Introducing Inside Star Citizen | 3.5 Ep. 1

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:06

   welcome everyone to inside star citizen I'm your host Jared Huckaby now each week we'll invite you to come inside our studios and join our developers that they share their latest work bringing the star citizen universe to life with interviews about specific features demos of the latest game systems that are currently in development and semi regular updates on sprint progress from teams around the world now to get things started for us this week let's check in with Simon Daniel as they share with us their work on a new lighting model for particles that's both better-looking and less resource-intensive kind of like me let's check it out today we're going to talk about the new lighting system for GPU particle system all decoupled lighting [Music] it's hard to our ongoing process of

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   essentially replacing the old CPU particle system with this new GPU particle system the difference between the old particle system the new particle system is that now we have implemented some new features which allows us to focus much more on the visual quality of the particles then on the performance like started off beginning of this year on the GPU particles each particle had its one single sample of light things for example in shadows that the whole particle way either in shadow or not in shadows now the method we based it on it is a technique invented by id Tech and we took that technique and we also pushed it for further you can see very nice shadows on the old system if we wanted to use shadows then we had a huge

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   impact on the performance so with the new one there is no worries about the performance but only to focus on the quality aspect of the particles lighting means that we can borrow color from the Sun from the environment also from the cue maps and then this will translate actually in making the particles the assets belong to this environment or to this planet so the way it will improve the player experience because it benefits the performance so that means that you running a better frame right because we have a control how their solution overall total resolution of the Atlas that sort of defines the worst case so so we get more controllable performance better performance the lighting will be much better so it looks

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   better and better performance basically by the frame rate I feel like it punch it punch it up right now I don't like this nearly as much as Shawn Tracy does this is I'm convinced the only reason we ever got shot in Tracy to do h-e-b was because of this this is a is C Los Angeles soon there's gonna be is C Miami and I see a Special Victims Unit spaceships more than just a means of getting from A to B they're a great way to make your mark in the persistent universe and members of our ship teams work to bring additional vehicles to life in every major patch including the upcoming alpha 3.6 now it might be a bit early for this but we thought it'd be cool if we took a look inside the insides of the upcoming Vanguard series of variants with our ship teams very own

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   John Neville so the objective of this exercise has been to redevelop and incorporate components into the abundant firstly behind the cockpit is not gonna be the component room behind every wall are you gonna have various things like coolers shields power plants under the stairs here we have radar after working on the component room it was the past to redevelop the modular interior of the ship this is the new warden interior you're gonna have your a little service station here that you can interact with the ship with again this has components in this slot here we've redesigned the bathroom and all of the storage around there and then across here you've got a new gun tree next to these things here

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   we have the gun racks where you can store all your weapons in and then on either side you also have a space for a locker thank you for your clothes and things its objective of this middle room here was to build a framework where we could build a modular pod in the sense that when you buy a Vanguard the cockpit the component room in the rear room are all gonna be the same basically whenever you buy a variant for the ship we are to change out this middle section here I've also been working on Harbinger Varian and the harbinger variant is the torpedo ship and then here again you've got space for crew in the bathroom and the country here with weapons locking next to it and inside this one here we also have a big torpedo Bay so that whenever the pilot is deploying the torpedoes

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   you'll be able to see these Toby there's getting loaded down and deployed and then you've also redeveloped the hoplite variant which is introducing more space for storing the weapons away so yeah like an almost like an armor at the side here where you put all your assault rifles and guns and all kinds of cool stuff and then also space for introducing heavy weapons too so you can really kick this area out and be able to turn it into quite a versatile Arsenal workshop yeah so the the objective of this exercise has been to make a modular Vanguard which allows developers to build variants a lot more rapidly in the future and also it gives the end user a much more versatile and richer experience telemetry now Webster's

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   dictionary defines telemetry as I'm hey Dave someone so what's going on we're shooting the shuffle can I help you so what we did here yeah yeah we don't want to do it in the stage anymore we want to be inside development and everything oh cool that's cool yeah cool so are you like hosting it out yeah yeah you know everybody's busy we figured I do this and it frees you guys up to focus on like water sleep making star citizen yeah yeah totally totally that's cool it's really cool hey come to work let's go now to kick your Standefer who can tell us about a recent update to the

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   telemetry page currently available in Roberts space industries comm Hey we recently published an update to this dashboard that includes a few new features and some additional filters that you can look at the data with this allows you to drill down on the heat map to see all the data that we display and divide it not only by the different resolutions that people are running as well as the different versions of the game that we've published in the past additionally we added some statistics about loading times for our game the loading times that we're displaying not only track your average loading times as well as you can take a look at the community's average loading times divided not only by the different versions of the game so you can see how loading times change as we publish new versions but you can also take a look at what percentage of the community uses

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    SSD versus HDD and how affects their loading times as well another thing that we've added to the public to limit your dashboard is the ability to see or average ping compared to the average ping of the community so you can see generally where you lie along the lines of the average player for your connectivity and finally we've also added data about the stability of our different game versions this is shown via the stability score which contains a tooltip that you'll be able to read more information about how this stability score is generated with all of these new data points headed to our public telemetry dashboard it means you have an increased number of metrics to really dig into how your gameplay performance relates to that of other players and how it's changed over the lifetime of the different versions we've

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    published in star citizen and just like us as developers we know too that our fan base is very data driven as well and loves to digest all of the very specific details so that's why we want to provide all this data to you each quarter inside star citizen will focus on the patch currently in development but occasionally sometimes if the stars align and things work out the way we hope we can take a look ahead at something that's a bit farther down the line like we get to do this week so let's go now to Robin from the environment art team who's been working on additional look dev for orison the first landing zone for the planet crusader orison is quite a unique location it's the second planet in the Stanton universe it is owned by Crusader

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    industries they have created this giant shipyard it's quite high up into the clouds that exists out of a network of floating platforms the main functional location is generally to create the big commercial airliners from Crusader industries it's floating in the air because of the unique properties of the planet there we get you those nice sunset sunrise colors and feeling everything flows by itself so instead of making it in space which would require spacesuits it's like an ideal place to actually do something like this the key features are mainly of course the ship Wharf itself that exists out of like a refineries dry docks were like flying dry docks of course housing for the people themselves to get that utopian

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    feeling of parks and like a lot of green a lot of trees and then there's of course also the flying hub for the transport because everything is being transported with trains so we're trying to home down the key functions that we need for this apartment I think it's gonna look quite amazing with some very interesting views looking out over the horizon like Sun setting that kind of stuff looking down seeing this big gas giant looking like around you you'll see these big platforms creating ships buzzing transport that kind of stuff yeah I think it's gonna be pretty cool last week alpha 3.5 completed its journey through the evocati and pichu test phases on its way to publish on our

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    live environment to discuss how that went and because we'll take every opportunity to have these two on the show that we get let's welcome Chris Roberts and Sandi Gardiner to the show Chris sandy I'm well but you have to tell me what's going on here what are they sure yes thank you to our Aussie fans who organized the croc stuff yep and set system Tim times and Maltesers which were enjoyed by the office here as well as sandy all right so we got a few minutes with you I want to ask three points I've just made its way to life I had that go well many brave bugs died to bring us the release and we appreciate their sacrifice many cups of coffee were drunk and a lot of late night hours were burned by the team and the testers or the community out there working really hard so last few days games pretty

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    stable people having some like fun and a lot of the missions are now starting to work well which is good so it's nice I really like watching all the videos everyone's making and the stories of the various things are up to it's great there's been some whispers of a rebound to the subscriber program coming up anything we are ready to share just whispers whispers yes I mean as more of the game comes online which three-point-five there's you know we're getting somewhere then we're going to revamp and a little bit more in that bit more better balance - in-game stuff to sort of out of a you know jump point or whatever just you need to revise these things as things change and when we start about putting things into the game that has to be okay I'm just saying to me it's history is over and it's my time

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    now so just take off no we will see you so what have we learned today we learned that you can make particles look better while costing less the interior the Vanguard variants have so much more room for activities tonometry is great until you see that everybody else's computer is just a little bit better than yours and we're not so far away from the day there are characters can live amongst the clouds now if you enjoyed this week's show you can thank our subscribers for making each and every one possible and if you didn't like the show my name is Mike and Shella and we'll be back next week until next time we'll see you in star citizen insights now we're working on it's a

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    work in progress thanks for watching for the latest and 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