Inside Star Citizen: Alpha 4.0 - Playing With Fire

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   last week we explored some of the new adventures available to players in space in the upcoming Alpha 4.0 but there are even more dangers to be found within your spacecraft and vehicles fire is blazing a trail towards its awaited debut in the persistent universe and while we don't want to burn any Bridges with the resource management team we'll jump out of the fire and into their frying pan in just a few weeks w i really bet their ears are burning we're fired up to give the VFX arsonist a chance to set the world on fire this week or at least just the interior of spaceships because we don't want them to burn themselves out playing with fire I'm out of idioms now I'm going to go see if I can add more fuel to the fire [Music]

2. 00:01:03

   in 4.0 we'll have fire inside of ships for our initial roll out we didn't really want players to start fires everywhere uh the poor service they really wouldn't be able to handle it so we decided to focus on the the interior of ships uh they're smaller more contained and more controlled fire is tightly integrated with the Resource Network system and a great fit for a first release with in the spaceships where Resource Network will be focusing on as many ships as we can starting a fire is based on damage and like different kinds of damage fires can be caused by ship items when they hit zero Health there are also ways for ship items to cause fires in

3. 00:01:53

   the normal running and operation of them we're currently looking at making it so that when they Mis fire and they have the highest level of wear that there is a chance that they can also cause fires but other types of damage like impacts from weapons or explosions they could also ignite a fire another way to start a fire is getting the environment hot enough to actually get your surfaces to autoc combust for example if you open up your door on a really really hot planet and the hot air starts to flow into your ship then uh if that air is hot enough and some surfaces might start igniting from that seriously I can open my door and my ship might catch fire you would need a room to reach think it's like

4. 00:02:42

   1,000 Kelvin for those materials to start to smoke so it's something that's technically possible but it's not likely if the planet is warm enough yes is there a Planet warm enough to do that right now don't think so okay I just want to be sure you're saying systemic it's possible systemically it's possible yeah it's technically possible but very unlikely don't worry everybody part of the fire hazard system propagation is based on the fire triangle which is oxygen Fuel and temperature oxygen is tracked by the room system the atmosphere that is most rooms in Universe have their atmosphere tracked uh including oxygen the fuels they will be tracked on the surfaces so

5. 00:03:31

   every surface in the universe is marked up with a surface type that surface type has different properties for fire propagation to work the heat that is usually from a ignition source is the damage that could happen but also if you have an object already on fire that could start a fire again based on the heat that that fire is emitting fire will start small if you have a small ignition point so it will not start blazing immediately so it will start propagating quite slowly but if you leave it untended then the fire will starts growing and the more it grows the faster the propagation will happen and the larger the fire will gets it's quite complicated to have a control over that

6. 00:04:21

   much energy heat it's a balance I think that's the hardest thing to get having the balance having the fire tech texture that works well with the particle Behavior with the heat the Sparks you need to to have the whole feeling of heat and danger and it's when you get this spot where it really starts to make you look Sly afraid of it that yeah it starts to get gets good I would say each of the materials that we have marked up they have their properties and we can set a material to be combustible or not most surfaces will be combustible a few exceptions such as glass will not be but the ones that are especially in ships we decided to go for a more Tech

7. 00:05:11

   approach so even if metal itself will not easily combust we assume that behind that metal there will be pipes and cables that can catch fire based on the properties that each surface type has for example wood will burn different from rubber or plastic or metal so the propagation between those will interact differently don't worry like not everything will catch fire at the same time we have these different properties that will cause different surfaces to catch fire at different times you have to think of the other things that can also catch fire things like your cargo which you probably don't want to catch fire because if it burns out you will lose it other things might be loose ship items that you have have

8. 00:05:59

   laying around just in case you want to repair your ship the player itself will not be able to catch fire but the player will feel the influences of fire in their environment so if you step into the fire then you will take damage if you are near to the fire you will feel the heat so your uh actor status will start showing up with like higher temperatures if the fire is not managed properly for example your life ports uh can't feed in enough oxygen then oxygen will be drained and your player will start to asfixiate why can't I set people on te will you commit here and now that someday we'll set people on fire I will commit to

9. 00:06:47

   nothing I tried everybody people will have different ways of setting fires to ships hopefully other people's ships not your own it is important to know for 4.0 that we will not have fire outside of ships so if you set fire to an item inside one ship you can bring it to another ship given that the medium that you're traveling through has enough oxygen to sustain the fire you can set fire by damaging items in the ship so shooting them when an item dies that has a chance to set fire other ways to set fire are are bringing in ignited items and placing them in someone else's

10. 00:07:39

    ship one of the biggest challenges that we recently had with fire was the networking and Francesco has done a really really amazing job with getting that ready the presence or absence of fire is an very very important thing to convey to players you don't want a player stepping into a thing that doesn't look like it's burning or avoiding a that looks like it's burning synchronizing fire was a very important part of making sure that the F should function correctly and we have a lot of data that fire generates and a lot of data doesn't work well over networks there was a lot of work put being put into relying as much as possible on the fact that our fire system is stable it's deterministic it will always do the same thing given the same initial

11. 00:08:26

    parameters there were a lot of cases there were cases of players is joining in late they obviously don't get where the fire was 3 hours ago they just say now they need to know what it is now there's players who have really bad internet connectivity or servers struggling a lot situations that bring a hold to The Continuous progress of fire from one end or the other and we need to reconcile that so we needed a way to know when fire was no longer suitably similar between what the player was seeing and what the server thought was there and refresh it at that point and minimize how much data we needed to refresh it at that point we are pretty happy with the way it works now uh we have it so that it sends as little data as possible to sort of create these summarized States for the CLI in server

12. 00:09:14

    and only when these differ enough do we actually send a relatively big still compressed but relatively big snapshot to synchronize everything back together a fire that is left unchecked will spread throughout your ship and if it does this and it reaches your ship components system is offline then you'll be having a very bad day and this could lead to your ship being both crippled or destroyed so this means you will be able to put out fires using a fire extinguisher where possible we have made sure that fire extinguishers are readily available throughout our ships the extinguishers they're very simple to use they are point and shoot you have to be careful that you don't start flailing wildly with your extinguisher if you

13. 00:10:03

    have to aim at the base of your fire and then keep it there to cool down the surface and take away enough of the Heat and the oxygen so that the fire calms down there will be temperature readout where you can see how strong the fire is still where you're aiming and you need to keep your finger on the trigger until it actually goes out fires can just be smoking there and technically it's very close to being on fire so you really do want to make sure it's really out before you move on because if you just leave them smoking and then go wandering off there's a good chance it will heat up again and Catch Fire again it's worth knowing that a fire extinguisher has a limited amount of ammo within it to your benefit you can also take your fire extinguishers back

14. 00:10:52

    to where they are stored plug them in and then they will recharge their ammo however it is important to know that if your ship doesn't have a functioning life support at this moment the recharge will not work if you leave the fire completely untended then your ship can completely burn out so it will be look completely black if the life support can keep up providing enough oxygen then it will just keep going until all of the fuel that is the surfaces has been burnt out or if the life support is not running then your fire will start to diminish but if you don't do anything the life support will keep feeding in oxygen enough for the fire to be

15. 00:11:40

    sustained and start spreading everywhere you don't want people to put fires out no I I want them to die in a fire views and opinions of Leo do not represent those of Cl here in games r space Industries or subsidiaries there are more ways to extinguish fire with the life supports and Resource Network you can cut uh Power to your life support for a room and that means that there will be no more oxygen provided which means that the fire itself will start using up all the oxygen and it will extinguish Slowly by itself another way is to open up your doors to open space and that will mean that all of the atmosphere is being

16. 00:12:29

    sucked out into open space and again no more oxygen for your fire to continue after a fire you can repair your items or replace them fire can damage your interior of your spaceship we have some very beautiful burn decals that Francesco and Gom have been working on to show you where your ship has been burnt the visual damage to the surfaces is not something you can repair manually but you can go to a repair station and uh repair your ship there and that will get rid of all of the visual burn but if I want to leave it burned cuz it looks cool I can do that you can do that it persists I'm very happy with the current

17. 00:13:19

    progress It's been a very long route for the team to get to this point it's amazing to finally be able to roll this out to the players it's am amazing to work with it's just so fun and the results are very good and very quick so I'm looking forward to to see what people will do with it like what kind of weird Edge case they'll find and we'll probably have to fix up but it's as long as the servers don't die because of fire and I think we will be able to deal with it so what did we learn this week well we learned where and how fire will make its first appearances in the persistent universe in your spaceships how it'll spread and the dangers of leaving it unchecked your spaceships will burn and maybe go boom and both how you'll put

18. 00:14:08

    them out or potentially spread the fire to other vehicles and I'm banking you all might find some ways that we missed now don't forget the ship Showdown is still underway it's your chance to vote on which vehicles you like best as well as send John crew messages on social media that he legally has to respond to during this time hi all David here the only thing I have to to say about this is no just no our program will now conclude for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thanks for letting us share the people and process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week it's time to go pyop Planet Side how do you start a fire first you contact the ATC yeah yeah I could start with that

19. 00:14:58

    that would be good I could say that I could say that you want me to do that well first of all you start yeah you you you call the ATC and they set fire to your ship