CitizenCon 2954: Brave New Worlds

23 October 202401:23:491,722 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hello citizen [Applause] KH G citizen con hola citizen con ni citizen KH and hello Manchester I'm not going to need this anymore cool I am Ben or as some of you know me I am Bal on Spectrum today we will talk about Brave New worlds this is pyro 2 monox it's a Barren Planet not really habitable now since the advance of our planet Tech we've always allowed players to circumnavigate planets and
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move from orbit to ground seamlessly explore complex areas in intricate detail now with server meshing we're going to need a lot more locations for Missions and destinations for more life but there's a major question that has always followed this project since the beginning of alpha 3.0 how are we going to make a large number of planets and systems how are we going to meet the Fidelity Benchmark we've established in this technology update we bring life to lifelessness even to monarchs we take the physical representation of the terrain the geology the atmosphere the climate and the environment to create accurate biomes that spring naturally from the Collision of all these environments
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coherent denser biomes that follow the laws of nature that we encode into Data data that we then leverage to place flora and fauna yes but also settlements buildings alien and human life in a planetary context this creates worlds that are scientifically plausible r in gameplay opportunities we want you to find Adventure just by going around the planets without a Quantum point we want you to find actions along your path for this we are changing how we made the game we are scaling how we made the game in all areas this is not just a planet Tech update this is a collection of systems that we call J
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now to help me explain all this nice work and this nice technology let us kick us off and I wome welcome our very own Ally Brown and will Hine for phase one of Genesis yeah hello Star Citizen yes hello citizen KH yeah so let's start with some introductions this guy over here is Will Hayne AKA water guy or river guy and this lovely gentleman is Ali Brown Pusher of pixels
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extraordinaire and we're here to tell you about phase one of Genesis which we're entitling the laws of nature and this involves revolves around the fundamental approach we use to build our planet and is the literal foundation for everything else we're going to talk about in this talk today now it centers on datadriven physically based rules that we aim to realistically emulate nature and its incredible diversity before we dive in a bit deeper let's just recap on some of the things we already have on our planets so here you can see our lovely atmosphere and our Cloud rendering which can provide some spectacular views we have a on the-fly terrain generation which is no loading screen in our game which we're very proud of then we have our scattering system that can populate these planets with many different diverse biomes and we've been setting quality benchmarks for each of these biomes as we come
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across them one by one but what we have isn't perfect this scene on Microtech it looks great but it's not getting the same density that you'd expect from a real Pine Forest that's one of the things we want to solve the other if I take you to the other side of micr tech you'd be excused if you thought we just turned around and looked at a different part of the forest why is that well this is because currently our artists create slices of biomes in great number and then they distribute them across the planet using humidity and temperature properties each size looks great in isolation as you've seen as you've explored but this is not the solution to give us varied and natural biomes across an entire planet additionally just using humidity temperature limits to only two degrees
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of variation and that's not enough for the sorts of planets and worlds that we want to create and for you to explore so how are we going to scale up our planet Generation Well as I said before we're going to start with physically based rules that drive everything we want nothing to feel random on these planets we want no limitations on the number of biomes we want infinite biomes that are continuously changing across the planets and we want extreme density and we want to maintain or exceed all of the quality levels we've set with our existing biomes and most importantly we want it to be scalable so that we can really scale up to the level of content that the designers are expecting and from your perspective we want you to be able to truly explore and find unique playing opportunities everywhere on our planets so to start this we're going to need more data so if we see here some of our existing data sets on our planets we
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have temperature which we Define locally and globally and humidity and that's it for now with Genesis we add many other data sets such as the geology type the soil type and then we also go for things like the soil de depth and the quality and the nutrients and many other properties all drive this complex data set that we use to build rule sets on that each individual asset can describe how it should work with them we're going to put something together and show you some demos today using some of the assets that you've already know and love in the Pu although you might see some new stuff later we'll save that what you're going to see is a vertical slice of development it's very early stages very work in progress you might see some bugs but that means it's only going to get better so be excited the number one challenge with planets in
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our game is scale in no other context do you need a planet to look great From firstperson perspective when you're stood among the trees you need it to look great when you're in a spaceship at a Quantum marker miles away and everywhere in between there are no loading screens you see everything we cannot afford for it to look bad in any of those scenarios so let's start from a ground perspective demo number one let's have a look so how do we make
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that thank you thank you so let's talk about first what's underneath it all the ground so so in our previous terrain Shader we just switched between different ground textures depending on climate and didn't really consider the unique properties of each type now the terrain Shader is based around four layers we always first consider bedrock at the bottom of it all then we're approach we add layers of soil of different types we then add debris where appropriate whether it be pine needles Dead Leaves Etc and then when it gets cold we add snow each of these layers has unique shading properties and unique transitions between them because we do this all in one Shader we're able to achieve that as well as being performant we can also use things like water saturation to darken and tint the soil and other properties
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to make it look more realistic but that's not what filled most of the screen in that demo that's the vegetation like what Ali said we want to emulate the laws of of nature so in Genesis we have rule sits for every asset that tells it how to respond to our Rich data whether it be soil type water availability temperature geology or whatever we assess the viability and the Vitality of each asset and compare them to decide what is likely to spawn in a natural environment this automatically creates the cohesive environments that you saw in that clip not handcrafted anymore no one has told those Ferns and those Pines to be like that they each want to be like that and that's what we're doing multiple assets coming together to create a unique microbiome what about trees then same thing they have a larger requirement for Space they have a larger requirement for nutrients that's how you see the distribution and it's how it all works
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let's meet the Flora that came together to beat That Forest to beat That Forest to make that forest and have a look at some of their properties now just to knowe they are all going to look quite similar because we've already seen them in the same place so they must be similar so building BL like grass and common grass medium amounts of sunlight we had ferns see it's a much lower requirement for sunlight we had seix bushes forming our under Bruth and we had Pines of course and multiple variations of Pines diversity is driven by competition everything has ideal conditions which affects its competitiveness we also have additional control over this in the form of dominance which allows us to make one asset more competitive and more dominant than another which is just what we see in nature everything is constantly fighting for resources and of course light because we spawn these assets in a hierarchy it's easy to propagate shade
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data down over the distribution of the assets so that we can control ones that prefer or reject shade often like these ferns they can spawn in light but they are outcompeted in those scenarios most of the time so you will see a rogue Fern or a place where there's no seed for a specific asset you might start to get this coming in let's take a look from a larger perspective again so to take a few some of the things we
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saw in that clip let's talk about rocks first so anyone that's done a lot of ground driving and ground Vehicles might have seen that our rocks sometimes feel a little bit randomly scattered and be quite an obstacle sometimes so in this clip you saw that the the rocks are no longer randomly scattered and they're now BL placed based on physically based rule sets and this logical grouping is is achieved via erosion simulations which we run offline to build localized data maps and they describe the size of the Aggregate and rocks and the it and where they should naturally form and that means we get things like these natural clusters or Boulders at the forest edge underneath the cliff side and on that note you might have noticed that the cliffs have been dramatically improved in how they shade we also get see things like the natural clumping of vegetation caused by seed dispersal this is controlled per species so we can get better emulation of their unique growth
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patterns and create much more realistic environment and we also calculate the slope aspect which is the exposure to vegetation to solar radiation and other environmental factors and this allows us different species to flourish in different conditions as we can see on different sides of this Valley then over a larger scale we calculate the age and vitality of each tree individually to drive exactly how high they should be but also the color of their leaves now this isn't the only thing that will drive the color of the leaves we're going to introduce the concept of seasons to the game and this will mean our planets will evolve through the year and we'll be able to shed leaves from trees and have the grass River in winter so as you're starting to see all these
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rules all this data is all coming together to create what we call truly emergent biomes let's have one more look at how this varies over a much larger scale just like in real life oh thank
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you just like in real life our areas should vary even by traveling a few kilometers if you get in a helicopter and fly over the Alps it all looks a bit snowy but when you look closer it's constantly changing and we're now able to accurately represent that with our changing data another very important factor to mention is the distant look in this screenshot you don't see a single tree and yet the tree the terrain is still green we previously did that with artist made lookup tables that told the planet what color to be at what position but that wasn't going to work with all our new data and are far more comp spawning now we have a systemic solution the planet Shader is able to intelligently evaluate what's going to spawn there using the same rule sets that cause the assets to spawn a when you get there that means we can sample the sort of color that that is going to project onto the orbital View and use it
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we get a far better accuracy from the result together by creating rules and authoring data that works we create a continuously varying planet that sets the scene for the incredible exploration gameplay I know you guys are going to have but how have we done this without compromising on performance so yeah with all the new data sets and these physically based spawning rules you're probably wondering how is this going to handle in your CPU we don't want to melt anyone's CPU so we've redesigned all of this Tech to work much more efficiently than before and now it can run on many CES this allows it to be run perfectly well on both the CPU and the GPU so we've redesigned our framework so that we can run it at both and swap between them freely now the benefit of this is we can do things like first off move the terrain system to the GPU and we've now done that to get some incredible
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performance improvements but we then also cached the results in some we called a virtual terrain texture I'll give you a quick demo of this now this is now vastly faster than the previous system but it also allows us to generate the terrain in much higher resolution which means all the popping you can see on the mountains as we're approaching all of that should be completely eliminated on the right hand side of the screen with the extra Headroom we've gained by making our terrain system more efficient we've been able to introduce some improvements including high resolution ground textures proper blending between surface types and of course better tiling if you're familiar with any of our planets we've taken off all the
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assets so you can see the issue and now how it looks you don't see those lines going at all and one more with the terrain data cast on the GPU like Ali said we can perform the scattering there too which is significantly faster all those algorithms that we've used to generate those first bits could run there without being more expensive on your CPU and it also means results are directly there on the GPU we can render straight from them that allows us to have dramatically more density in our new system we can render
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objects directly without having to go via the CPU every frame we also cull at different levels of granularity with bigger groups in the distance and individual assets up close just as a demonstration this is the sort of density you can expect on Microtech today and in a second we'll flip over to what you can expect from the new upcoming Tech in a second we're going to turn on the culling group Stog so you can see these are the groups that we create of those trees and of the terrain and as we get closer we shrink them so we're more intelligently rendering what we need without having to assess each tree individually all the way down to the so to recap some of the things you've
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seen here in phase one we had datadriven rules based on physically based data generating emergent biomes that continuously vary across our planets to get infinite possibilities and we've achieved this with much greater density than before and much faster rendering and we also achieved seamless transitions from ground to space with zero popping so now that we've got all this Tech it's time to talk about how art might make use of this so for that I'll hand you to the next phase towards Sebastian sha thank you guys thank you no thank you wow thank God there's only 20 of you otherwise it be nervous right thanks for having me I'm
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here on behalf of the planet content team and we're very excited to finally show you some of the things we've been working on um as you've just seen from and Ali the system keeps growing both complexity and capability so our libraries have to grow alongside it wait should I click no um no I should click oh there we go so our goal of the content is to provide our goal is to provide the content that the system needs to populate every corner of every planet with realistic environments and this content is what this phase of Genesis is all about emergent biomes for our first example of today
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it's almost a shame will left because like it's about moisture but let's look at very high moisture and medium to high temperature w there
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thanks that did look really good so for swarms we obviously made vegetation that feels at home in or near water but before we dive in allow me to give you a quick primer on our approach to authoring plants most species can survive in a fairly wide range of climate conditions but will only Thrive the conditions ideal to support this concept we author our vegetation assets to describe the full growth cycle of a species if the conditions aren't ideal they may not grow the full maturity or look their best but the species can still exist so let's have a closer look for The Waters Edge we made plants like this alterat Tera and the iris we also need the Aquatic one to float on the water surface like the water Lio peled this Willow and the one after a Chinese T tree while comfortable near water we can also use to replace some of
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the more aged SES used to seeing elsewhere in the game the last one it's it's taking a bit longer now but um the last one I'm going to wait the last one you may not see used much in other biomes but it's a very iconic one for the swamp the Bal Cyprus so another feature we need for make a swamp experience a proper one is water injection over the last year or two a lot of work has gone into improving the way our water reacts and renders so naturally we wanted to make a biome that highlights those advances let's have a brief look at what it's like being inside the swamp as you walk through swim through
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the water you may come across obstacles like logs or debris floating on the surface they will react to the player character and can be pushed out of the way we were also pleasantly surprised when we first saw how the water simulation systemically affects aets floating on the water surface making for some really immersive moments now before I get to our Second Use case of the day a quick disclaimer obviously all the things you're seeing here today we still actively working on but this one in particular it's a bit early in the process so let's have a look at extreme option density next with the data saying we should have high rainfall and sunlight year round it's the perfect
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condition for our next biome to appear woo oh
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considering everything you've just seen is still very much working progress the gameplay capture team really did a great job showing our work in the best possible light with jungles we want to explore the concept of vertical sertification as they are the prime example for that what it means is that you have horizontal layers of microbiomes defined by the uh defined by the species that thrives with the amount of sunlight and rain that still reaches there the floor herb and brush layer we could almost do before obviously missing the density but now we also have the option to add variation to the tree layer by dynamically spawning epif fites like Lanas orchids or prats attached to drunks and canopies of other aets with this and improved density is
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what will finally allow us to make convincing jungles and the best part is we don't even need a lot of different species to create what we refer to as a canvas of a biome the idea being that we can vary what kind of forest you're in by adding or replacing the plants that visually stand out the most now to get a start on our certification we made EP fights like the aprum and the Spate including a version for your have then obviously you need jungles for uh leanas for a jungle and we also made the careers which add character to the herb and tree layer for tall trees we decide on a fairly generic rubber tree as its different growth stages serve as a nice foundation for All Height levels and that's pretty much it what we need to make a pretty
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good base for Jungle now for a third and last use case let's pretend the data indicates regular rainfall and motor temperatures this climate would support a lot of different forests but we also wanted to use this opportunity to explore extreme scale and that just really cool on
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now for this one we first looked at the different Redwood biomes on Earth and try to analyze what the most defining species of them are with this understanding we then decided the following plants to allow for a fairly Universal Redwood forest they will allow us they will easily support variation across continents and planets a fairly common family of species for the ground levels of all redwoods are ferns in our case a Sal Fern we also made a huckleberry variant to provide some visual density for the sh layer to add some Jurassic Wipes we made tree FMS as they can be found in New Zealand's Redwood forests the most important one though obviously the quers and they ended up being one of our most complex sets yet as it turns out they can grow to be fairly ridiculous in size it keeps going now one thing our games Fage s Sly
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missing is the ability to properly react to what's happening around it the goal here is to unify all forces from all sour sorry for the horrible rhyme um all sources from all all forces from all sources Wind characters and creatures ships explosion and whatever else and have the vegetation behave accordingly now as part of our Tech improvements we will be implementing a GPU based simulation that's fit for our game scale for now we set up the ferns with our existing CPU based one to better visualize what it would feel like to walk amongst those giants also with the biom our planets now being defined by where an individual object wants to appear you can expect a lot more happy accidents by having species invade different biomes um making for some unique locations hopefully
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surely now before I get to this appear of stage I just want to say a big thank you to everybody involed D especially my team in Frankfurt for doing such amazing work and being all around great people and also all of you guys I really hope you have a fantastic citizen con this concludes this phase of Genesis so please welcome me into the stage so I can tell you all about the next one love you thank you hello citizen KH all right those new planets and biomes were pretty right but it's time from phase three civilization to give you some stuff to
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do so let's talk about location density we've emulated nature as well as we can to make sure our planets are physically based and realistic and our biomes are emerging but it's time to start populating the verse because where there's people there there lives and the structures they build so it makes sense that whenever you go and explore these planets that you find their lives and what's even more important is that when we make these structures that they use and follow the same rules as our biomes such as the jungles and the swamps but before we continue let's first take stock as to where we are now at the moment in the verse we have these custom beautifully made locations such as ghost Hollow we've got our distribution centers or even just some outposts and they' have all been
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handcrafted by our designers and artists to hit that Benchmark and they've been working directly on the planet however going forward this doesn't really scale with how we want to go forward with the game server meshing is about to arrive and we're going to have a way higher player count so those 73 bunkers across stampton just won't cut it but in general it's also pretty Barren there's not much for you to explore in and find stuff out there so just no exploration gameplay you haven't really put your character to use for the way that you should so this means we need to go bigger which means we need to change our workflow and with any workflow means we need to First establish a new Benchmark so with our new Benchmark we are ensuring quality and improve on our
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previous work and make it even better and any location that you'll find needs to have its own unique personality and no repetition we don't want you to find the same location twice this also means that this is your exploration and your findings so when you go out there and explore with your Carrick or with your Corsair is that whatever you find you can share with your Orcs or with your friends as for it density if you fly down to the planet you we want you to find something let's say every 100 clicks but also improve the mission experience so when you you stay more in the planet you're more immersed and you go from location to location just keep going so going forward we are modularizing all our existing locations and assets we basically making a library
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of buildings and layouts that we'll be using to no longer work directly on the planet the neat thing all these modules and assets can be iterated upon and tested right in the editor for all the designers and artists to ensure fun gameplay and interactive sandbox activity and also make sure all the mission stuff is there basically we're building a toolkit so let's look at some of the things that we need to keep in mind as we are making that toolkit first and foremost we've got our art style and branding we've got things like Frontier for our settlements we've got high-tech for the eer Emergency Shelters but also utilitarian like our bunkers and distribution centers the Richer the data the Richer these locations will be secondly they all have a function
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we've got mining for our mining outposts farming for the farm stats or just places where people live the function of the place will Define the way the place looks as well and its form and last but not least the people as well the faction and their loadouts we've got lawful people like the new citizens for prosperity in pyro unlawful such as Xeno Fred and sometimes not even no no one the place needs to look a bit you know derel and different places you'll find different people so now that we've made our toolkit and we've defined all this new stuff let's start building thousands of locations yes I said thousands So to avoid the same issue of working on directly in the planet I'd like to introduce to you
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starchitect but star allows us to do is directly on a planetary scale scatter all these new libraries and modules and assets and no longer work directly on the planet and it uses the same logical World set as our emerging biomes and we it also gives us full control over the data that we set on these locations so expect locations in places where they make sense let's kind of look at all these this new genesis data and all these new libraries and then Chuck it into St architect and see what it gives us as you can see we're now able to make full-size locations and they will look completely different based on where you'd find them the layouts are control controlled by the rules and it will reflect its place in the verse we've got Farms mining outposts but even our older
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locations such as the bunkers that you find on Stanton so let's look at an example and kind of use the tool to really you know make a location we can Define the rules as I've mentioned a couple times by now so for our mining Outpost it wants to be near a resource we can specify what this resource needs to be but we can also give a suggestions where sometimes you'd find it here and sometimes you wouldn't if the location has refineries it might
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want to be near water to refine the resources then secondly we can Define what buildings should be there so obviously we need mining buildings houses for people to live as well and even power buildings that we can leverage with the Resource Network the architect will intelligently figure out where the placees and what needs to be at the location next up Farms its rules well temperature not every plant can live in every temperature but the same with soil type only certain plants can be in certain grounds and then we can query the seed map to determine what plants you would find there what are the harvestables As for the targets again farm buildings obviously power buildings houses but even animals such as our beloved quasi grazers and last but not least thec chips we've got these all over the place
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currently rules well they'd be close to anti-air because I would be shut down but even in harsh flight conditions such as mountains or low visibility You' probably most commonly find them targets well crash ship parts of course sometimes you'd find the full remains of a javelin and the other time you might just find the nose of starf laying around so let's talk about coherency sure we could scatter all these locations everywhere on the planet and you'll find them in places they make sense but we can do better you don't just want to find an outpost completely on its own right we want to make sure it really feels like people have built their lives here so let's talk about some missing bits we want to tell tighter stories such as the people's lives but also
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logical exploration if I find one thing I expect to find something similar or something else nearby we also need more data control what defines one mining Outpost being different from the from the other ones aside from the harvestables and also give the narrative development make sure you know people build near rivers on mountains they build near town halls they build near distribution centers so to hit that bit of a benchmark we make sure that locations are near each other and group them together the effect it gives is a fully developed landscape with Vistas and points of interest all over and we group them together in what we like to call a cluster like this one that has 13 locations let's talk about clusters clustering
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means generating locations near other locations so for example if you find a distribution center just like in the verse currently I would find forward operating bases next to them but if you go even further out you'd find mining outposts to funnel those resources to the fobs go out even further you'd find caves around them cuz that's where they might find some of the gems and then we can even specify the data at on a cluster level all of the factions that live at this whole cluster any mining Outpost that the same people but also what Commodities they sell to find on what resource you'd find so let's look at an example of the Clusters we have our mining cluster again we can Define what rules we should
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have rules well near resource just like our mining Outpost but also it needs to be on a lawful planet we can Target on a planetary scale where they would need to be they need protection as for the targets well caves mining outposts but even trade posts let's go to the other side of the spectrum before I do so I forgot data we can on a cluster level specify again what mineral Commodities but what also what harvestable types you'd find are in in that region now let's look at the other side of the spectrum an unlawful cluster what rules well they need to be far away from any other cluster because they want to be isolated and do their evil Deeds on their own and also on an unlawful Planet such as somewhere in the pyus system for the targets Outlaw outposts
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crash ships because they would shoot them down and also ruins from just places they just completely overrun the data on this one you'd find specific loadouts and they'll be using weapons that you wouldn't find any other legal system and these weapons will be sold at the shops in these regions so now that we have a cluster let's go even bigger just like our locations we can put clusters near other clusters and we group them together ranging between 10 to 15 locations each and we group this into what we call a sector like this one that has about 120 however on a planetary scale we can
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Define how many sectors we should have with each their own data and Persona and every single one of these location is now ready for the mission system to hook up and give you gameplay and for you to find a bunch of places on your own and just on this side of the planet can you guess the number we've got about 3,42 locations and again this means that architect we're just able to on a planetary scale just Define how many locations we need what You' find there and to just give that full identity thank you for listening and I
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want to see you in the verse but I'll see you in a denser verse however this was only the first phase of civilization let me introduce you to the stage the person who will introduce life at these locations Franchesco Ruchi so hi everybody so where are we today so my name is Fran franisco Ruchi and I'm the director in cig Welcome To The Next Step of phase three we will look into how life adapts
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to the laws of nature and how all the NPCs can interact pretty much with this incredibly vast and dense worlds that we just saw so up to this point we have seen how we are building the worlds we start from the physical data set and this is to make sure that what you see is not just beautiful and realistic but also physically accurate so the distribution of the elements that we have seen and the location and the pois are influenced by geology Mission narrative and the lore those locations cannot be lifeless we want the planets to basically leverage the space that emerg with life so from an ey perspective I will categorize the elements of those words into four micro groups emergent environment that is
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everything we have just seen being built out of the physical data set users made locations so this includes everything that our designers or you players will create in the world so something that is mankind made and not predefined in the environment interior of those locations now this is very connected to the previous point the the difference is that they represent usually a confined space where there is much more tied interaction and for NPCs is a lot about interaction with objects that we are usually used to in our everyday lives and then the n d day and night cycle so in essence the passage of time that so far didn't have really a lot of impact on the game play so to allow life to respect this world and conform to the
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rules that those environment defines well we want to improve our tools and work workflow uh and we want to distance ourself as much as possible from a designer driven approach this is because first it's labor intensive it can be PR to bugs but also because the scale of the words that we' have just seen are very hard to be you know designer driven in the markup so we want to improve to improve this workflow and we will see how manual markup is also not usually the best option because with these words that are heavily impacted by users and changes and customization uh it's very hard to know in advance where interesting things are so today I want to show you a couple of examples of what the it te has been focusing on uh to make these systems uh supported and scale correctly to support this vastly
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dense Dynamic words so we look at perception in light and dark environments and dynamic cover generation so attacking an outpost now must have a level of depth that goes beyond what we had so the outside environment can change change Vehicles may or may not be present NPC can be anywhere and if it's a bright day well we will be more visible but our enemies will also be more visible and if you choose to attack at night time well we'll attack in Shadows during Darkness it's going to be a bit harder to see our enemies but we will also be harder to be spotted and it will give us more opportunities to be stealthy and sneaky how do we do that so as you see there is also a lot of different light conditions in these Outpost so in this scenario we will start look
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at our perception is impacted by the day and night cycle on the planetary surface as we seen in The Outpost Natural and artificial lights are the two elements that will impact vision and knowing that you can use this to leverage your gameplay Style to exploit basically all the environment so what is perception on NPC level is the combination of data that we collect out of the senses and vision is one of the sense and just tries to um in a way simulates The Human Side ability so designers can already tweak the perception in different ways and one way is defining how quickly NPCs can understand what they are seeing and the light condition have a direct impact how how quickly an NPC will fully understand for example if there is an hostile in front of them and obviously there is condition of light that
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designers can control and some others like the days night cycle that they can't so in this video we will see two main elements the graph on the top left and the two color for cones the graph on the left basically represent the current light level the NPC is in and the current multiplier this light level generates to speed up or slow down the NPC perception and understanding the two instead represents the primary and secondary fov the red color means that if you stand in that location it will result in NPC reacting the lowest to you and the green color instead represents the quickest response so during the night NPC will have a hard time to understand and and and forese and see things but if they have flashlights on their helmets they can turn it on and this will impact their primary fob
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making still the periferal vision a bit more uncertain and as you see here uh first first of all the MPC is patrolling with this domesticated friendly copion this is because he wants to exploit the vision the night vision capabilities of the animal and it's kind of our tier zero pets so we will now look at the cover system that is the next Dynamic things that I want to show you uh so when we introduced planetary navigation mesh the first time our goal was really to create a systems that would support and process the environment in a very Dynamic way uh our planets just way too big to statically export them and process them first of all and then they also their regions only exist when somebody's there and NPCs are there so essentially
00:51:37
environment has its purpose only when life exist Also let's keep in mind that even if we could explore dynamically and statically those planets so processing dynamically all a static version of the planet this would be first of all wasteful and on the memory side and time consuming uh and also because we have a lot of runtime modification of the terrain this would require us to still reparse it the runtime and pretty much that will be almost all the time so to generate the cover data we want to leverage the navigation mes system and what we do is as you see here the blue uh polygons are basically where NPCs can work and the green ones are what we call cover surfaces that are represent simple representation of the environment what NPC uses to the to understand if they can hide behind something and if they
00:52:24
can shoot from some position so up to now we have an approach where designer would would be a designer driven approach designer can Define in the locations where cover was interesting they could mark it up either the location itself or prefabs and then with a special entity that would just sample dynamically the environment but will still be designer driven um this is obviously a good approach for it's also standard approach in gaming industry but what about all those organic and inorganic elements that get scattered with a new system like if designers wants to iterate on these ones for example and they want to change the physical data sets those scattering tool will just change completely layout and what we want is that designers can do this change without being afraid of doing it because the game play was you know predefined
00:53:12
and controlled and now they can just make something beautiful but also fun besides that yes we did have a prefab approach where you can build stuff out of small building blocks this is obviously a good approach because it's uh uh you know in a way you can build stuff out of smaller version but this creates a lot of unnecessary data Imaging a crate and we can say that the crate can generate cover now we stack 100 crates and what happens that we have a lot of data to generate cover that we have to process throw away this would just waste CPU cycles for nothing this is why until now you also couldn't fight an NPC in a forest like this one and see them hiding behind a a tree or a rock so enabling the dynamic generation of covers on the planet allows us to exploit all the elements of the
00:54:01
environment whenever navigation mess generates NPC can now have a chance to fight with you hiding behind available elements Boulders rock walls and all use are all useful elements right now however we don't have to limit ourself to static geometries but also vles can be used for cover and as you can see this is dynamically generating while the vagle moves so be careful where you bark your Ursa because now can become a source of danger for you as well last but not least these systems can be just used on all the different type of navigation mesh we have so not on the planet but also for example the interiors and everything you guys construct because obviously you guys will build your own locations but you don't really mark up stuff or you don't want to decide that because that's going to come automatically out of the system so I want to show you
00:54:57
so what I want to show you now is just like a little bit of insight of what goes behind the scene when we generate cover and navigation mesh these are some of the steps that our system does so we always start from the environment voxelization what that means is we process the geometry the physical representation of the geometries that is a little bit simpler than usually the render mesh and we construct it in a box Eliz approach this is also using different types of agent definition why so because obviously where a human can move is not the same as where a vle can move so we can Define different type of precisions and then speeding up the process where we when we have to or be more precise where we cannot be to and we can also create overrides based on different things for example if you crouch you can enter into smaller locations that where you stand um this process is basically
00:55:45
common between navigation mesh and cover after that is generated then we can evaluate the Vox in different ways for example defining where we can walk so can we make the step with our foot over a specific Vox cell or is there something in front of that hole in the N mesh so that we can actually cover behind and then we can basically decide we generate cover surfaces and after the cover surfaces are generated we can process where the cover locations are cover locations are good spot for NPC to be behind the cover so what we see here is the with the introduction of melr last year obviously we knew this would revolutionize how you guys are playing and we did have to find find a solution to handle all the destruction you get so you we destroy so much stuff in this
00:56:32
world that we had to find a solution right so this is why we approach the cover generation navigation mesh as it is because there is just no way for us to predict anything that you're doing and we want just melstrom to be another trigger for word evaluation so as you see this is all damic generating and destroying anything just makes the war be revaluated so as you see here we can have also lots of rules so you you can you can see a here but when F break first they invalidate and then when they rest for example we can decide when it's a good moment to regenerate so that we also don't waste too much CPU Cycles uh the color that you see is mostly uh cover quality so you see the
00:57:20
light green is High cover the dark green is Low cover and then we have the red that we introduced some time ago that is basically not really good cover but if there is nothing better well it's better to be behind something that being you know in open space so let's just recap what we want to do is finding a plan and having a good plan to approach life in this vast Universe what we want is the life to be able to systemically evaluate all the dynamic environments that is generated we want to improve our workflow not only to support designers and being faster but also support all your guys creations so we want the life to adapt and this is all for making the game fun for you so that everything comes together so thank you all this was phase three and now let's welcome Ben Parry
00:58:11
that will introduce you guys to phase four of Genesis thank you hello Cen con that's not my sorry someone's changed my lines welcome to phase four light and sound now we've seen already um automated systems for automatically placing different biomes uh different uh vegetation settlements and people so now we're going to take the same approach to automatically handling light itself first of all why is this important well it's not always obvious especially when
00:59:00
they do their jobs as well as they do but there's an incredible amount of attention from the lighting artist that goes into all of the locations that we have in the game besides just marking up the reflection probe areas they also manage the visuals really carefully adding fill lights um approximating bounce lights off ground and up into ceilings and dark Corners where there aren't any direct lights pointing really um and the problem is not only does this take a lot of time and really constrain the style that they're using it's simply not possible if you've got a planet full of forests and what was it 3,00 and something Place locations you're going to be exploring places that no artist has ever visited no they've not looked at and they've certainly not going to be able to have tweaked it for you so we need something that works completely hands-off and natural outdoor scenes are
00:59:48
especially problematic for us indoors you can put a lot of little lights around pointing from different directions and you can probably justify it Outdoors you've got the Sun and you've got the sky and if you're behind a tree you've got the sky and so you need that Skylight to vary now so this is the forest as you'd see it without the GI system as you can see all the Shadows are receiving lighting from the same environment probe so it's basically just a flat color across we replace that with around 40,000 mini Ray Trace probes each of them has their own view of the sky and so that gives you way more contrast and variation As you move in and out of the canopy now there are a couple of other
01:00:42
pieces of the puzzle that we've been working over on over the last year now the first is well all the stuff that you can't stick 40,000 mini probes onto anything that doesn't have an opaque surface we can't really know where it is on the screen and track it from frame to frame but if we don't do anything it's going to stick out like a sore thumb we've got fog we've got particles we've got other little things I don't know what they are um and so we need something to do with those so to address this we've added a kind of stable grid of medium kind of probes that are generated around the player As you move around so that gives us approximately like the approximately matching lighting that we can apply to all of those things now this is a little bit bit difficult to illustrate in normal scenes so uh for once I've been making my own
01:01:31
levels as you can see Pico's in trouble again um but because the lighting team hasn't helped you can't see anything in most of the scene if you add the transparency GI system suddenly the whole scene comes alive and this is something that we could never have done um until we added this Tech now the other piece of the puzzle is glossy Reflections now we've got a fair few shiny objects in the game you may have noticed and we've got the same problem that if we fix the lighting on one thing and then the reflections don't match it's going to look terrible also rate racing Reflections is really cool and we wanted to do it um and the challenge here though is that the rate
01:02:19
race Reflections you're going to do they're not just mirrors like we've got a whole range of objects in the game from like a scuffed hole panel all the way up to Chrome polished pipes and we want the same system to apply globally across that so I'm going to do an uncomfortably short breakdown on what this Tech looks like and how that comes together so here's what sorry here's what we need to be now obviously it reads a shiny but there's this kind of fakeness to it um it kind of looks a bit like it's flying so let's see what the rate tracing looks like yeah it's really noisy and horrible we need to clean it up so what we do is we let pixels share their data in space and then also in time to clear up the final image and then we let the game's normal anti-aliasing just kind of
01:03:07
clean up the last stuff and Carries over the finish line and that's how you make a chrome penguin now I'm going to derail for a moment away from the topic of Genesis cuz this isn't actually just about automating the lighting for new environments this this is also about pushing quality in areas that have already had all of that work done by the lighting team we're freeing the artists up to light more naturally allowing the time of day shifts to be embraced rather than fighting against them and as I'm about to show players and NPCs are going to reap the same benefits as well so here we start adding natural areas of light and shade and warm and cool colors these open areas benefit in the same way
01:03:58
as the forest scene did adding areas of shade and areas of open lighting like I mentioned the time of day shifting leads to different ambients as the sun moves and this is a shot that I just liked finally let's see how the the new GI system can brighten up your characters day and also their day as well whoever they are well U I promise you light and sound but I don't actually know anything about
01:04:47
sound so here's the man who does gram philipsson good afternoon citizen con I've been at C nearly 10 years and this is the first time I've done this very exciting for me so uh do you want to make some noise so um sound isn't as fast as light so it takes me a bit to catch up Jared wrote that joke for me so you can blame him says it right here blame him so now we have a huge amount of visual and interactable content locations biomes populations planets and
01:05:36
systems and now they're all beautifully lit too thanks Ben but how do we paint this world with sounds it's a challenge it's a challenge of scale we need to support multiple star systems and it's a challenge of quality we want the highest quality possible we also don't want implement M mentation to hinder creativity and we want a seamless experience so we're asking a lot but with Star Audio we can rapidly Implement audio for entity classes brushes or audio sweeteners all of which can be reused and reflected immediately across the game including all of those emergent locations we talked about earlier so again this is Genesis data deriving what happens in Game and we can do all this without breaking flow so here's a fairly dry
01:06:24
video it gets more exciting later I promise uh showing you our rapid workflow so over on the left I had to think about that we have the wise editor that's where all our sounds live in the middle we have star audio editor and on your right we have an entity that needs some insect sounds on it so we can very quickly drag from Wise to Star Audio we can mark up very quickly a bit of logic and we can re-trigger this entity's spawn sound so that it immediately makes a sound I assure that is a group of insects um thank you you're too kind if you like that one you like the ones that come later but there's a little something
01:07:12
missing so to add some realism sounds respond to how they move how you move in the world and how they move relative to you so we need to change the frequency as the velocity relative to The Listener change changes this is known as a Doppler effect in simple terms the pitch dropping as something whizzes by or in even simpler terms now sound designers traditionally needed to implement their own Doppler sounds but given how fast we can travel through these rich dense locations and the sheer number of them we can't afford to be doing that any longer so we've created a systemic Doppler solution and I'm going to show you that now the only way I know how by putting a big Benny noodle machine on top of a
01:08:16
mountain so you can hear the pitch and Tempo changing as we move relative to the Benny noodle machine and this is all fully systemic no special treatment for this sound and I expect the noodle bar to be very busy after that commercial so how does it work well the listener is surrounded by variable time delay buffering not the horrible kind of buffering you're on the internet this is a really nice kind that helps the game sound good uh each buffer represents a section of the sphere around the audio listener and um the audio is mixed into these buffers at a position that is uh
01:09:08
appropriate to the object position in the world changes in the position are applied to the delay buffer by interpolating the audio data but that's not all we're doing here now I know there was a bar citizen yesterday so some of you may not be thinking as fast as you might normally but you may have realized that by buffering the data in this way we're not just creating a uh speed of sound we are not just creating a doler effect we are indeed and I just spoil with my own line creating a speed of sound effect so introducing systemic speed of sound to the game I now have uh a couple of minutes of video and we go through Rapid Fire looking at some fantastic examples of what this brings to the game starting with a spaceship pass by that is supported tonally by the uh systemic
01:09:57
speed of sound okay sounds cool what about weapon fire so let's bring in a sniper and unfortunately for the uh sensitive of heart AO um we're going to hear this first from the perspective of for both with no speed of sound effect okay so that's if you at the Pico perspective there that's how you'd hear it in game right now let's hear it with speed of sound enabled and this time we're just going to listen from Pico's perspective so Pico's down before he
01:10:47
even hears the shot but don't worry he's not dead okay let's finish him off now he's dead and uh as the voice of Pips power up uh I need to get some proper equ in so there's one more example for you now finally oh not finally we have ship weapons so listen to the fire rate as the ship approaches the camera here giving you a bit bit of a sense of threat it's not too easy to tell what's going on there but you get an increase in fire rate finally the really cool stuff explosions so we can put a cinematic element a uh Shockwave element and a
01:11:36
delayed speed of sound effect and that's way too cool to do just once so we're going to do it twice more from further distance so again cinematic effect first when you see it Shark Wave and the explosion itself this is all completely driven by parameters in the game so we can do this for real whenever you drop a MOAB one more that's pretty
01:12:37
cool so the speed of sound simulation gives you a better sense of distance it improves the sense of speed and it supports those amazing cinematic moments so in summary we're trying to make the game more immersive and respond to all this Genesis data and make it feel more real and that's not all we can do we can make sounds respond differently to changes in atmospheric pressure and resultant changes in temperature so for example the sound will travel faster in extremely hot high pressure environments we really look forward to getting this in game for you and getting you enjoying it at home now that's all from uh phase four of the Genesis cycle light and sound so I'm going to hand you back to the
01:13:24
amazing Ben and Ally to bring us home with the Final Phase thank you sir so as grahe says this is going to be the final phase of Genesis and it's called Nature's W and and this is where we're going to bring the very Planet itself to life so first off let's start talking clouds so clouds have got an atmosphere have got to be one of my favorite visual features of our game they're truly awesome but they're also completely static nothing has changed with them so what we want to bring with Genesis is the evolution of clouds over time this isn't just some simple scrolling animation we use the same physical data sets that drive the biomes
01:14:14
we talked about earlier and St architect and these are also now driving a physical simulation of the clouds so they can form and dissipate in realistic conditions so this means things like the oceans the prevailing winds mountain ranges and the temperature will all impact the clouds but to complement these more Dynamic clouds we've also improved our lighting model so it now correctly accounts for how light scatters multiple times inside a cloud and this is important creates much deeper lighting and it can contrast against the sun's Rays resulting in much more Vivid Cloud Scapes like we see on the left here something we're all too familiar with in Manchester now it would be awesome to bring this into context and show it on an actual Locas let's take a look at a quick scene to round this up it's a nice day on the surface but
01:15:04
something's different the clouds are moving but they're not just moving they're forming naturally in changing shape they dissipate as they glide on the atmosphere based on wind data Stratus and cumulus alike now we start seeing the new Cloud shading Model come into play we are seeing enhanced occlusion beneath the cover emphasizing the sunbeams how it interact with the clouds and seeing the light shafts peer through the layers now as this is closing in we can start to see the changes in visibility of the area light precipitation is starting previously we authored static Cloud shapes but no longer we didn't Manu
01:15:54
place a volume here its presence has been informed by Genesis data oh and it's not just a cloud volume it's a weather front now we're trying to see the wind picking up terrain and rocks are getting wet vegetation grass and the overall environment are responding to the weather the system is changing the world around us we can see puddles being formed dynamically in the dirt properly responding to light Reflections and Rain droplets making it getting it's getting really ominous and loud in here I can feel the danger I think we should let this play out in the game here what those F on this location
01:16:53
conditions are deteriorating the severe we need to leave now get back here I'm getting out of this suit now powering up and flying out we'll need to switch to IFR see you on the other side sh
01:19:11
mon it's getting very Sparky up here recommend deviation Lo
01:20:27
wow wow man that's what we call the Falon maneuver to get out of there Ali please break this down for us what did we just see yeah so that was a combination of lots of tech we just saw that all combined together to make a really great cohesive experience so we started with the cloud simulation which wasn't really a cloud simulation it's a weather simulation the rain will appear not at random but it's based on physically plausible conditions so you have real WEA evolving across your planet all the time we have a host of visual effects like the rain and then the have the atmospheric scattering that you get under the columns of rain we had the puddles and the splashes and all of this type of visual effects we saw the wind developing over time and that introduced turbulence to the flight model making flight very challenging and then of course we saw the lightning which plays
01:21:15
havoc with your instrumentation but of direct strikes will damage your ship and of course dur some storms will be dangerous enough to be fatal as Ben's unlucky Aurora just found out and these storms will sometimes be shortlived and localized but others will be larger and potentially permanent on some planets and this is going to restrict access via flight I mean players will be forced to resort to ground vehicles or even foot and this is all going to be dynamic meaning that you might find yourself trapped in some really unexpected situations so we really can't wait to use all these mechanics to open up many new gameplay opportunities for all in the earth soon a wise Yogi once said it's your job as a pilot to compensate and stay on
01:22:04
course all right what have we learned today guys we've shown you an approach to of encoding The Rules of Nature into planetary data we've seen biomes emerge from geology temperature humidity climate weather the physical terrain we create denser more diverse living planets without artists hand placing or man manually creating biomes instead leveraging asset mapping we've shown you a new way to make the game that can scale to create thousands of Coran plan places for civilizations on planets that can be used for Missions or immersion gameplay without Art and Design hand placing locations leveraging World design rules instead we've seen how populations of AI and NPCs inhabiting locations dynamically adapt their
01:22:53
understanding of the environment without custom markup by developers allowing the creation of more playable spaces rapidly we've shown you how light and sound also benefit from Genesis data to influence planetary environments and we shown how these system these systems come together when weather comes into an area changing your gameplay experience significantly our goal with Genesis and all of its system is to create more worlds better worlds Faster by applying our Tech wizard and craftsmanship to build systems that respond to data that's our star engine presentation for today guys for this year have a great citizen con we'll see you on next one

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.