Star Citizen Live: Planetary Art

13 December 201901:01:161,327 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to another edition of star citizen live I'm your host Jared Huckaby and I'm back about two minutes ago don't boo me boo me in my own house about five minutes ago we realized that I haven't been on this set and sitting behind this desk since October 18th it's been two months since we've been here we've been on the road we've been in the UK preparing for citizencon doing citizencon we were back I hope you enjoyed our wonderful wonderful immensely talented substitute host last week will WAIS bomb I got jury duty I got jury duty for the first time I got the jury summons and then they decided they didn't want me that was depressing like I'm not used to that kind of
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rejection it's harsh ah so what's today's show about it's about planetary art if you did watch citizencon 2949 you saw you saw one of our guests this one right here on two esteemed panels the terror firmer panel which will go which isn't live on YouTube yet but will be shortly and then of course the micro technicalities panel all about plant a planetary art our new plant took v4 and what it's what does for star citizen what it's doing for stars is and what it will do for star citizen so joining us to answer questions follow-up questions about those two panels is Michelle Cooper hey do Michelle I'm doing great thanks Jared and joining us as his first time not just his first time on SCL not just this first time one of our live
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shows but his first time on any star citizen related video whatsoever who are you the D studio I guess I'm sure it happens names own ask I think it was I think it was Gareth born who came on the show and he forgot his own name when we were doing the enjoy he goes I'm and it wasn't a gag he literally he literally spaced out it was pretty good it's hard doing a live show is harder than then people usually expect so today's show we are talking about like I said planetary art the the new planet tech that's that's coming in
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to star citizen with the upcoming alpha 3.8 what it does for our planets for our moons going forward as usual you can submit your questions live then either the twitch chat or this are the spectrum chat by pressing your question with the word question in capital letter surrounded by brackets that's going to help us pull it out from the chap we also collected questions as we always do early throughout the week on our on spectrum and let that where that lets people vote them up now before we get started I do want to say that uh now all the questions that come in on those threads are always on topic and sometimes not although always the questions that are voted up are always on topic for instance I believe the most voted up question this week was about animals of fauna in in populating our
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plants and moons which is a wonderful question but not something the artists that worked on the planet tech to build our environments I can talk about so we appreciate the enthusiasm we appreciate the votes but that's not something they can talk about well we still got plenty of questions from the thread so we have done our long intro ops back and getting used to it let's just jump right into it the second most voted question that actually applies to you guys here what sort of impact has v4 had on development time like does it make making planets or moons faster or just better or both you want to go first yeah I'll give you a very simplified answer and then Sebastian can give it a bit technical stuffing to it so we've essentially
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removed as much paperwork from the whole development process as possible so what we had in in the earlier version of our planet second is something that I had had as one of the slides and what's going on with TV I have in one of the slides under the presentation is basically this is file structure that we had with all these separate files that kept the settings and this was really slowing us down so I think there was one of the most important things for for making things faster so by getting rid of dead space getting rid of that time essentially we free up more time to work on the actual artistic part of it so creating more content more library items more assets more textures yeah goddess on the top right good
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in essence it allows us to be put in numbers but it's like it's gone from weeks to days for simple planets just with father the process changed no homo artists focus it is now and I can yeah it's just better all around I'd say yeah thinking about it pardon me I'm still I still have my coffee from citizen not part of the challenge going forward when we do things and that this applies to many things not just planet it before is we have now refined the tech that we use to build the planet that was used to build the planets that we've built the moons that we've built but as we go forward we'll be building things that
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haven't been built before you know different planet types different biome types it's like that so it's hard to completely estimate how much faster it will take us to build something that hasn't been built yet it's always a challenge in all game development but I can I can say from watching you guys convert the existing planets and moons from b3 to v4 and not just not just the quality increase but the incredibly relatively short time span that it's that's taking you guys to do that it's exciting what plan of what planted before I can potentially do for us going forward and to add to that I mean that's also we were doing it while building the tools and learning how to use them so it's only gonna get faster yeah yeah
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I think where's the Texas will be solidifying and I think already from going through this process reworking everything a lot of best practices that come out of that that anything that comes after will benefit from I'm just like with our spaceships we get better at making them the more we do with them know so um next question is what is possible with planet tech V for in terms of unique environment landmarks I mean depends what people consider to be unique environment landmarks I guess the fact that we are no longer tieing biome to a specific height map allows us to do a lot more diverse things so we could for example have a giant desert and just put
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one single Oasis somewhere in there which was not a thing we could do before without sacrificing an entire set of height map data just for that so that's always exciting and you will see it from space if it's big enough so yeah I don't know I think when I think is about in unique environment landmarks I always go to Devil's Tower in Wyoming if you've seen Close Encounters the big giant crazy mountain formation that they had in in the Close Encounters that's what I always think of when I think unique land masses I don't know why to add to that I think with the system how the system works now like except already mentioned we're no longer repeating
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tiles that have a specific specific combination of this height shape this terrain shape with these asset types in these colors so all the elements are completely blended or mixed together in a unique situation everywhere so depending on the temperature depending on how this mountain range happens to be in that region where it's warm or hot the Oracles what types of assets and all that stuff so every area is in its own way more unique then if we talk about landmark things 80 percent the the goal of the tool is to do 80 percent super procedural and not have to worry about it and that frees up more time for us to do more specific craft it's areas we have outposts which it's more
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purposefully built it's a point of interest for the players to go to on the organic side we would like to do similar aspects to that I think caves is a good example of organic points of interest for players to go to and I could imagine like being having a massive rock or something big that is set up in the same way like we would do a cave or an outpost that has similar things that would draw a player to it but it's not necessarily man-made I mean this is something that will will ya we'll continue to explore I think cases a good first step okay for our next question this is probably the most common question we've had well it wasn't the most up voted it was the most submitted
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in multiple places and got votes in multiple places and it's all over the live chat right now what can you tell us about water people people really want to know about water we're talking waterfalls we're talking rivers we're talking oceans what work has been done for in planting before to support the addition of water to our planets and what's still outstanding you go first so remains a difficult thing we have a ocean that is on Stanton 1 but as players know if you cannot go underneath the water surface you cannot really interact with it that much we have a frozen ocean which you can actually walk
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over and all that stuff so that's it's an ongoing process one things that one of the things that we cannot really do yet but we are looking forward to exploring and doing more northward sorts on the R&D side is all the water related stuff because one thing that I've always wanted to do personally is have like little small lakes or areas in in areas that are not necessarily connected to the ocean I think that would be really cool the same with running rivers and and yeah when you get elevation changes water faucet that that happened as well but it's it's it's quite complex to to tackle so yeah it's we don't have the answers yet for that okay now when you say it's complex complex to tackle that's that's not the
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same as saying it's not going to happen it's not the same as saying we're not gonna you know do it or pursue it it's just that you start with the when you start any endeavor you start with the things that are accomplishable now you know that's what we do it's v-0 v1 v2 you start with the things that you start with the easier wins you start with the immediate wins and then you build from there exactly yeah I think considering that we had to rethink how we do terrain and because it's on the sphere so I'm a planet yeah there's a lot of a lot of ground work that needed to be done before you can get all the other elements in there as well but yeah I don't think it's it's impossible just needs dedicated time to to spend on it
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and considering the changes we've been able to do in the last year and and all the effort that went into that and the people that that we have working on this I think that there's a yeah that we will get to that point at some point one of the questions from the thread had to do with in a lot of the images that folks have seen so far either at citizencon or or the folks that are in vacati there seems to be there is occasionally an issue with repeated textures we repeated textures in some cases is this something that was it was it a v3 thing is it some of its mitigated in v4 is it something unrelated something that's still
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outstanding what can you tell us about it the repeated textures are obviously an issue they have been at least for my personal opinion better envy free but that being said before was still very much in a ground work face or most I mean it's it's pretty good already but it's like the foundation of things to come and the fact that the textures are tiling so much just like a compounded issue come coming from technical issues about precision then we have to go into like the way we apply textures to the terrain it's very manual right now which we definitely want to improve in the future with more procedural like procedural things to help the artists do a quick a
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better job at this and then there's also the issue that we're still like I'm not sure if I should say this but we've added tech to before the last two weeks so it's still an ongoing thing and we will definitely plans to improve this from a purely technical procedural approach as well without any artist input so it's it's not something we're gonna fix it free eight but it's definitely on the list of things to do hopefully very shortly you make a good point there about how we we're still adding two to the two everything that makes up plan tech before even in the last couple weeks things are very rarely ever like done like okay that's it that's the last we're going to do on something and then we never we never go back to it if it's
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a it's a hallmark of star citizen's development that if there's a if there's a fix to be made if there's an improvement to be included we will pursue that the next question is actually related this is v4 considered final which I kind of I think I just answered overs or will there be a v5 uh v6 v7 in the future well I wouldn't say it's final I think there's a foundation now that we can continue to build on and it's is one that we put a lot of effort into thinking through and make sure that it's is something that we can could continue to build on I don't think there are changes that would be that would warrant a renamed to v5 because I think everything that goes on top of this is is the iteration on on
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what in a sense is what we have now if that makes sense like for my point of view at least you know I totally found I think I'm a result I've got a point um yeah we just like I say it's good in all aspects I'd say some better than me free so I'm still a bit behind um are we have plans for everything to improve them if we get when and how are we gonna get around to do that and we'll see but nothing should bar on the complete rework or like yeah a major number change I guess we're never gonna say never well that's what it's put it that way we don't we don't we don't want to sit here and say others there's yes there's never going to be a planet Tech v5 take that to the bank that's not that's not what we're saying it's just that with v4 we believe we've got a
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foundation that's pretty solid that we can continue to build on and we're hopeful that this gets us to where we need to go and will continue to support us for all the time to follow well put speaking of the improvements over the last couple of last couple weeks it's been a while since this isn't gone I think we're are we three weeks away two weeks away I don't know time right now you guys have continued to improve you guys have continued to iterate I understand you you you have some Ian approved videos that you that you say show us Michelle yeah why not so yeah like you mentioned we we've recorded some footage just straight from the editor because obviously we're constantly publishing and we want to get the best possible version out there to everybody soon but in the meantime
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during this process we often just fly around the editor and just record some videos and share them amongst the teams it's just for everybody to check in on what the progress is and so we can do that I figured you're the screen share with us here now yeah I will I just wanted to just know yeah describe the experience oh yeah no I was just a screen share so we figured it might be nice just to bring some of these videos and share them with you I'm sure people would like to see it alright so this is just footage from the editor and of the dark Arctic Arctic region on Microtech and so far when we've shown it
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and talked about this has only been static imagery like a screenshot I think of about three screenshots in the micro technicalities presentation but it's it's sometimes hard to get the fully comprehend what's going on and how the environment actually feels unless you have some footage of just flying around and seeing an emotion and seeing the scale and moving through it I think one of the biggest surprises in the community anyway if I'm allowed to speak for the community here with micro tech is that it's not just one giant snow-covered ball nope that's we were very keen on making sure that we even though it's the theme as cold and ice
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and that we have a their first offering officially alright well I'm gonna keep asking your questions here's you if you want to play it just you just want to want to just go through a couple of videos here we don't want to lose the questions from the community here what does planet took before do to help with things like popping trees as distance changes and stuff like that the load in the swamps I mean before change is not really anything about that to be perfectly honest that being said I mean there are some improvements like what data the objects are spawned on that's more stable and doesn't jump around as much if it lots out that's one
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improvement but it's also not necessarily iconic to the lots and then there's also the the fact that we continuously work on the assets and try to improve them as best as we can but it's also like disconnected from tech before really it's just the thing we we try to improve our pipelines all the time so it should be better than before but it's not necessarily completely different from a layman's perspective it certainly looks like it's smoother to me and I don't I don't know I don't know if that's if that's just me imagining it but I I see I see more fades than just pops yeah I mean that's part of the whole data being
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most able thing really before the the moving of assets was not so much data lots were badly made but just that the data their spawn on moved around with the MIPS like if you zoom out the quality of data changes and this is something that thankfully the engineers were able to improve a lot um so should be much better than before in this regard but yeah the tender underlying loading process is still the same okay so with another water question here well things like oceans rivers lakes ponds and streams eventually carve and shape landscapes no in the sense that we will not have the terrain dynamically change
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based on on water flow or creating this playground where people could be a directed to water flow and and make things happen on the terrain I don't think it will be that dynamic but it's it will more likely be the opposite where we have terrain shapes that are very especially with the simulated data that that's behind it will more likely create opportunities for water to appear or rivers to flow in when we get to that point when we get that part of the working gadget now yeah we will through as our as artists and said we will go through and we will create rivers and anything that that that seemed to have carved their way through rocks and stuff but well we're saying that it's not going to be something that that procedurally happens live in the game it's it's not we're not talking
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about you know the deformable terrain the Rotter water will slowly like wear away the terrain or anything but no but we will with with our tools we will go through and we will create the impression that these lakes and rivers and streams have been here for years and and have worked their effect on rocks and stuff like that yeah yeah thoughts about volcanoes and lava a lot of good there were a lot of questions about lava planets like I don't know if people just been watching episode three a lot lately but a lot of stuff about lava planet so I mean I assume they're talking about cold and dead lava planets but you can totally do no problem at all I know like I know seriousness I guess they want to like liquid lava and stuff but it's like
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the same issue as the rivers really it's not something that the attack before can do right now we'll hopefully get to that yeah I mean yeah I personally I think volcano a lot of us are really really awesome I would love to have them but I think whatever we do next whether it's more advanced water stuff or a lot of stuff we want to make sure that it's a complete experience and not just a visual representation of what lava is doing on the planet and then you walk up to it and there's a look you cannot interact with it or anything so we want to if we add it we want to make sure it's a meaningful meaningful addition beyond just the visual representation of
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something that looks cool we want to make sure that gameplay is involved with it and that we deliver a complete package of like oh this is what it's like to have lava in the game and to interact with it yeah I think that I think from the reasons people are asking is probably because after citizencon we know that Pyrus system is beginning its development so folks who have kept up with the clock - PDA with the lower posts and stuff like that look through the star map for pyro I know that I think there's some I think there's a multi-planet or maybe more than one it's been a while since I've looked at the Galactic guide for pyro but almost certainly there's some there's some lava related functionality with the pyro system and that's yeah that's why it's on people's minds I still think my Mustafar thing is probably correct though I liked episode 3 let's see what else do we got next
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what is something you want to do that's not yet possible with Planet X before steep cliffs steep cliffs steep cliffs overhangs and this is more of an asset issued and realistically would be able to do with the terrain anyway and yeah all the smaller bodies of water all the cool stuff you could do with that like a lake in the mountain area or flowing water waterfalls okay sorry no the way that the blendtec before works with their whole climate data inform individuals and every asset being
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able to know what kind of climate data it's it's sitting on will make it much easier for us to like build assets that nicely integrate with the terrain so we can make essentially terrain extensions as meshes and they will hopefully look the same as the terrain or at least yeah have everything that arraign has around and that is definitely something you want to work on very soon now Michelle you mentioned a steep cliffs and stuff like that I think that I think that our next question here might actually relate to that our mountains going to be taller than the cloud layers on planet and there's been some discussion in
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spectrum lately with Ali who's not here at the moment to talk about it there's been some discussion about height map limits and stuff like that what can you tell us yes so technically or theoretically there's nothing holding us back from having the mountain peaks come and stick through the clouds we however like at the moment the clouds as people know who do their landings and the clouds are not really that volumetric yet it's something that's high on our to-do list on our wish list that's being being worked on so we want to make sure that if we allow the player to travel through the clouds on a mountain peak that we want that that experiences which you which you would expect it to be so you want to refers to a thick layer of clouds and just be in the middle of it
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just like you would if you fly one airplane for example so that's one of the reasons why we feel like it's not quite the right moment for it yet because right now it would not be dead experience then just you to hook onto that thread that Ali responded to and just a general questions about steepness and terrain height I think Ali did a really good job of explaining it and trying to explain what widened there's a limitation or what the issues are that we running into actually I have a little video prepared just to help me with that because I've been reading that thread so I sort of expected this would come up there what we're referring to you guys
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there's a threat on spectrum why is there a height map limit if I remember it correctly our director of graphics Ali Brown has been in that thread for the last a couple weeks I think answering questions there it's a really good discussion about the not just the limitations but sometimes not just the technical limitations but sometimes the creative limitations between both behind why we can do things why we can't so we've got a video here yes so I just recorded this little example of what actually happens with I mean go to the other one first with the terrain and how terrain is basically functioning so we have a patch of mesh like polygons and we have our height map
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and it's displaced so it's stretching up and down right this is based on just our height map of a piece of terrain that goes in and it's pushed out and what you'll see is sometimes with this these triangles or polygons they gets stretched so the steeper it is and the more they will get stretched and some of the issues that we'll run into and I prepared this one as a more stylized version of it like this is it's basically a grid with with with polygons doing the same thing a very simple height map that will displace it and these are basically our texture textures applied and what you'll see will happen is if there's a smoothness you'll see
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that these textures will remain quite nice and smooth and they will not distort or displace too much but what you'll see happening on the areas where another sure if my mouse is visible is cool but you'll see on the more steeper areas is that these textures will get really really stretched and it's a very old-school problem to have but it's it's one that is also quite hard to fix especially if you're dealing with whole planets worth of height content that that's doing all kinds of things some games they they fix this by covering up a lot of these surfaces with additional geometry that's what we also yeah do but the steeper it is and this is just
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the textures problem but also if you look at the triangles or the polygons it's the same issue we distribute our assets based on these these points these further and if an area is super stretched the more stretch tissue there's actually no points to attach these assets to so they will they will find a spot to spawn on and it will it will very look very jarring so if there's not enough geometry to support it it will it will cause issues so the steepness is it's a bit of a technical limitation and it's the reason why it's it's hard to do and get results that are very visually satisfying as well because we can do
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higher stuff especially on the large scale so I think Ali said it as well like if you want a very very high mountain you would have to do a bit of a pyramid shape so the base the top maximum height might be more than like six seven ten kilometers but in order to get there you would have to do it very gradually and I think that's what happens in most situations on earth and most large scale mountain ranges as well like yes the maximum height is very high but in order to get there you're travelling kilometres and kilometres on the horizontal axis as well before you hit that highest point and we sort of had to make a compromise saying well in
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a patch of four by four kilometres how much would you expect the maximum height difference to be how steep would be and we sort of settled on maximum of two kilometers between the lowest and highest point and if you combine that with the height map on the on the planet itself which doesn't really have a limitation we could go way higher but then the steepness would be a less it would be less steep but the maximum Heights and lowest high points would be bigger than one or two kilometers I hope that sort of makes it a bit clearer yeah and for folks who want to know more twitch chat is there on the case they're on the case trying to solve it you can go to the spec you can go to the thread
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in spectrum we see the discussion Ali's been taken been really great about engaging in the conversation with everybody you can see far more information from the from our director of graphics about you know what can be done what can't be done what we're still looking to do in the future about this so check that out now we've got Hearst and this is the plan Tech before version of her student yes and this is from Monday so I think Monday so yeah this is this is close to or - to what what will be going out soon as you might notice we we took this opportunity to go a little bit back to the 2017 version of person
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that we presented so everything is a bit more darker and polluted we wanted to we wanted to take this opportunity just to go back to the original art direction a bit more where all the elements are coming together again and yeah we're we're quite happy with with the results so far and it like Seth mentioned with v4 it's it's it's really about a new and solid foundation that we can continue to build on right first is having what you have and try to like hook things into it to make exceptions for now we want to be able to do this this is a from the ground up and I think that that was the
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most important thing for for us as like the team that we wanted to have something that we know in the foundation is correct and we can actually continue to build on moving forward now will this run on my 46 or do we have to upgrade to a Pentium it's not really just more one of the questions from the chat says we will see will we see traveled areas like dearth paths in the future in the future we want to we want to get more stuff related stuff but yeah we would need a tool for that that it's had to take a bit of a backseat in favour of properly
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doing the planet tech so not you know not not out of consideration anything just nothing just not in the immediate yeah this looks like one of their junkyards seems more spread out than it used to be yeah this is one of the outposts on one of the little islands in along the coast so this is one of the new spots people will be able to visit did any we see a lot of grass a lot of rocks stuff it's tough on the surface here did any changes in v4 affect the way that grass and plants can sometimes clip through the the bottom of a ship or even our landing ramps not yet but this is something that we are continuously
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talking about how to improve and we want to improve it because I think now that there's a this foundation is set up we can actually look at the details more which means that if you like for example the cacti if you have your Rover or you're a cyclone beast of a machine and you're just blasting through the wasteland and then you run into those cacti and you're you're standing still which it doesn't really match your expectations when you're driving around the vehicle in a vehicle like that and you're hitting what I would expect to be a software object or at least I would expect it to break on there when they want to get hit so stuff like that is stuff that we are still looking at on
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the to-do list couple questions in chat about big cracks on the surface of a planet I think they're asking if we'll see cracks that are big enough that we can actually go down inside them and I think we hit the height map thing again yeah yeah I think that that ties into the height map or detect the technical limitations of of how the terrain works and is displaced any type of crack would have to have some sort of angle I think I'll he mentioned that it works best up to 70 70 degrees so if he wants something super steep that's actually we would we would come down to assets along
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along those edges to sort of get for more vertical faces which is also something that we're looking into but what are these I know you're not actually moving through the things I can't tell you to turn around but what are these pillars were looking at he's like oil there these are prospecting towers in the right this is the videos recorded when the density of these assets the occurrence of these assets super high so these are actually very they're like this should be dotted around like four of them in this entire frame but yeah like I said this is taken straight from the editor as a yeah in progress yes all work in progress if this were if this four highest C we'd have the work in progress tag in the lower corner but then this was a last
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minute ad for the show we realized we had these this morning so we decided to throw them in there as a as a treat for our viewers so we don't have them WIP eat here may I come back to a question about having them get a better machine for this though we made it of conscious effort to not spend much more resources for the whole thing and some parts were even using less so you hopefully won't need Nurik for any of that I just don't get to say Pentium very often anymore these days I know we're still looking at a we're still
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looking at Herson here has arccorp been improved in any way with before ah gob is a very special beast in its own right I'd say it'd even be freeware to do a lot of put a lot of extra effort in adjusting the tech just for our crop and we've done the same for before as well that being said since we had to redo all planets we didn't go all out on rebuilding our crop of everything utilizing everything that before has to offer in terms of improvements so you just try to hit get as close or slightly better than we free our crop which I hope think we hopefully did but it's not yeah I mean yes it benefits from some of
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the improvements like the space-to-ground transition being more consistent but it's not a very different planet I'd say yeah everything that improved in terms of the the consistency from from orbits to ground also is the case for our core but a lot of the improvements that happens for v4 are very very much based on on the organic side of how a planet would work so temperature and all this stuff and what happens with terrain and what happens with assets and how the stuff sort of mixes together and our corpus is a very unnatural place because it's it's basically completely covered right so
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yeah yeah it's it's not benefiting as much from it as organic locations for now we'll see if we ever get when we hopefully get around to yes well eventually I'd you know we were talking about this a little bit before the show we've stated before in the past eventually our Corp will need to be revisited to add things like its oceans and stuff like that so I would imagine that whenever that time comes who's probably uh will probably be a good chance to look at the other stuff look at what you can actually benefit from in the before take properly without like with a proper rework of content there's a couple things on the on the on the bucket list I think the the big the butterfly scene at the equator that's
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the yeah yeah yeah well yeah I still there three it because like he just said you know it's our corporal the the work right now for 3/8 wasn't as minor as far as our corp is concerned but it's mostly for the other planets but the and then you know the addition of more biomes and stuff like that it's you know fuck-all yeah good call so that's the new orbital I've not visited our Corp in 380 yet now one of the things I this this is a me question here we are in these videos we are traveling much faster than a player can ever travel like look how fast we just
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got down from from the station to the city I know I know level LODs and stuff and our there set based on the relative speeds that players can travel as far as when they stream in when they stream out and stuff like that we are exceeding that by quite a bit in these videos is that going to make the popping that we see sometimes these videos a little more egregious than they would be in game I would definitely say any footage that comes straight out of an editor is like you mentioned the speed is we're flying around with ridiculous speed so the the the popping or the loading of these assets is it's not meant to keep up with that with that speed so it will be much much less for
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for players just playing the game and flying around and there just occurred to me as I was watching this somewhere I'm like because you know I know that the tech our team and I think spends a lot of time balancing these LODs and and their transition rates and they're usually based on the speeds at which a player can move and we are just they're not built to keep up with this speed but they should look much better at relative player speeds let's see art aren't corpse a beautiful planet but with only three types of biomes residential commercial industrial the service gets can't get a little repetitive will we see additional biomes eventually eventually we will yeah but yeah for free a that's just redoing what was dead before and getting the whole
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set of planets out in time so yeah yes you remove it so much faster than a player can yeah so you can see the transitions more but when you play when you do this at player speeds it's gonna be very very slow much smoother alright do you plan in the future to add mud on a planet with the water they're very very water focused I can imagine yeah it's understandable water is a lot of fun to play around with I'm mostly wondering we do have mod textures I think we're basically run out of videos so you can stop this creature so yeah we do have some mud textures already on
00:45:30
some of the planets I think you'll find some mud on Staunton one and it's in and around the trash but I think the question is more about will we have slippery mud and we see any footsteps I think it ties into you what you would expect to see with a more complex simulation of snow on the ground as well like those effects of stepping into deeper stuff and that's yeah on the on the wish list that we'll still have to look at so we have more textures but not slippery mud that will change your physics drastically or create like you you won't be able to create these massive much this little slip streams yes we don't have deformation but I do think
00:46:18
we can make the mud slippery for vehicles and stuff I think that's possible yeah this I mean it'd be good to make driving on the surface even more difficult than it already is yeah I mean the frozen ocean would be slippery so is much to be the same now we have some basic friction but it will not be visually very involved let's follow up on that while we're talking about vehicles driving around planetside rocks why do you put so many rocks around looks good help me out but what's what's the deal well why are there so many rocks that's a good question I think in a lot of ways the the the environments
00:47:11
that we're building are not landscaped by humans so I think we first of all we've much to try to really improve our scattering methods and in three-point-eight so with the terrain being much more an element in the feets into the scattering system and where we where we distribute assets that should already create a way more natural feeling of okay this is a dense area here it's actually a clearing that you can sort of follow and it feels like a natural path but due to the procedural nature it will still find areas that are super dense and less dense some areas just the algorithm just gives you maximum rocks so that can happen I don't think that will ever ever really change
00:48:00
but we've really tried to balance that out wherever an artist is involved in its looking at an area but nature isn't always nicely done yeah and when you say when you say things like I don't think that I'll ever really change you know we're talking about that there will always be difficult areas there were always these places on a pond when you're building an entire plant there will always be there always be places where it's difficult to traverse it's it's you're you're meant to you're it's meant to be challenging for you to get through there but I really like what you said before about how we are constantly it iterating on the algorithm on the way that these things are placed on the way them on their densities and stuff like that we've we've worked 3.8 but that's not the only patch where
00:48:47
we've improved yet we've actually improved it in and such previous patches as well and it's something we'll continue to work on it's a I know many of our many of our developers watch the YouTube videos they watch the twitch streams that you know now in addition to playing the game ourselves we watch other people playing we see their experience and we do we do want this to be a fun but challenging experience and a lot of lot of ways so we will continue to watch we will continue to evaluate and we will continue to adjust as we have been based on the experience that we see players have yeah yeah I personally I just added that some some of the sci-fi novels that you read it's like one person to mark slotting a root yes one of the things that I found like was really really cool about it
00:49:37
this you had to plan out this is rude of kilometres just to get from point one to be and like plan the whole trip and there were so many dangerous like even even basic rocks were very dangerous like this boulder field is gonna be a real issue I personally think it's really cool but I also appreciate the desire to have a like a good smooth running rally through across my own surface or I do look racing so it's not we're not doing it to you to make life difficult I mean we want to make sure that we we can facilitate both basically yeah it's a you know and a lot of creation methods sculpting for instance it's you it's easier to take away as you go than it is to build up after the fact
00:50:25
you just you start you start with a big slab of granite you start with everything and then you slowly start pulling away the parts that you don't need to get to the shape that you want and I think that's where we're we're still we're still we're still working with our big slab of granite right here we're still refining the the way the granite is made and then as with things continue we'll continue to sculpt things off of it and make it a more enjoyable experience seasons has come up a couple times in the chat will we ever see planets change depending on seasons hopefully I mean the fact that we have everything based on temperature humidity no which is like almost climate will allow us to do much more than we could before but it's still something we need
00:51:14
to put more work in and like build things specific before item so hopefully we will be able to have season soon or like eventually who knows but yeah it would be nice to have it and we are already preparing some of the assets in a way so we can actually change them change the car like have to leave stir and change tackle and stuff um so we are slowly preparing for it but I'm not sure if they're like specific plans to get that like when that is gonna be a thing boys right it's a it's a very large skill a dynamic thing that would need to happen so yeah you can sort of predict or look imagine how we would set up assets for it but how old is a components which would tie in together
00:52:03
the point is it's not it's not coming next week you know one of the one of the really cool things about Planet X before and we talked about it quite a bit in a is you that went out yesterday with the VFX team is what you just mentioned Sebastian how we now have temperature information in our in the in the in the ninth of tau sets the surface types and the surface types like that and we can you we can pull so much from that like that's what the via the VFX team is tying into that to to inform the type of ground storm that is that is produced over each area so it's it's definitely conceivable at the very least it definitely seems like it's theoretically possible to to tie into that same
00:52:51
information to kind of to flock trees in the winter or summer or something like that but at this point I'm not aware of any direct plans or or intentions to do that at this point but who knows what the future old there's no depositing on the suit of the player and suppose the things that go right so that's also like that's gonna tie into the whole environment as well so we will be able to have snow deposit on everything in the environment eventually so Dow things coming together that will hopefully give us seasons eventually but yeah we're not dead yeah other building blocks putting being put into place now the the snow buildup if I remember Brian
00:53:41
McCready that on the affecting the player off it's that's not in three point eight that's come no later because that we're going to think yeah because we have to go back and reset up all the other different armor types and characterize that do that and stuff like that so it's dead so the tech is there we just need to implement it across everything at this point yeah will there be caves to discover on micro tech and its moons in three point eight knots for three point eight and this has to do with if we think about caves on micro tech and its moons I think we're we're we would really love to see a new architect which would be frozen caves ice caves right so we really want to do it justice and do it properly and if we
00:54:33
would put in caves now would probably be the architect that we already have because just simply do it to your time time limitations but when we do caisson mikrotik we want to make sure that they they are a proper ice caves and they fulfill that ice cave feel and look as cool as they can be so not for three point eight but in the near future okay let's we have a question here let's go a little further ahead we know that Crusader and micro tech comes out with alpha three point eight but a lot of our backers are always about alright but what's next Crusader we know that Crusader from lore nothing is a gas giant does planet tech V for applied to Crusader because and we
00:55:25
talked about earlier how it doesn't apply Ark Ark work with its mostly or an organics kind of thing but that seems like maybe Crusader might be an exception yeah well yeah Crusaders I even more detached from pentek before the narco because a cop is at least a solid thing but Crusader needs its own very own tech on I mean maybe we will be able to use some of the tech and repurpose it for Crusader I don't know about that um that's probably for Ally to answer I guess bad yeah it's not gonna have any impact on Crusader yeah there might be some logic or or it's just general methodology that we can sort of take into whatever we do for Crusader but Crusader will will be its own a piece of tech to you to do that
00:56:15
and that would involve all the the clouds and just having those look and feel correct and like except that it doesn't it's not even a physical or solid thing that you would fly to it so it's basically all types of clouds and layers and yeah it's a very different system yep and folks can expect to hear more about Crusader as we continue its developing next year in things like iousy and maybe even back here on SEO so stay tuned for that stuff okay so this is it we're at the end I got one more question for you and then you get to go home go for the weekend get to watch all expanse which is roughly it's not commercial that's just me saying I'm
00:57:02
really excited alright it's not a commercial so just like watching spans what's the thing about what's the thing about Planet X before that excites you the most you guys have been working on this for yes between plant eggplant took me to find a query plan tech before you've been working on developing this tech for some time now where we're at now what it does for us in the future what's the thing about it that excites you the most for me personally it's definitely the whole the things we can do of it in the future just because it's so enabling and all different kinds that we always wanted improvements to have but kind of limited with the lifter groundwork that we had and now it's like yeah like I said before we
00:57:51
have plans for essentially every part of it that's gonna it can be improved and that's what excites me the most just so we can get better looking planets much faster in the future and that's yeah and a lot of things we couldn't do before so that's what excites me the most yeah I think that's pretty much my my answer as well it's it's it's such a big thinking back of earlier planet tech like a lot of the stuff that we wanted to do either have to be an exception to the rule set that we have or like then we the more complex stuff got the more we found ourselves adding exceptions in order to do stuff and then in the end you'll have this very complex system of all these rules and exceptions and
00:58:40
checkboxes that you need to make sure that you need to enable for it to work and then you forget one and this see like now we're this at a new system which fundamentally is as a very grounded logic to it and allows us to just you can imagine doing stuff and you you can imagine like okay well this requires temperature or I understand that I can plug this into the flow maps and the the humidity in order to achieve a certain thing and so with that data you can actually everything you could almost imagine what I'm gonna say everything but a lot of the stuff that we would want to do you can sort of plug into the logic that is there now and with that foundation there's that we can actually look forward to you okay and
00:59:29
now we can start building again on top of it instead of adding exceptions and and a little additional checkboxes just to enable certain things yeah well that sounds great guys thank you so much for taking your time to be here on star citizen live Sebastian it's your first time doing video for us how was it thank you for having me yeah I I think I didn't make a committee full of myself so that's always good um no actually have fun that Mike really picked up that breath it's so far from your mouth too and it was just like yours it was surprisingly good I had a lot of fun all right that's Sebastian
01:00:21
that's Michelle I'm Jared thank you thanks for watching us everybody watching there'll be no sel next week but we'll be back with our last ISC of the other year so this is the last SEO of the year so enjoy we'll see you on is see you next week happy holidays if we don't see all there's everybody and until next time take care Dylan 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

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