Squadron 42: Around the Verse - Strengthening the Core Tech

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm sandy gardner and i'm chris roberts this week we're checking in with nick Helms and various development teams for another squadron 42 project update yeah we're gonna take a look at some key tech and assets being built out for the game take it away Nick hi everyone welcome to another squadron 42 project update as we get closer to our target goals for the game it becomes harder and harder to show you what we've completed without revealing key parts of the story this month we will attempt to give you a glimpse of our progress without revealing any spoilers go to join us lieutenant for squadron 42 we have a number of feature teams which work on a variety of aspects of the gameplay the technology that we need to develop the game everything from the content side of

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   things through to in development technology and technology that doesn't exist yet you know when you put these disciplines together and you put these teams together and they sat down on the same floor the knowledge that they share have a speed at which these people can work together it's remarkably better in a lot of places you still have you know an engineering team and then they sit together on their own separate to the animation team or separate to the design team and you know while that method of development can work it's a lot slower and it's also a lot less involved as well but if you have a feature team if you have this dedicated strike team and you have a member from each of those disciplines together then you know you bring those features to completion together combat as always has been a strong focus for our feature teams this month we've been working on mobility and actions like vaulting jumping and climbing to make sure that shooting and exploration are fluid and

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   fun so something we do in game at the moment is that we we have two different types of animations we have entity driven animations and we have animation driven animations we've kind of mixed these up in the past and we're really shooting for entity driven animation now where the player is in full control of what they're doing when they stop pressing you know if they stop pressing forward they stop immediately if they start pressing a button they start immediately so we want the player to feel like they're in full control of everything Kanaks like vaulting and jumping mantling things like that are kind of movement mechanics that we have had work on but we've not had time to fully finish out yet so we wanted to revisit all of that make sure we've got all finished assets it feels good from the first-person perspective and it still looks really good in third as well the actor team have been refining the idle system for NPCs this makes sure that

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   they automatically pick the most suitable idle animation for their current situation and environment the main idea is that no matter what situation a character is in as soon as they have no instructions from the behavior the idle system will take over and we'll play appropriate animation idle animation or fidget for this given context we change the set up in a way that now it's the idle poses are bound together with the animation and it's all set up in mannequin this makes it much easier for the designers in conversations previously designers were the people who need it to specifically request every single idle animations now they don't need to worry about any idle poses that they only need to request the animations and conversation lines they

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   need and this system which is like kind of running underneath will take care of this the engineering team have also been working on our procedural inverse kinematic tech with the goal being to smooth out blending by retaining as much of the actors performance as possible procedural solutions we've been talking about is the ways we use the game code to change the animated poses some of the things we've been working on really is to procedurally blend between a lot of different grip poses to get to shape on the hands we want to better connect with items you're holding depending on where you hold them and the size of the item we also use AI K to solve different constraints we want to keep so if we want the hand to be in a certain position but without the spine to deform and use the entire length of the arm one

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   thing we've been looking at is a unique ok solver specifically to improve and look at the arm to let more of the animation be there even though we're using I Kate to move the hand to better fit with the object doing interacting with problems specifically bit like a solver is is you could solve a few cases and then you get this one edge case that just flips their whole thing out it's just a lot of maths involved we're really happy with the progress we were making I mean a lot of the things we've kind of worked out in theory because a lot of procedural things you kind of go like oh this could bug procedurally house actually sort of panned out in game the actor feature team has made a lot of progress this month the player is now able to examine objects and manipulate them with their hands to find out new information another thing that we have been working on that we want to

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   be able to do with items is inspect them so it's a nice take that we've added the ability to be able to bring them up into central view and then use the mouse to manipulate them so you can kind of look around them and what that allows us to do is allows the player to do should I say this focus on attachment ports to be able to in the future will be able to interact with those swap out different attachments like scopes and that kind of thing so the main focus of the past couple of Sprint's has been a lot of visual refinement so polishing animations that kind of thing making everything look better when you picking things up placing down and also obviously adding in this solvent inspect stay and all these different grips so the amount of things that you can pick up and interact with in the environment it's kind of just expanded just

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   increasing the emotional so everything's looking yeah prettier the weapons team are starting to bring some of the tech previously seen in the alien ships to their weapons the giant rocket launcher is one of the first weapons out of the blocks and is shaping up nicely so this is the Xen carrouges rocket launcher that is part of squadron 42 it was really interesting to work on it since it was the first alien weapon we've been working on and it was definitely something new for us I was responsible for the in-game model texturing and shaders we added an animated glow effect C&D codes and made an overall polish pass to it so all materials textures and animations were fine-tuned we try to make the weapon look really heavy and it will be about the same size as the railgun the VFX team have been

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   prototyping procedural soft-bodied formation to create amazing destruction assets impressively this is accomplished with much less art resource than usual this month we've worked out how to do take a standard wall assets break it up and do apply a soft body simulation to it and then rig it for games so we can do deformation and light shearing of metal in game this method will be used for the cinematic sequences where you see either a ship Bend or crumple or a piece of metal work such as a metal wall shear and break apart this method is like a cheaper method of doing this bending process we have another method for doing this which is the GM cash Alembic way but that is a lot more expensive there's a

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    lot more memory resources that is used there so in conjunction with that and this method here we can blend these two together to make very interesting and detailed destruction simulations it's not often that we get to associate a team's work with the word rubbish but this month we've seen the props team deliver loads of detail work on the clutter and scrap that's built around the various abandoned spaces in the verse recently I've been working on scrap piles and these have been using a mix of a substance designer and ZBrush pipeline they make use of several techniques one of which is using silent textures and the other one is using unique props I start by sculpting assets inside of that brush which are then taken into designer and sputtered around and distributed in a procedural manner and this works well from both an

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    artistic and a production standpoint this has been a quite an interesting set to work on it's been a mix of location work and regular props work this asset type has blended in with both props and environment type work and this works well from both an artistic and a production standpoint the Vandal race continues to get there look animation and behavior fleshed out focus this month has been on their basic costumes and primary weapons we're working on the vanduul armors we're tying in there look a lot with the ships and we're also gonna see their culture kind of combined with a couple other cultures because the kovanda like to kind of bring in influences from other cultures but they still have a really unique look we're also working on the weapons Evangel don't use traditional weapons they don't use rifles and stuff

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    the main thing that we're focusing on having them uses a spear so they have a spear that which has multiple different types of States in it a firing state a collapse state they also have a very close quarters knife the knife actually plays pretty tightly into the lore of the vanduul because it kind of ties who they are as a species you know we're working on different types of things I'm really just fleshing out the culture of the vanduul as a whole that's all for this month's update until next time back to you so any increase thanks everyone in stars that are the news the live release of Alpha 3.2 is right around the corner yes that's right and thanks to all our PT groups for continuing to get a patch ready for prime time with the all new mining mechanic new weapons and various quality of life improvements you're definitely gonna want to jump into the PU and check out what three points you has to offer there will also be newly flyable ships

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    of course the AG is eclipse vandal blade argent 600 i and the anvil hurricane will soon be flyable in-game yes as well as the totally redesigned the geo serve ng line which joins the fireball roster with this release and with the Debu of mining in 3.2 the prospector has returns in the pledge saw those of you that pledge for the drake vulture will also get the prospector as a loaner ship or you can use a newly implemented group system to find a friend with a prospector and convince them to lend it to you or that checkout reverse vers live on twitch tomorrow for our monthly subscriber townhall episode and maybe a special appearance by chris is that treat you well you're just gonna have to chant in to find out thanks to all our subscribers response for the choice and thank you to all of our backers for your

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    continued support and enthusiasm we hope you're excited for alpha 3.2 until next week we will see around the around the mos restart that's a car around the wrist I am Skyy robbers the daughter of Christopher Roberts and Sandy Garner hi my name is rain rabbits but fresh we have to check in with rocky thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in

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    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