Star Citizen Live Gamedev: Outlaw Lifestyle

29 October 202100:58:351,617 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] [Laughter] italian spiderman wow spiders [Applause] hey everybody welcome to star citizen
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live spider-man i'm italian spider-man i'm your host jared huckaby uh it's halloween weekend and i i didn't feel like doing count disco this year so so this is this is what you end up with sorry everybody uh welcome to star citizen live game dev outlaw lifestyle uh if you've never seen star citizen live before it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week hang out with our developers and either discuss a little bit of our development or showcase a little bit of our development this week's episode is a little different uh if you remember from citizencon uh that just like two weeks ago i think uh we had a whole bunch of different showcases going on one of those was a lovely uh uh josh van zulen uh showing his process
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of creating the interiors of the outlaw space stations now josh because he came prepared and is wonderful at his job created an entire hour-long presentation for us and then when we fit it in with the rest of the day we're like you got five minutes you got five minutes so we uh we slaughtered the heck out of that set out of that that segment for for sizzicon but he's back he's back today uh where's where's my screen saying josh how you doing man doing all right how are you doing man i i i'm bring me i considered doing the voice the entire time and i'm like no that's that's i was about to say like i was kind of expecting it but no no no no no
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all right so so josh uh outlaw space stations are a big uh feature of the upcoming pyro system um they are they are uh some of the they're few and far between in the system but so that means that when you encounter them they're incredibly important they are they are life throughout the verse so uh at this point because this is your show here uh i'm gonna turn it over to you let's just jump right into it uh what are we doing today sure absolutely so um for those of you who who didn't tune in to sitcon um i'm josh vanzalin principal environment artist here at cloud imperium games and basically what we're gonna do is we're going to expand on
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that talk that we did at sitcon a little bit so it was only like a tiny snippet of what we really had there so we're gonna tread like some of the same ground but it's going to make a lot more sense in the broad scheme of things and uh we're going to go into a lot more depth in regards to the actual development process uh figuring out how we actually start these locations and build them out and figure out kind of these really key aspects along the way so like certain things like uh figuring out uh what the art direction is for a starting point right so we have key bits of art that we're trying to actually establish and uh then reapply that into the actual game setting and then finding out where there are holes within the art style itself so
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maybe the concept team or the art director hadn't necessarily thought about how the art style would work in this one particular instance or how it would particularly combine with the game design that we're actually needing to put in there because we are making a game and then also figuring out not only the um only the just the general workflow for the location but what the limitations are in terms of what tech we have available to us how much physical stuff we can put in the location and uh then just like figuring out those real problem areas where we're going to run into issues and then address those and then react to those and then try and find you know creative solutions to to problems so this is the the earliest part of the development process
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just after concept art so this is pre-production on the actual location and um basically everything you'll see here is not basic it's not exactly what you'll see in the final product but it is a very solid foundation for figuring out what we actually will need to do and some of this stuff will actually survive well and truly into into the final product for sure this is my first time seeing this for a while so it's it's a little bit of a nostalgia trip because uh uh it's moved on quite a bit from that from this point but um it's there's still a lot of elements that are fairly similar right so it's not a wasted opportunity or time within development's actually incredibly critical for figuring out how we can build these things in a time efficient
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manner as efficiently as possible and whatnot so without further ado let's just dig in right so what you can see here on on my screen right now is something we're all fairly familiar with this is the stanton systems rest stops so one of the food courts here what we're going to do is we're actually going to use this as a base the the idea here being that we can take um well the pirate system which is and has a lot older space stations here maybe they were developed by the same corporation and whatnot and they're not you know every corporation tries to save money here or there um they've used the exact same module in the sensor system or in pirate or vice versa whichever came first uh the pyro systems ones being not as well maintained of course but
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this is going to be our base so we're going to see how we can start to get some easy wins without having to completely redesign uh all of the modules that work already with our procedural system right so what we're going to do um and fingers crossed this doesn't crash is i'm going to turn off this version and um just quickly i'm going to delete it and then get rid of alright as well by alright and then turn on our one so this is kind of what we opened on at sitcom so this is basically the exact same thing but what we've done is we've grabbed every single
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brush or mesh within the scene and dragged up the wear to the maximum level on it right so the idea here being that we needed to really see whether or not we needed to go in and make a brand new material set for all of these panels on the sides here or whether or not we can get away with just using the existing texture sets right it's it's the question of do we actually have to invest time and resources into developing something that could potentially take months of work for an artist or can we just use what we already have and fortunately so far uh the answer is we can pretty much use exactly what we've got here so far right there's a few little additions here or there which we'll get into a little bit later on where you can see that we've uh had to go in and make a few more materials but it's substantially less than what we
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would have had to if we were making a brand new material set right so cool so that's basically where we are here what we've done is we've gone through and we've just stripped out all of this essential or all of the prop work that was done in here originally and we're just trying to keep it uh down to its original shell as much as possible another thing on top of this is what we've done is that we identified pretty early on that uh the the optimization in this area could have been a lot better and so we've gone in and we've actually uh tightened up a lot of the things especially around this center area here so we've we've added a lot of things like we've added these areas basically and these areas is is how we kind of control occlusion volumes within our game you'll see a lot more of that further as we go on as well but this was one of the things we super early found out about and just addressed here so
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these will um at this level run a lot nicer than the old ones but uh we're putting a lot more into these so ultimately it's a balancing act right cool so from this point uh we're going to start to try and establish some of the the key concept art that we had so what what we were identified really quickly with this stuff is that it's really important to start from a base of just like complete darkness when you're when you're building these things so right now i've got it's got working lights on and i'll show you exactly why right so up here we have all of this roof that is quite easily visible with the working lights on but ultimately when we're actually in the game with the correct lighting so if i turn on the lighting
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and turn off our working lights you can see that we can't see the roof at all this is super important because that means that we don't need to spend you know days and days modeling all of this intricate kind of pipe work and machinery that we can go and put up in the roof right we can just let it fall into darkness and and it's pretty good right worst case scenario if we did find that we needed to like do some dressing work there we can do some minimal work but it's mostly in darkness so we we get away from it right it's about spending the time where you need to spend the time we're getting a lot of mood that's coming through right here right now and this is very close to what we had in in one of the concepts that we were looking
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at what we've got is a big key light big area key light coming up from the top left here that's just shooting through everything we've got some particles happening some rain and we've got a little bit of fire over the side here which is just floating out in space this is already starting to look nice we've got another light over here the idea here was that we didn't want the light to touch the second level we wanted to keep it in this level so as these two levels start to meld together in terms of lighting because we're actually going to have a market down here you're going to get a whole bunch of like warmth and different colors down the bottom and then you're going to get this stark cold difference uh with the area above because these space stations are they're pretty much not working right the life support isn't there there's absolutely no utilities and there's
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pretty much no lighting right and the lighting that is there is like only being held together with duct tape pretty much in general everything's really cold apart from where people are trying to live and those places are premium real estate right moving on from that we're going to go in and we're just going to add in a little bit of dressing with some cables here so this is just adding in a little bit more of that you know reinforcing the fact that they've had to go in and jerry-rigged this thing to make it you know remotely habitable right by snaking through all of these cables throughout the entire space station to you know maybe power heaters powered portable life support systems or or anything of the sort right maybe it's just an open like one of the automatic
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doors that needs to have power powered to it right so they're sneaking all these things from temporary generators all the way through the location right so that's what we're thinking about here um and then another thing and this is what i mentioned before is that um this right now this picture here apart from the glows that we're getting from the marketplace is pretty much straight on point with with the concept art that we were given for the location but one thing that was not accounted for in the concept art is that this area as a marketplace is going to have this dynamic between the normal people downstairs at the market who are buying and selling stuff and then the gang who is actually controlling these locations right so we wanted to create this structure where the people down the bottom are not
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oppressed but like there's this ever looming gang presence that they're there right so the gangs are all up in this top area and uh have kind of made it like their main hideout yes i'm sorry before you go do you want to explain the rain at this point okay yeah i can explain the rain this will become a little bit more apparent as as we start like turning things on later on but the rain is uh this as a disclaimer it's way too intense right now right the idea is that this is um there's such a stark kind of heat difference or temperature difference in this space when we have the market downstairs and uh this huge volume basically we have all of the steam from the markets people
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cooking things and whatnot all rising up to the roof and then condensing on uh the roof itself bits of machinery lots of the go to work or or cables and whatnot and uh then just slowly dripping down and ultimately potentially being collected by by the people living in the station right because water is a valuable resource basically it needs to well obviously it wouldn't be as intense as it is right now but also we want to introduce a little bit of frost into it as well because some of it would technically freeze as it comes down because it's cold enough um so this is basic the reason why we've got this here is that we can just explore that idea and see how it would feel within a space like this and it's a mental note as well to the the vfx team
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that when they come in and do their pass because vfx haven't touched this this is just me finding particle systems randomly throughout our library the vfx guys can go in and go oh they want rain here okay i'll hit up the the artist why they did that and then we can figure out the logic behind it and then they can do a feasible particle effect for it right right it's basically a marker for some for another team down the line to be like hey you need to fix this yeah absolutely and to just validate it with with art direction and and cr right because ultimately if if you show this to the to the directors and they go what what the hell why is there rain that's so stupid then i want to know about it as early as possible right because this dictates a lot of the the work that goes into the
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environment narratively and artistically sorry for derailing you can go it's all but yeah so in terms of the gang upstairs one of the things we need to do is we need to just create a gated experience for those guys where if you are not of a certain reputation with the gang you don't have access to those spaces right so one of those things is adding in a checkpoint over here so if you're in favor with the gang you'll be able to go through this checkpoint if you're not in favor then you won't um you'll probably get attacked you probably shouldn't be on the station to begin with if you're not in favor um if you're neutral then you won't get in but they won't kill you so anyways it's kind of just a strong
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point for them to defend their main hub which is going to be behind them here so what i've gone in and done is just take one of our existing catwalk sets so i'm going to turn on our working light so we can see it a little bit better uh so this is an existing catwalk set that we've already had with within the game at the moment and the reason we're using this because it's a little bit too chunky at the moment it's just to feel out whether or not this is something that we can you know viably use uh in in this space right now or if we have to actually make a brand new catwalk set right what we've discovered is that this is actually a little bit too chunky to like a little bit too substantial for the gang to actually use within this location and uh so we've actually taken measures now in development where we're having artists go in and make alterations to the set so that we can make it look a little bit
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more haphazardly put together right without a professional installer coming in and doing this for them right so this was a very important thing to kind of establish and figure out is this something we can get away with the answer is not really so we're we're going in and making it adjustments to that right past this we're going to go in and add a little bit more dressing work here so one of the one of the artistic intents that we established really early on in production is that um ian the art director really didn't want to see the walls as much as possible so um you'll see a little bit more of this as i go in but we're starting to cover it up with a lot more of these soft surface elements right which is also relating a lot more to the culture that we have on the the
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planets themselves like you would have seen like there's a lot quite a lot of soft surface elements inside the outputs that we have on those planets as well so it's kind of like creating a relationship here as well but it also helps us cover up a lot of the original walls within the space station itself right so we're adding in a lot more of that what we've gone in and done as well is adding in like these like kind of barriers that kind of keep like kind of a bunker vibe from inside so you get like a little slot here which you can shoot through and a few cover points here where they could potentially take someone out who was charging in if a gang takeover decided to take place so we got a few of those things um i'm going to turn off our lights get that mood back in and then so now generally during this process i'd be
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doing a lighting pass but for the sake of simplicity here i'm just going to turn it on so this is the lighting that we've gone for the in for this place in particular one of the things that we wanted to get across here is that it's not a comfortable place to really be standing um as is as is evident by my little um scene here with the scale refs so one of the ways that we've done that is by introducing these red lights around the place and um these are actually serve double duty these are also portable heaters so they're keeping people warm within the cold environment but they also give us that little bit of red light which is a little bit menacing on top of that we've got floodlights that are just like blinding people as they come around and there's a lot of
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forward-facing lights on the actual uh checkpoint itself right so we're kind of creating this really cool mood and uh ultimately trying not to impact the original keyframe with our concept art too much which is it's being fairly successful here we're getting a little bit of a call out with the light but it's actually not too bad so we're actually being fairly successful in this regard cool on top of that there's there's still a few things missing from this image in particular so i mentioned that we wanted to not see the walls as much right and one of the ways that we're doing that on on power stations is through the use of like uh graffiti right and we've used graffiti a little bit in the game so far but we've not used graffiti to the same degree that we're going to be
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using graffiti here so we wanted to cover everything in graffiti the graffiti you're gonna see right here take it with a pinch of salt it's not like the actual final art stuff this is just stuff that we've thrown in just to see if what the way we envisioned it would work would work so don't don't take it too seriously so you can see the rest and relax logo up here on the wall if i turn on our graffiti layer here you can start to see it starting to get a little bit occluded by a lot of this graffiti right we've also got this wall down here which is completely disappear so if i toggle on and off you can see it's like very much like almost camouflaged in if i turn around as well we've got this wall back here
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you can see the difference that that makes and it kind of disguises the the actual building set that we're using not that we necessarily want to hide it but it creates a variance within the environment enough that again it means that we don't have to create completely brand new assets and it gives us this unique art style that is different to any other location right it's also gone in and added just like a few bits of variants along the floors and we've got some emissive logos that the gangs they like to use emissive paints for all of their um graffiti and whatnot so we're going to get a lot more of that stuff in as well here it's pretty early so i won't show too much of that but so yeah if if graffiti was our bread then um this next thing is going to be our
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butter and that is rubbish so rubbish is super integral on the stage space stations like i said before like these they're not well kept at all no one there's no real administration apart from i guess you could say the gang the gang doesn't care they just as long as like stuff works and they get their money at the end of the day that's pretty much it so things just get kicked to the side and um just slowly built up over time right so we're going to get big pout uh big piles of of rubbish that happen there's going to be bottles and broken things everywhere not the most sanitary place to be in the first row the thing with with um with the rubbish and and you'll start seeing this more as we keep going is that it's actually quite a difficult thing to get the balance right so we actually have to create it's
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i say sculpted it sounds arty fatty but it's it's pretty much for sculpting the way that we're putting these rubbish clusters around so we have to figure out how it would logically gather up within the environment and be pushed to the side or people be you know easily be able to put it somewhere so they just put it there versus here or whatnot right so we're thinking about that and you can kind of start to see that here where the pathway is straight through the middle of this barrier here it's mostly clear and then we've got this build up on the side right same thing here as well it's built up here and then the main pathway is is kept relatively clean that's pretty much rubbish now the rubbish thing is a very um
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well it raised a lot of alarm bells as we were doing this right and the reason being is that uh it's an insane amount of objects to start plastering around everywhere right our entity counts in the game at the moment are already so high that where we've we can't add anything more into the game without taking stuff out right so we want to avoid that as much as possible and also it just means that in general the game runs faster if you're not if you're loading in less objects uh as a general rule of thumb right these are these are what are called draw calls technically uh normally and um we want to address them as much as possible right so one of the examples of like these uh rubbish piles just really not doing us any favors is back here so i'll turn on my working list so we can see this again
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so we've got a huge pile of rubbish here can i interact with you yeah so you can see that we have like a huge amount of objects all contributing to this one pile of trash over here in the corner it really just it doesn't need to be like this we could do this with just one object if we wanted to and we could combine a whole bunch of textures together and really reduce down that the cost of the individual asset individually this doesn't cost anything like say whatever but you start multiplying it across an entire space station you know hundreds of thousands of these assets you're not going to have a fun time right so this is this is us identifying a problem and then as we go into production uh the props team is actually going to go in and and
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create a kit for us where all of these are one object and it will be nice point here a little bit when he says you can't add things without taking things away it means that we've created these these these levels that have tens of thousands of objects and stuff like this and we figured out that's where the performance is now we have to get smarter and find new ways of doing it which is what he's discussing so you can't just add objects to a game infinitely any game in existence that all has a performance cost so we have to invent new processes and new procedures to make that efficiently so it's don't take one little sound bite out of context and take the whole thing so continue yeah
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absolutely i mean it's it's a thing that games have done forever right like you have like multiple objects baked down into one all the time so it's nothing out of the ordinary but uh yeah in our instance here we've not done such a substantial amount of rubbish as we are now so it's something that we've had to identify right so cool right now uh so let's go and explore the marketplace then so we'll go downstairs the eagle-eyed among you probably would have spotted elroy's elroys has uh seen better days one of the things when we're looking at these locations is we're asking
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ourselves okay how can we sell the narrative story within within them right and uh funnily enough elros was here and uh i needed more space to put the market in and um i can't remember it was me or someone else in a meeting uh just just joked and said why don't we just drive a forklift through it and so that's literally what i did i literally just drove a forklift straight through elroy's and that's given me so much more room to play stuff and it's narrative storytelling right it's like oh someone wanted more room which is the truth and just drove a forklift straight through it so this is like an easy win it's a bit of fun as an artist to do uh just to try to sell these things and it also serves the purpose of giving us more space within the environment as well we've also completely gutted our
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roys so we've got no furniture in there anymore and you'll see what we put in there in a sec so um from this point we've got a really open environment and um as in the same vein as what we were talking about with with the rubbish we need to consider our view lines and how many objects we're drawing onto the screen at any given point so what we're going to do is we're actually going to go and kind of subdivide this space up a little bit we're going to add in a few walls here and there blocking volumes and uh and whatnot and that will enable us to effectively cull large portions of the environment uh so that we can keep the frames up as much as possible right so this is a very critical thing to establish early on in the process as you can see a few walls have appeared and a few blocking elements have
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appeared we've got a big wall back here which is funneling us into a certain point so you can see that we can you know basically not draw entire portions of of the marketplace here just with these walls same with this one back here so as we're approaching if this was to be an entrance into the marketplace we're doing the exact same thing we do have a big sign of that line of sight straight through the middle here so that would be you know maybe a thing that we'd bring out and say okay that's a concerning thing maybe we need to create another blocking volume or maybe offset these two volumes from uh one or these two barriers from one another right to to solve that these are the sort of things we're looking at and then alright itself has gone through a pretty major change and this is probably the most developed of all of them so we've actually gone in
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we've really subdivided el rose up heaps so this is actually going to become more of a slum so the mannequins are kind of giving it away a little bit in here but where we've got a room here and then we've got this alleyway that's running through here and then back here we've also got another room as well so and if i turn on our visory debug right let's talk about this a bit before you can see that we're starting to break up these into different different zones uh in in the production version of this environment we actually have this split up now uh but when we were doing this for sitcon it hadn't gotten to that point yet but all of these areas have their own colors associated with them which means that they're all in their own visit areas which means they can all be culled independently from one another uh which will just make the game run a
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lot faster in the at the end of the day so we've gone and done a little bit of that now we need to start getting in the actual marker vibe itself so a lot of stuff is going to happen right now and uh basically as i turn on the stalls here the stalls are basically the whole reason you come to these markets right is that they sell every single type of little knick-knack whether it's good or bad quality the the food is suitably street food quality it's just you know it's like the most lively place within pyro itself right we've gone in and we've really like tried to get in that crab street market vibe as much as possible one of the the things that we really
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needed to be careful about with these things is that uh while it's cramped and not a lot of room to go around and do stuff that there was still room to go around and do stuff right so one of the things that was raised as a concern immediately was that um the ai needed to be able to navigate this space right so we have a minimum space that which uh the ai can like pass through areas and we had to make sure that we were keeping that in mind when developing these spaces right so one of those was like this area here making sure that that is large enough that two ai minimum can pass one another and thankfully this this is after a little bit of adjustment right but also discovering uh that the the ai can't
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move under or if if the height if there's a height restriction as well right it's just something we didn't think about when we were making this is that the ai has a minimum height it makes sense when you think about it right they're not going to pathfind under somebody's bed you'd hope not at least what we actually discovered is that these stalls themselves the roofs were so low that they were occluding the uh the navigation mesh here so that meant if we had two stalls facing each other literally ai couldn't walk down even though it met the minimum width uh requirements it didn't meet the height requirements so they literally couldn't walk past we actually had to go in and address these legacy assets which well i say legacy they're not really but like they're from art corps so
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um they're a bit older we had to go in and readdress those to fix the navigation issues with them and yeah so that we could use them in this environment as well if we wanted to but it also means that as environment artists we can go in and go okay i need to make sure that my my roofs are at a reasonable height or any other kind of thing hanging around the place because we've got quite a lot of stuff hanging off the roof speaking of roofs so because we've got all of this rain happening within the environment or just water drops or whatever you want to call it they've gone in and actually started constructing a temporary roof as well this will aid in them being able to not only keep dry but collect the water that comes back down what we what we'll do is we'll go in and we'll start putting little collection
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like buckets or or tubs or whatever around the place as well and where vfx come in they'll be able to do a whole bunch of really cool water effects around the place as well so that's really cool but one of the things that the main reasons other than that that we've done this roof stuff is that we really want to get a sense of parallax with with the actual cavity itself so as we look up through the space you can see that we're getting like a lot of different levels of depth within it right if i turn off my working lights you can start to see that a little bit better so you can see all of those different layers that we're getting within the environment that's ultimately what we're after we want to make you feel cramped but also understand that you're in quite a large cavernous space as well so that's why we
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we've gone in and done the roofs again that suffers from the same issue with with the rubbish like there's way too many objects that are making up the roof at the moment so we're going to have to go in and just create like merged versions of those where five entities go down to just one so it's a common theme of that throughout the entire environment so from here i'm just going to go in and uh just add a few props so just like some tables and chairs we've got a a planter fire happening in the background because um there wasn't any dumpsters i couldn't find any dumpsters on the original station dressing so that's a planter and uh yeah so from this point we're we're missing a little bit of um
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lighting within the scene right so at the moment it's just being entirely lit by the stalls uh the stalls have actually progressed a lot further on from where they were a while back so we actually have a lighting pass already done on them so they're they already have lights built in into them but um we're still not getting the exact vibe that we want we don't have any fog we've got areas like this which is going to complete darkness which is fine but not in the middle of a market right if people are walking around here and this is a high traffic area you'd expect it to kind of be lit up like i mentioned before what we did upstairs we'd be doing this pass as we were you know figuring everything out anyways uh but again for the simplicity i'll just turn it on as i mentioned in in the sitcom talk
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we're now getting the thickness that we need from the lighting and the atmosphere within within the environment the fog really helps bring in that like there's a lot of stuff happening here people are cooking food there's smoke from machines going from the fires even and whatnot it just helps us get a lot more of the vibe we're after within this within this environment as well and you'll also notice that this area here isn't falling into as much darkness as before now right cool all right and if i travel down here so you can see our alleyway that we were looking at before in elroy's is starting to feel a little bit more kind of i don't know dark and moody and a little bit scary i guess in a way so we're starting to get a lot more of
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that in now as well so another thing that was super important and a principle that we had within the within the environment um that we wanted to get in was this uh idea that this the station's got no power so power needs to be generated from somewhere and we we tried to combine this with the idea that the gang is asking for protection money so it's like you would pay your protection money which would give you power that sort of vibe if you know what i mean what we have back here is a a generator room right so this room back here is going to be filled with a whole bunch of generators and we've got a little engineer area here as well uh which is cool potential for a gameplay if if we
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get that in and um it's just selling that narrative vibe right with with that whole idea of us having a generator room uh we need to and and that is associated with the the stalls and people having to pay protection money we need a way of clearly displaying that throughout the entire environment right so what we've gone in and done is add in some cables to connect everything this is a lot of cables a lot a lot of cables the cables themselves was a a very interesting uh thing to kind of figure out within the environment because
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cables are inherently kind of hard to do when uh you have to place thousands of them because there's thousands of them and uh this space back here in the actual generator room itself this alone just to figure out i try a few designs different layouts see what worked this alone took me like an entire day of work just to do in editor just placing around cables figuring out what looks good and whatnot right trying it through a few different designs ultimately it's it's just a lot of busy work that's hard to do um not it's not necessarily hard to do it's just it's not good on the system and by that i mean it's not good on the artist when they have to do a million clicks all the time placing a million cables it um we don't want everyone to get uh
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an injury right at work from doing that we needed to come up for a solution for that and also to get the time down we've we've done a number of things which i'll get into in a sec now in in when looking at all of these cables right you can go okay yeah let's let's place a whole bunch of cables throughout the entire environment now there's a number of challenges that come with that one is that uh it's generally you don't want to be placing one cable at a time right because that's this is not going to happen so what we've gone in and done is we've actually clustered all these things together that means less clicks for the artist to actually go in and place these things and uh it also means less less draw calls so again keeping in mind the efficiency
00:39:28
it just makes it a lot easier to place now in terms of placing um in in game development generally cables and stuff have been done through a spline system right now unfortunately we don't actually have one uh in in the engine at the moment uh so we requested one we we asked like what's the potential of us actually being able to get one for these stations and um unfortunately tech came back and said we're actually prioritizing on these other things for that release so we can't get them in for that one so based on that right it's sad but uh it means that we also have to come up with creative solutions around those issues in development right one of the ways that we've done that is by basically just creating the cable kit some of these cables are already
00:40:15
actually used within the game itself so we didn't actually have to create too many more assets but it's just a kit of assets where instead of placing um a big spline throughout the entire environment we would actually be creating a modular kit so these cables would connect from uh point to point to one another just like you would like your your standard wall kit that we we might be using along the walls here or the floors or whatnot it's just with cables so like this section running down here is like made up of of two two segments of modular cable kit right the challenge comes when uh you try and make it not look like a modular kit right and that's what we really need to work out and and and figure out within the environment right and there's a number of ways we can do
00:41:02
that right and this next thing uh we'll we'll contribute significantly to that now on the subject of also just adding in like heaps and heaps of cables we needed to find a way of reducing the amount of clicks reducing the amount of assets we're going and doing that and and adding those clusters of of cables definitely helps but we still weren't getting the level of density that we were ultimately after with the cables so what we actually did is we we went in and we took the the cables that we had made or this cable trim texture that we had made for the outposts on pyro and um created a 3d version of it and then transfer that 3d version to a flat
00:41:50
texture right and what we're doing then is that flat texture of those 3d pipes we're then just creating like a shell around the actual 3d pipes within the to give us give us that extra layer of thickness so if i zoom in on this you'll start to see it just completely breaks down as as the parallax occlusion mapping just dies on on these cables here and this is how we're doing it right we're adding a significant amount of density and thickness by just having 2d cables throughout the entire uh length of of cable here right so that means that not each individual one of these isn't a is an actual cable that we have to place it's just one big mesh that just encapsulates the entire uh like i guess bunch of physical 3d cables
00:42:40
and this really helps not only with like just reducing poly count within the scene draw calls but also stops artists from going insane which is ultimately a very important thing as well so these things are snaking all the way through the environment they're coming through here you can see we're mixing the 2d ones with 3d cables as well this is that like kind of slum area that we're talking about before and ultimately they will go through the entire environment as well so this was this area in particular was another example of like figuring out the minimum height for ai right this is the minimum height that we can have for a space and have ai navigator around it and uh as you can see we actually got two levels so we get a level on on below and above this creates a really nice dynamic
00:43:28
within the scene so yeah that's cables and a little bit more of ai so from here what we're just going to be doing is is basically adding a little bit more of the moving elements within the scene so we're going to go in and add a little bit of vfx so this is adding in just like some heat haze a little bit of steam and whatnot these effects right now are just like the placeholder effects like we were talking about before with the rain uh they're just to sell the intent to the the vfx team and at least have something in there to show the directors in reviews and uh then ultimately when this gets pushed into production and the vfx guys come in they'll make you know actually good looking particle effects or use existing ones they may already have that i don't know about
00:44:16
and um make it look spicy so we've got that in here we've got more fire happening i think in some places we have the occasional spark i think down here yep so we've got some of these cables shorting out or whatnot it's it's not very well made that's the idea right is that these things are so you look at it you just like i ain't touching that that's the vibe we're after we've gone in and we've done a few a whole bunch of that now the other thing that we need to look at is um and this is a concept that we we really introduced and double downed on uh for orizon and that is uh the the moving and dynamic objects uh within the environment right so um in on arizon uh i i personally worked on the industrial platform providence
00:45:03
platform and on that one we played around with two animations so we have the the crane animation which moves cargo around the platform and we also have the uh the engine display where it explodes out and tells you about the engine and stuff like that right that sort of stuff is super important to sell the life of an environment and uh we we learn a lot doing those on orizon unfortunately for pyro it doesn't really make a lot of sense to have you know an engine display exploding or a crane moving around cargo at least in this specific setting so the route that we've actually gone down uh with introducing a lot more movement within our seams in that regard is through uh the the physics within the scene right so on ours and we played a lot around with cloth cloth that was like the first time
00:45:50
that we really got proper amounts of physicalized cloth within the game itself and here we're pretty much achieving we're trying to achieve the next level of that right it's just not just the occasional flag everywhere it's like how many how many of these surfaces can we physicalize in an environment at the same time right the answer is not all of them as you probably would suspect but um we're trying to figure out how much we can get away with within the space itself and on top of that we also have cables so we're bringing in this is the first time that we're bringing in physicalized cables so you'll be able to walk in watch them move around as they get blown around in the wind and interact with them as a player as well now i've not turned it on because
00:46:38
i don't want it to crash while i was explaining it so i'm going to turn it on now fingers crossed it doesn't crash so there we go one of the reasons that we're going in and doing all of this stuff in pre-production right is that we want to figure out where the limits lie before we start making guarantees and cash and checks with directors and stuff like that right when we're looking at like specifically the physics stuff part of that is the expense of it how much can we get away with within the environment itself and uh also just the general stability of it within the environment right so as you can see in the in this center top screen the the cable here is is not behaving itself very well so this is like an issue that we need to identify right is is that an issue with
00:47:27
the physics system with the rope itself is there some sort of instability on the back end that we need to address is it something that i've done wrong right in this instance i'm almost certain it's something i've done wrong um that's actually a good thing that's an easy fix i believe it's just clipping into another object so i just need to move it but as soon as i turned on the physics you may have also noticed oh it's not done at this time so this is a thing right one of the cables actually disconnected and fell through the entire level so that that's a bug that we need to actually address it's like doesn't like connecting to a certain surface we can't have physicalized items falling through the entire world that's just not um a good thing to have happen right we
00:48:14
want these things to be stable and reliable and on top of that as this person comes through uh this area here you can see that we have the cloth interacting correctly with dynamic objects like characters right so making sure that that stuff works the settings we're using on the cloth entities themselves and the way that the physics calculation is handled on the back end is able to cope with that within the environment itself so this is kind of a larger topic uh especially when when in regards to to physicalized items right we want to have as much as this stuff physical as possible because it brings life to the environment and it's generally just kind of fun to mess around with in games i don't know about you guys but i'm always messing around with
00:49:00
any physical item that i find in a game like i will kick it push it shoot it so which you can all do with this stuff which is cool so yeah that's um adding in like a lot more physical elements within the scene if i go up here as well we've got another example of just some more hanging cables so a fairly static scene that just it just helps significantly like even though it's such a small part of the environment just adding in that little bit of movement is really good we also have another bit of a cloth barrier back here that if if these guys weren't sitting down here being lazy might give us a demo but they're not in this instance yeah adding in a lot more of that
00:49:48
dynamic movement it also helps us kind of sell specifically in regards to the cloth um helps us sell a little bit of the narrative vibe which is that they want to keep heat in areas right so they're not just putting this up just so that people can walk through like them and just oh yeah that was fun it's actually serving a narrative purpose of like keeping heat in this area and not in that area right it's the same thing with like you go to a shop and they'll have like these sorts of things like either they'll be to keep our flies or they'll be to keep heat in or out either or right that's basically what we've got going here as well so in general like we finished this pre-production step within our pipeline now and um we've learned quite a fair bit in regards to like how we need to
00:50:38
construct these stations so like the biggest learning point was basically that we need to have a very very substantial uh building set for stuff like rubbish right and then also for stuff like cables so actually figuring out how we can create the density that we need because even this frame right here even though there's like a lot of rubbish and a lot of cables this is nowhere near the density that we need to actually achieve what we want so we want to find all that stuff as early as possible and we have and right now as we've moved quite further on beyond this point right we're already starting to implement a lot of those solutions to the problems and and already seeing dividends right that's basically the process that we're
00:51:28
going through we've gone in we've we've figured out where we need to we've found our performance deficits we've found creative solutions around them we've gone in we've actually relatively well achieved the artistic vision for the vibe that we want for these things as well as maintaining the game level requirements as well right like the the gang outposts and um the ability to go in and have shops where they're interactable as well as just dressing as well that's pretty much where we're at with with well at least the vt stuff for the power space stations uh this is like the most critical step in the process for figuring out how how to build these
00:52:17
this one was i'm so glad we we really gave this one the time of day because wow was there a lot of things that we caught on this one that we really would have shot us in the foot if we didn't explore them all properly so yeah i think i think there's a couple of things we want to reiterate uh things that folks who uh maybe uh weren't here at the beginning uh might have missed hi i'm italian spider-man especially because if anybody wasn't here at the beginning he's just like what the heck's going on um this is a pre-production thing that we that we were showing uh this is not building the asset that you're going to see in the game that this is imagine this as like a giant 3d concept of these things it's seeing what we can do it's exploring what the technical limitations
00:53:05
are it's identifying the problems that building this will eventually have so that we can find solutions ahead of time and stuff like this that's where we talk about the trash and the entity count and all that stuff it's to help us discover new tools and processes that we have to develop in order to make this thing a reality uh then for uh for the folks in the chat who who uh were perhaps talking about oh this is too much trash and outlaws aren't like this and they're not messy like this something uh remember that we are building an entire galaxy and this is literally one location in one station in one star system and what not uh these outlaws is the simplest answer to that i'm i'm
00:53:57
sure as the game continues to expand and evolve you'll see nice clean tidy outlaws you'll see ocd outlaws you'll see all manner of things there's no limit on this kind of stuff so so for those of you who were in the chat uh going a little crazy about all the trash and stuff like that it's this is just one location guys it's it's it's okay maybe this one isn't for you but it will be for other people yeah it's an interesting point to bring up though like um we've we've also had that internal debate right where like how much rubbish is is is correct right and and generally we also agree that like the areas that are being controlled by the gang or like normal people they shouldn't have as much rubbish but then areas outside of the market itself like
00:54:45
maybe that's just where people within the market are just throwing their stuff the gang doesn't care about that so you'll see more of an increase there versus in the actual area itself but um it's funny you mentioned that like maybe there's a tidy gang because uh one of the things that we we wanted to explore with with the games themselves is that they do have different personalities right and uh we'll go into that more like probably down the line but um we definitely do want to do something like that where we can display different gang's personalities in in new and interesting ways for sure yeah uh we've had scl's with the narrative team were uh specifically dedicated to the gangs of pyro and uh even though they haven't shared all the gangs they've shared several different gangs all with different uh ethoses and stuff so that this is literally just one that
00:55:35
you're seeing so um all right man um thank you so much josh i i i i will say i thought we were dressing up um i thought we had agreed to i didn't want to make a point of it at the beginning but i mean i i i sat here i can't i came as italian spider-man and you came as a regular old mummy yeah disarmament that's disappointing i'm only the only per i'm also the only person that showed up to the leads meeting dressed so i was i was clearly misinformed i appreciate the commitment all right so yeah folks that was uh outlaw lifestyles that was uh uh the
00:56:22
expanded uh uh uh artists edition version of the presentation that we gave at citizencon um i owed it to josh it was a it was a heartbreaking decision to have to cut it down for uh for for citizencon but when i did it i promised i'd give him an opportunity to do the whole thing and i i think it was well worth seeing because these things are amazing uh i i'll love them so yeah um that's it for our show isc uh returns uh next week uh i think it's what november 4th uh it's we're coming back with a feature on mining gadgets the latest update to the mining gameplay and of course everybody's favorite of sprint report uh so yeah so that is and then we'll be right back here next week on scl uh i
00:57:12
think we're currently scheduled for the ui team uh we'll see if that happens things always jumble around so that is josh right there uh i am uh italian spiderman and uh uh we'll go ahead and do let's do the opening video again one more time let's see before we leave it take care everybody italian spiderman suspensor
00:58:08
spider spiders spiders spiders you

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