Inside Star Citizen: Hey Now, It's a Rastar

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   foreign first introduced in development at citizengon 2951 is the tool that allows developers to easily place and manipulate structures on the surface of planets and moons in system Stanton pyro and Beyond and in the time sense works progress to stabilize and Shore up the tech so the team can use it on a whole host of locations from the most recent derelict settlements to a reconfiguration of existing ugfs in the upcoming Alpha 320. currently in the Stanton system there are 70 underground facilities or ugfs as we call them and when these were built a couple of years ago we had the kits to build a wide variety of these assets however due to technical limitations we weren't able to realize their full

2. 00:00:48

   potential at that time we had 70 locations but we only had two security ugfs and two drug ugfs this isn't a case of we haven't had enough assets or enough time to do the Arts up until this point we have all the things that we need to do the job the raster tool has really just allowed us to take this to the next level we are now able to go back and to revisit these 70 locations to create a wide amount of variety so that each location doesn't look like a copy paste version of the other this has allowed us to really go back spend some time with these locations and help them realize their full potential [Music] planetary location building tool to use an RTS placement system combined with modular elements to allow the

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   artists to build locations at the surface of planets in cell bodies since Susan Khan we highly focus on usability and stability to make tool Rock Solid it's a small project by three people Mark niece and I and we are excited for the developers to be able to use it now these are not the new new ugfs that you've probably heard about in events like citizen Khan these are just the same old ugfs but we've just given them a Fresh coat of paint and we're going to be placing them alongside the existing locations and just giving them a bit of a refresh let me show you how Rasta works in the engine so here we are on demo I'm going to give

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   you a little sneak peek of the rest our tool in action and how we build up a location from scratch so the first thing that we would usually do not in this case with the ugs because they already have predefined locations but we do a little bit of location scouting on the planet to find a nice cool location so I'm going to open up the browser tool over here and the first thing that I need to do is create a location before I go any further I do need to say that the UI for the raster tool as it stands is not the final version the players are going to see at the end of the day this is purely for artistic and development purposes and I will say it has definitely come a long way in the two years that I've been using it so the first thing we do is we create a location we get this grid on the ground over here which allows us to define the location size and apply different

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   effects and statuses to the location we have some settings for the Aesthetics like dirt and wear which I can get into in a little bit but the first thing I want to do is create a much larger location size because I know that I want to cover quite a large footprints and then we're going to go ahead and add an element from the eugf main buildings and let's add a drag one to the mix over here so that's going to be the base building that everything is dressed around that's going to be the the center point of this location the cool thing that restore enables us to do is also have certain modifiers and volumes applied to our object containers so that for example if I were to move this location up the terrain would automatically conform to

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   the the ground that that needs to be that just saves artists a lot of time from having to do these sort of things manually and allows us to focus on the creative side of things the next thing we need is three turrets um these turrets depending on whether you are at a security ugf or a drug ugf will react in different ways to the player obviously more hostile in a drag environment than if you're in a normal friendly environment these will go just dotted around the place and these currently don't have any turrets spawned on them but they they do that when I hop into game the next thing we want to do is we want to focus on large to small shapes and dressing so the first thing I might do

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   over here when walking through this process is get some of these larger clusters these shipping containers the ugfs are used for storage as well as research so having ample space for storage outside as well as in it's always good to have and now I just want to Define like the footprint of the space so dividing it up into sub areas as well as the larger ugfs so we can have you know maybe some structures like research stations and habitations on the exterior and just break that into little little branches of of spaces might have one over here and then maybe let's spread this location out a little

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   bit maybe let's have a little bit of dressing near these turrets one of these clusters uh cool things so you can also do like quick rotates before you play stuff so you have a good idea of what stuff is going to look like before you do just like to get a little bit of unevenness to the terrain over here helps things from feeling too flat and let's get one of these largest structures in the back over here these sort of like chimneys so this is how I would normally go about creating like three distinct separate locations even within one larger point of Interest so now the point from this afterwards would be to just create pods

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   leading to and from the UTF that would naturally draw the player in and then to set dress with smaller elements so there's some more functional things that I do need to do first for example the ugf does come with these three floodlights but we might need extra areas of Illumination elsewhere so I'm going to go ahead and place some extra floodlights around here when the raster tool is turning red like that it's just doing a collision check on all of the objects around it to make sure I'm not placing anything on top of each other and just making sure everything is kept neat and tidy so I might need to just place it over there and then if I want to close so I can always snap it to a surface closer now that everything should be able to be visible at any time of day or night

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    since we are working with a very Dynamic time of day over here now I want some more functional things like roads leading up towards the ugf so we have these over here might be a little bit small to see just like a generic path that leads up to the ugf I'm just going to do a quick rotate over these and then of course all of our normal editor functionality is also linked to the rasa location so for example if I want to align this road to the user and I can just rotate that make sure everything's nice and centered and where it needs to be okay so now that I have my roads placed I have my floodlights placed I know I'm not going to be crashing into anything in terms of placing stuff the raster location now I could go ahead and do a

11. 00:08:05

    little bit of dressing around here so getting in some small shapes just some scatter around the location then I'll go ahead and grab some of the more functional looking things that one structure it's big shapes over here that we can surround go have the terrain adjust to that and then ring in some of these just got to make sure that things aren't intersecting or clipping between each other too much because that never looks good and let's start building this out a little bit more so this is the process

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    that we follow to create a fully fledged location we set dress all the different elements we play it from a player perspective because sometimes scale can be a little bit funny up in the air like this but this is the general process that we go through in order to create these locations and make sure that they are fun to play essentially so yeah that is a quick little sneak peek at the raster tool and how it allows us to very quickly iterate on our different locations and to make changes very quickly and also to realize the potential of locations that we we dropped years ago but now that this tool really allows to let them shine so one thing for Rasta is to move away from building block which gave us a really great start to further integrate it into

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    the editor and again these are not the new new ugfs these are just the new ugs someone from the law or the story Department probably needs to come up with a better name for that but we're not erasing any of the work we've done in the past we're just building upon and improving and these will set alongside the big colossal ugs when they when they are released so what do we learn this week well we learned that rastar may still run on programmer art but it's a fully armed and operational tool already in use by our developers that with it the existing ugfs limited to only four variations until now are finally realizing their customization potential in the upcoming Alpha 320. and that its next Evolution already well underway now don't forget that this year's ship Showdown is right around the corner of course it's your

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    annual chance to vote on which viable ship has to become John crew's favorite each and every year for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week