatever you want really cool stuff guys as you can see the functionality currently being fine-tuned for mining will have various uses when it's applied to different ships and situations yeah and in squadron 42 radar is factoring into missions and situations in fun ways adding realism and elements of flight simulation to the proceeding yeah and while we're on the subject of radar a certain ship plan for alpha 3.2 release is particularly adept at flying under it that's right let's go to Jared right now

18. 00:13:55

    for a new installment of shipshape exploring these stealthy Aegis eclipses greetings citizens and welcome to another edition of shipshape we take a look at what's on the ship pipeline who's working on what provide interviews with developers and continue with our brand-new bi-weekly cadence that means smaller but more frequent updates I'm your host Content Manager Jared Huckaby now on the show this week we'll be sitting down with some of the team members working to bring the stealthy Aegis Eclipse to life in the upcoming star citizen alpha 3.2 let's check in on the progress of this torpedo delivering Dynamo now the inspiration for the Eclipse has been primarily things like the b-2 stealth bomber it's you know a flying wing it's

19. 00:14:46

    designed to be this like stealthy secretive capital ship killer its role is to kind of fly into the battle fire some giant torpedoes hopefully try and take down the other capital ships and then fly away intact it's based on age there's a lot more angles not more you know Phillips and soft curbs look at things like the saber Raven and tried to kind of compliment things like the holes in the wings so you can see the same signal designs implemented within the Eclipse there's just a single-seat spaceship it's just a cockpit and exterior and a lot of torpedo Bay the interior the cockpits very utilitarian it's has a lot of quite heavy technical cladding almost when you get inside this

20. 00:15:37

    thing you feel like you're kind of a small part of this like you know really complicated bomber really climbing is these things just almost a bit of a challenge in itself I think when you actually get inside the the cockpit for the Eclipse you feel very encompassed by it when the canopy closes around you and the computers come towards you you feel like you're sat in a bomber the Eclipse has three different modes essentially it's going to have a that there's not code support for it yes but the intention will be there it has obviously an atmospheric mode where all the wings fold back and the fins fold up and it kind of transforms and this like really quite agile shape and the the space mode this is the kind of the typical

21. 00:16:24

    triangular shape of the b2 that you'd normally see but also has quite interesting landing mode as well when the Eclipse comes into land all the wings fold upwards and when the canopy opens it kind of forms a shape which is quite almost beat like if you look at the shape of the b2 airplane it's kind of based around like birds of prey it's based upon a Falcon and you know if you look at the side profile has quite an avian feel to it so we kind of try to kind of replicate that on the Eclipse to a degree you know it's why there's two to three Gladius is it's it's a wide ship I think as why this is this long if not wider so yeah I think if it's flying up heads and you've got a keen eye you'll definitely see it but I think but by the by the time that you've seen it it'll be too late I already like

22. 00:17:13

    to go I think primarily when I was building Eclipse I wanted to try and focus upon that animations I wanted all of the shifters feel very technically intricate so from the way that the cockpit opens and a lot of folds out to the way the torpedo Bay so that is payload if you look at the way the top it laid like it delivers missiles and has this kind of almost cylindrical a delivery system inside it which is quite quite complicated so little torpedoes themselves I get lowered just below the ship by this quite complicated mechanical arm and once I blow the ship dead and they have like a forward firing motion so I know this is still probably the biggest issues that we have with with the Eclipse at the moment is that

23. 00:18:01

    this is a new kind of torpedo launcher like in terms of animation on how it works and this is something that wasn't exactly how it was in the game before I cross a generator it's basically one torpedo on each gun sure it's like several torpedoes like this whereas for this one it's a torpedo launcher and basically it can choose the torpedo so on but it's in the middle hopefully in the future you should be able to equip different uh feeders and choose the order where you're firing the torpedo like you could get regular torpedo in the middle like a different uh video on the left on a different of it on the right and say after us firing this Opie do you want where the left also right whereas usually it would be choppy do

24. 00:18:51

    one torpedo two torpedoes way so but maybe you could say oh yeah I want top either one first and then torpedoes sweet but not torpedo too soon so even if it seems like a relatively simple ship as a torpedo launcher is a bit more complicated and other systems before landing gear is quite intricate too so when this thing moves and transforms it feels just just very technical compared some of the other ships but if you think if you look at it when it's transforming the entire thing just feels alive so it's got this cool bells and whistles and that the fans will see this and think I know too cool piece of kit like how long moves like it's you know it's gonna feel about us that's very minimal armaments in terms of the baikonur it uses the entire ship's basically just three giant torpedoes I think it uses size nine torpedoes so it's quite big missiles the

25. 00:19:38

    same the same size is what's the use on the retaliate err so if you just look at the size of the torpedoes compares the ship itself they're almost as long as the spaceship is and it's got three of these so it's going to be and quite a force to be reckoned with the whole point in this thing is that it's probably part of a convoy so when you're flying along you'll have your escort with you you know and the fighters around to protect you and you have one sole mission which is to you know fly to your destination and just deliver the sidelines torpedos to just wreak maximum havoc you need your friends around you Raley's giving you this kind of the ample protection to make sure that for the fighters trying trying to destroy your ship that you have peoples in fendi so I kind of almost welcomes a team plate element to it because you need this protection to be able to deliver

26. 00:20:27

    the missiles I think if you just flew this the ship to a capital ship on your own and had you know say this cap say the address house fighters around it and they see you you wouldn't send the chance if you look at the exterior of the ship it's quite dark it's all very kind of you know matte paints this very kind of dark color schemes but he wants to kind of contrast this with having the interior of the ship having this quite bright white paint anywhere the ship opens up really is why since I'd obviously scoot in the cockpit because if you're flying through space the giant bright white cockpit then people are going to see you coming a couple of ballistic weapons it has a couple of smaller I think size 2 or size 3 guns but primarily the big focus of the ship is just the torpedoes the fact that it has three size 9 torpedo

27. 00:21:16

    kind of speaks for itself so you you when you buy this and you know what you're getting into there's there's no you know misconceptions of what this thing is it's a bummer straight and simple it's going to wreak havoc destroy everything we made sure that as he eclipse could fit in an iOS as well so this is this is an important one so this is something if you have the wings deployed you won't be able to go in a nice way so you need to get into the learning mode which basically will collapse society as a wing tips we will be like this learning gear cause there and basically you can still fly on land in your night eyes so this is important as well obviously because if you get an address you can use it as a mobile where the base go somewhere then deploy some eclipse do

28. 00:22:07

    some reconnaissance work out do some attacks obviously use you see it wise to keep keeping me at bay I think the flying wing design is pretty interesting as well in terms of shape on in terms of maneuverability it should be a bit different since it's wholly flat as a design in the atmosphere I won't behave like so Savior for example awesome some ships that are relatively is the same size I guess Eclipse is a stealth bomber that will be really useful for cope software I think especially because it can act both as a reconnaissance ship because it's Elsie it's relatively fast as well for a bomba on if needed can't destroy something but it's can also be used as a support hole like if you have some

29. 00:22:55

    fighters that are already there like trying to harass or destroy a big ship like your stuffer or a claim where you don't come in for your torpedoes do massive damage and come back if you Liam then do the same again having these least niche roles really adds to the gameplay I think if you had you know heavy ship could do every type of you know combat and can mine and you know who could do everything build bases then suddenly end up with a lot of ships which basically just exactly the same with with no head of defining characteristics so I think it's important to have a range of vehicles which deliver different types of user experiences and also things that kind of encourage teamwork and collaboration you know it's kind of going pollen mission

30. 00:23:42

    with your friends you know when someone's in trouble or you you've seen that there's some kind of capital ship in the system that you need to take care of be nothing to get your friends together and say look guys we need to try to take this down it's it's just a fun thing to do once upon a time I was falling in love now I'm only getting torpedos shut it my javelin there's nothing I can do it's a total eclipse of my ship no worry about YouTube Content ID mention that one huh the aegis eclipse is making its way towards release into the upcoming star citizen alpha 3.2 as for other ships in the pipeline we can see that the anvil hurricane the vanduul blade and the aegis avenger variants are all in the flight prep phase getting ready to join

31. 00:24:30

    the Eclipse while the origin 600 eye is currently in final art review but don't worry I hear they're our designers and engineers already getting ahead on their flight prep work to make it scheduled 3.2 release with these five different ships coming online at the end of June they're pretty much the focus of most of the ship art and tech teams at the moment but once they make it into your hands a brand new wave of ships will begin making their way towards release in subsequent patches we'll have more about those ships in the coming months for shipshape I'm content manager Jared Huckaby we'll see in about two weeks everybody thanks Jared that ship will make a deadly addition to many fleets out there once 3.2 hits the PU and for those of you who would prefer an in-your-face dogfighting to sneaky surprises we still have a contest for arena commander and star marine

32. 00:25:17

    aficionado z' you can make your own tutorial video for either of those modes and compete to win prizes and have your work up on the official star citizen website yes and then tune in to reverse the verse live on Twitch tomorrow at noon for our monthly subscriber townhall episode Jared will be back with Kirk Tomei and mark abent answering subscriber questions following up on today's scanning features so make sure you get your questions in yes and make sure you check out this week's calling all devs if you missed it on Monday for answers to questions about dirty ships UI updates and more thanks of course to all our subscribers for sponsoring the shows and thank you to all of our backers for making the development of squadron 42 and star citizen a reality until next time we'll see you around the verse [Music] thanks for watching for the latest and

33. 00:26:38

    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.uvu.edu/library