Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Idris and Multicrew

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:07

   hey everybody welcome to another edition of calling all Deb's our Q&A series where we take cushions from you the star citizen community and pose them directly to our developers usually over videoconferencing I'm Jared Huckaby let's get right to it all right so this question I think is perfect for Ally Brown or director of graphics engineering we're gonna see what he has to say Ali how you doing man I'm good thanks thank you for taking the call from home we are of course in a work-from-home era here with all the world stuff going on so we're gonna we're gonna jump right into it I got a question here from a star citizen we've been getting this a lot just gonna jump right into it it says how's work on the gen 12 Vulcan conversion going what can you tell us so folks you start explaining what it is before we saying where it is at the moment very tough so

2. 00:00:56

   so yeah we've mentioned two things there there's the gen 12 when do or generation 12 when were and then there is the fact that it's gonna primarily use the Vulcan API so the gen 12 is just a name we came up with for our renderer which is going to utilizing multiple CPU cores more than the previous vendor which mainly only runs on two CPU cores these days we tend to have eight or 16 cores or more so there's a lot of focus on pleat computations so that at one time it's much faster so that's type of the gems well and under the hood it's going to use the Vulcan graphics API in fact initially it's going to use DirectX 11 which is the current engine uses and Vulcan and then once we've got the Vulcan support to be better though the DirectX 11 support or drop DirectX 11 and we fully over to Vulcan Vulcan is a

3. 00:01:45

   more modern API it's much lighter weight much faster as much closer a thinner layer of abstraction over what the GPU actually does so that gives us a lot of performance boost but it takes a lot more time to program for so it's a lot more initial investment but then we get big performance wins once we get over the initial hurdle okay and where we are so it's complicated the answer so we have a lot of multiple mini teams we've set up in the graphics and engine program at departments and they're tackling type of six separate areas so each of those six and where we're up to so there is type of the the highest level one is the the pipeline render pipeline we call init

4. 00:02:33

   which is type of the way we structure a frame that we might first we render some shadows and then we some renter detective work and then we'll get on to a depth pass a color pass then we'll do the UI and such but I'd type of pipeline it's type of the frame of the glues all together but it is starting soon but we haven't actually needed to do that bit first so that's the first but that's not what you would imagine we'd start there but actually it's the opposite we've started when this is the new reality so at the other end of the system we have the the Vulcan device this is the lowest level part of it which is where we actually issue commands to the GPU using

5. 00:03:22

   the Vulkan API so that's such the first thing which died on at the very lowest level the most difficult part oh my god a couple of guys just working on that one section alone and then another studio we've got some people looking at the type of the DirectX 11 equivalent so type of what we're going to use in the meantime while we get this lender up and running and because we already have DirectX 11 support that's pretty much done there's not a lot to do there there's not a lot of concerns so that section is okay and then we have like above them both we have this common layer so there is differences between DirectX and vulcan and by having this type of common layer above we can type of abstract that and hide that difference of a higher level rendering code doesn't need to worry about whether it's direct X or Vulcan and again that part of it is pretty much done and that's not a particularly complicated

6. 00:04:08

   bit but then the wheelwork it comes down to two remaining topics so we have the post effects and we have the type of what we call in the scene submission the scene when doing so the post effect our bloom our lighting you know all these type of things like the general effects you know and some of the facts of people hate you know motion blur and for my separation as well but you know the ones that people don't hate so much as well and then we have the land that's a big chunk of work and we have two guys just working on that they're getting quite far though quite far food that I couldn't give a percentage but they've made very good progress and they've started with the hardest ones intentionally so that we proved the system and then there's that there's gonna be a bit of grunt work to get through the more trivial ones afterwards and then the final big topic is the scene submission which is getting basically the geometry into the game

7. 00:04:56

   into the regulars so like you know our shadows and our color pass and just type of getting all of this geometry very quickly and efficiently into the renderer and that's probably one of the larger sections and that's only that's just about started so the moment we've got good progress on the Vulcan device the DirectX 11 device the common layer that binds them together and we've made good pose and the post effects and then that the main large areas that are still tougher to be started or to make sniffing progress is the scene submission and the the overall render pipeline it glues all together so yeah it's hard to give it like a to give this if this is the time where we it's like from beginning to end but we're here it's not me but I don't know it's hard

8. 00:05:47

   to give a these are each these six things are extremely big and complicated in themselves we have lots of designs there's endless discussions on each of these topics so even when programming hasn't started we can be many weeks into work before we even got to that stage so yeah there's progressing well though and there's a lot of resources dedicated this internally well you could save some time if you just skip the chromatic aberration public it wouldn't be a lot of time I won't even get into that argument okay and what are the before I let you go what are the you touched on the benefits earlier but but just in a short looking for the sound but I guess in summary what's the benefit of this work why are

9. 00:06:37

   we doing this work two reasons the first reason is performance we get the ability to spread I use a more efficient API they can spread work over all of your CPU cores which rules all in a much much faster rendering process on the CPU side and much lower latency as well latency is quite important a lot of people these days and the second side is because more modern API it opens a door to many new features that we didn't previously have access to which are things like ray tracing VRS and async compute and there's a lot of things we couldn't do locked to the previous API ID so performance then features afterwards so it seems like a big part in letting star citizen realize its full potential we don't really have a choice this has

10. 00:07:26

    to happen this is the next logical step we can't really achieve the performance or the visuals we want without taking a step first want to put a date on it No thank you it's our biggest focus this year there's nothing else that we are putting anywhere as much resource in for the graphics team for the graphs to go yeah jitter just a graphics an engine team yeah fair enough all right Ali thank you I think that was great I think we covered what it is how it works and why we're doing it and couldn't ask for anything more so thank you so much I'll let you go thanks a lot I take it alright so for our next question we were going to senior system designer Geoffrey coffin for a question about the idris Jeffery how you doing man I'm alright I'm alright it's a different

11. 00:08:14

    working from home but I'm progressing that's our that's our reality for the moment thank you for taking the call we're gonna jump right into this we have a question about the Idris now players know that the Idris is being introduced into the persistent universe with the upcoming Arlington bounty series but that's an NPC controlled address this question is about the player facing address you give us a status update on where the Idris is in regards to being available for players in the brazils universe yeah sure so the x-ray of the address is mostly there which is why we're gonna be putting on to be using its all the damages so a lot of damages set up for it the exterior networks all their thrusters etc which is why that can happen but for the interior it's

12. 00:09:02

    still fairly working progress because squadron 42 it's very working progress they're still we need like anybody works to go in any changes to the peak up or anything needs to be updated within the address the interior is still very much in flux and in addition to all that as well it's a big multi cruise ship so as these as these features get implemented we need to obviously refine what's present inside the ship so currently as it stands really the ship interior isn't in the stage where we can give it to the public and probably won't be for a while you make you mean you made a comment there about the multi crew and we're gonna talk to Dave Coulson here in a little bit about multi crew gameplay it can't be understated how important that is to something like the interest because the interest is is because there's a capital ship yeah you mean is one person meant to just fly this thing

13. 00:09:50

    around like a fighter is one person can technically fly around like a fighter but you you will be getting barely any other ships functionality out of it I mean your pilot will be able to you know fly the ship but you're supposed to have a navigator who will be navigating where you're going to go to and helping you avoid or go to hotspots you'll have people Manning the air traffic control seats who if you want to have any ships take off and fly away or even new ones flying in you'll need to have you know someone to manage all about the pilot can't do all of this on their own you know weapon sees to handle the railgun at the front even a captain who if someone's being belligerent in the crew might be able to turn around and like demote someone on the fly and say no you can't do that anymore so there's a lot of this functionality that is going to be going into the ship it should be going into the ship but it's just not there yet we don't have it ready like so essentially what you would

14. 00:10:38

    have if you release the interest right now is a giant fighter and just no I don't think most people would appreciate that it's very nerve talk to me a little bit about the work for the Arlington Bennie mission before we let you go now it is coming the the exterior control the NPC control the exterior is coming to the - there are n thin bounty series in half of three point nine how do you balance something like this it was really tricky so initially before obviously like the mission took too much shape one of the first things that came my ways was to actually try to balance the address around fighting different amounts of ships so I'd start spawning like hammer head after hammer head after hammer head just having like tons of hammer hits fighting the ship and then I try out maybe throwing in some Italia toes with their torpedoes one of the first things we quickly discovered was

15. 00:11:26

    with the way the ship's currently set up there they've got like a small health pool on multiple parts of the ship and as you take damage it'll spread up the ship and eventually go to the core location then kill the ship what happened with one size 9 torpedo is the Splash Damage within so many locations one would just kill the interest straightaway so we immediately like right we need to give this thing a bigger centralized health pool and then kind of have have the other areas have slightly less just to kind of balance it out so it was a lot of iteration just on the health of the ship alone let alone tweaking the the shield generators because this things are capital size your generators like the 890 has which make it huge and very difficult to damage in the first place so there was a lot of juice or base iteration just making this thing resilient enough to actually require a bunch of people to kill but not be completely unkillable in the first place and I imagine one of the

16. 00:12:13

    benefits of it going into the precision universes that we're going to be able to to witness thousands and thousands of players you know fighting this thing and taking this on and and getting that data back that will help additional balance see in the future absolutely like these capital ships they're kind of untested waters as far as obviously net game play games you had fighters out in there in the university years we know very like very well how they work but for these much larger ships which you're not supposed to be able to take that with an individual fighter so having you know in a radius just ramming to the interesting killer would be a problem so having taking out the players who are a fairly creative bunch there's probably going to be a lot of interesting ways to kill the interest that I'll get discovered and we can start trying to you know work around whatever gets discovered out there is going to be interesting certainly you're looking

17. 00:13:01

    forward to seeing in action it's like every ship I work on you know you get that sense of pride for what you really wanted to do well even like I worked on the Argo Emperor and that's just yes I think you won about but I still I'm still really proud of it and this ship is it's huge I've been working on this one for years so I'm really looking forward to it actually getting to go out there and even if the players can't fly it they can at least blow it up we'll see alright man I'll let you go thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions today man alright so last but certainly not least this question is a biggie and I think we're gonna go to Dave Coulson gameplay programmer from the vehicle feature team Dave how you doing man pretty good thanks I called you Dave I know you don't appreciate that I'm sorry David that's right we're gonna jump right into

18. 00:13:49

    this this question from the starsin tobacker voted up is deeper multi crew gameplay planned yeah absolutely deeper multi-crew gameplay has been planned for I have since the beginning right some interest has been kind of picking up on it recently we've had some discussions with CR and to kind of refine how we're gonna go about things we've been looking into you know building this permission system for ships where the captain can assign item control to specific people in the ship so he can you know give the engineer the role to control the power plan and the coolers and a weapons officer in the related control weapons that sort of thing right and the hope is that over time as we add more and more depth of

19. 00:14:40

    service systems gameplay inside the ships that combined with the permission system will be conducive to more and more deep multi to gameplay because right now I think all of the ship control pretty much gets funneled to the pilot and that's kind of the issue that we want to solve in the near term and then we'll continue adding depth to add to make the multi crew experience more interesting as we keep going right so where does that start does that start with the development of the individual game features like like the evolution of power systems the evolution of components and subcomponents and stuff like break the process out for for us how this comes to life it starts with game systems I imagine yeah it starts with game systems it's it's one of those

20. 00:15:28

    things that like we don't want to have this like very artificial feeling oh this is what you do if you're this role and you know if you're a weapons officer this is your screen and it's designed for economics we want it to feel a little bit more natural where players can come up with these roles themselves but what we need to do is we need to consider how the gameplay systems in the ship interact with each other and more importantly how players interact with them so that when they get combined together the natural result will be you know roles like you see in like you know a stereotypical multi-crew spaceship and so that's pretty much what we're doing like reviewing a lot of a lot of ship systems and trying to see what we can do

21. 00:16:17

    to increase the depth and make it interesting for players to engage with those systems and then obviously you know longer term is adding more features to ships and I think that's probably enough discussion for another calling event are we talking like like mini games or QuickTime events how does this manifest to the to the play like let's just say something like an engineer for an example if I'm playing an engineer am I gonna be sitting here going you're playing Simon Says do me and then the thing is magically fixed we don't want we don't want mini games we don't want QuickTime events as I said it's it needs to feel natural it needs to feel like this is the obvious thing for that player to do so take engineer for

22. 00:17:03

    example the way an engineer might go about things is if we increase the sort of interaction inside ships which you have you know maybe we have like life-support inside the ship is failing and you're you've run out of oxygen or something like that the engineer might have to walk over to a panel that has an oxygen bottle have to open the panel go inside get this oxygen what lab do some actions to repair it I'm not exactly sure how they'll work we haven't haven't flesh that out quite yet and then they'll go back and put that back in and make sure it's working and so that's the kind of thing where it's it's not it's not minigames for a role its actions that that interact with the ship systems

23. 00:17:53

    as the players yes physicalized some of them are physicalized right learned about one is obviously physicalized but like for example you know scanning for stuff is probably not physicalized it's gonna be something where you're at a scanning station with like a you know a globe that shows you nearby context on the radar and you know that sort of thing it'll it'll depend a little bit on what the feature is as to how it'll manifest in the ship but obviously we want some kind of a writing so and it's not silly capabilities of that ship because not every ship has yes yeah obviously yeah yeah so like for example a ship that has a med bed might have more sort of gameplay for a medical officer whereas ships that don't that won't be applicable but yeah absolutely yeah I you said you just you recently

24. 00:18:42

    just had a meeting with with CR that this is a topic of conversation that's current right now did you come out of that with any particular roles by the way that we're looking at that we're considering yeah so captain obviously is the the biggest most interesting one the captain first and foremost has this ability to assign permissions to players but the captain also we view as kind of like you know being a captain is kind of like playing a real-time strategy game where you you say you will be able to see what's going on in the nearby like battlefields say if you're in a bow to the globe and then the captain is like you know pointing things out and giving orders to various

25. 00:19:28

    people on the ship and you know trying to direct how things are progressing while you're playing the game and that's kind of Celeste the captain that's the first role or how we kind of see what their their actions are and pilot obviously is pretty much already defined engineer is a big one this is going to be you know when we get to increasing the depth of the power systems inside large ships the engineer will be you know naturally suited to that kind of role there's also like security officers which they can control door access and that sort of thing I played generally yeah I've not played gyre but I'm one of those before you know as old people will know what I'm talking about you didn't know yeah so

26. 00:20:18

    those I think those are probably like core pillars right so you got like engineer captain pilot and then probably like tactical officer or I don't know what you would call the person who's looking after scouting and radar is that tactical officer or science officer if you're not yes it's not a battle for instance yeah I think those are the main roles and then I think there might be specific roles for certain ships depending on their feature set and players could also just define their own roles if they want it's not up to us if they want to give players that or give a certain player a specific set of items to control you can make up that role however they want I think I think that's that that's a big part of this I don't want to bury the lead there it's less about I think it's

27. 00:21:06

    less about us designating the types of roles that players will be able to assume on a ship and more about providing people the tools and the systemic ability to create their own rules absolutely I think that's a much more interesting gameplay prospect and it's definitely what Chris is always wanted for a multi-crew and this is this is why interest and this is like picking up for us at the moment because we want to help the players define these roles a little bit better and give those roles something to do but I think that will result in the most interesting and varied multi-crew experience rather than having these like originally defined calls so so it sounds like before I let you go just to make sure I kind of

28. 00:21:54

    understand not necessarily a timeline but but but a flow here it's developing the individual ship systems like like power like scanning like you know making scanning more robust making power management more robust making components and component systems damages step more robust developing those individual systems and then it's finding a way to assign permissions to manage those systems and and study but yeah and then from there players will have the tools necessary to to create their own rules on ships yeah absolutely I think the order when things to come is not exactly known like we it may be that the ability to assign permissions is

29. 00:22:43

    something that we end up doing sooner rather than later just because of how my core that is to you know that experience because right now as I said just assigning all the permissions to a specific player ruins a lot of this right so yeah and then obviously increasing the depth of the features is going to be an ongoing process cool man I think that's it I think that's a productive we haven't we haven't been able to update on this topic for a while so I appreciate it especially since you just had the meeting with CR recently about it so yeah I'll let you go man all right so your thank you we'll see you again all right well that wraps up this episode of calling all Deb's I want to thank Allie Brown Jeffrey Kaufman and Dave Coulson for taking time

30. 00:23:31

    out of their schedule to answer our questions for us this episode remember that you can submit your questions for consideration up on spectrum which is the communication platform available on Roberts space industries calm and you can vote to see which questions you want to see address most for calling out debs i'm jared huckaby we'll see you next time you