Star Citizen Live: Q&A StarEngine

15 November 202401:05:071,646 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Hello everybody welcome back to another edition of Star Citizen live I'm your host Jared hucke and if you've never seen Star Citizen live before it's where we take about an hour at the end of our week and we invite our cig developers here and we talk about all kinds of things sometimes we explore the process of their work sometimes we just get to know them a bit personally uh and on shows like this a Q&A show uh we collect questions from you the Star Citizen backer and pose them directly to our developers so on this week's show we are following up to the Brave New World's star engine and Genesis presentation from this year's citizen con so we have a few select members we couldn't fit everybody on the show this week but we have a few select members from the teams that contributed to that presentation on to answer your questions so without further Ado let's get into it and get and meet who we got on the show this
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week we'll start with Ally Ally tell everybody who you are what you do for Star Citizen hi I'm Ali Brown I'm senior director of pixels and planets and that's it really look after about 20 developers who are responsible for all things Graphics V effects and Planet related did you get them to actually change the title to include pixels or are you being fun no that's what I've been using on spectrum because it's a lot easier to say all right uh will tell everybody who you are and what you do hi uh I'm I'm will I'm a senior engine programmer on the planet Tech Team I make planets and occasionally water and rivers and stuff and it's great fun okay and you you have a you have a nickname amongst the community don't you oh I certainly do uh water guy even though I should be Planet guy really water
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guy there it is in the chat uh up next Seb who are you and what do you do hi I'm Sebastian I'm with the planet content team and um I make tools and planets and content for them I guess okay what's so what's the difference between tools and content uh um like will and Ali they make the the magic sauce and we make the ingredients that goes into that and then we get planets out of it like yeah all the stones and all the the PLS and the the data that drives the systems and all of that is from us and yeah yeah you get a nice takech to make it work that works I just wanted to hear you say magic sauce and Graham who are you and what do you
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do hello I'm Gram philipson I'm director of audio technology so basically we take all these stunning visuals that all these guys create and we try to make them look even better by supporting them with audio we have to be real careful about switching from Seb to Graham because it it just it goes from dark to light it's like ah Seb say something um Jo me on the dark side I don't know all right so on the show this week like we said uh we're doing follow-up questions from the brave new worlds and uh star engine in Genesis presentation uh we we earlier this week we put up a thread on Spectrum which is our bespoke communication platform available on robertsspaceindustries.com we let you guys submit your questions vote up which ones you wanted to see answered most uh then we let our four guests here loose on the thread and they collected the ones that they that they
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were most capable of talking about now uh as is always the case in game development um things that are much much further out are a little too subject to change so we do try to keep uh our questions and our conversation related to within the next year of content so most of what we're talking about uh today will be related to the next year and possibly the year after that depending on specific little elements here so uh keep that in mind when wondering why we're choosing certain questions over other questions and let's get to it our first question uh maybe this is for sey it says will Genesis allow you to create more alien-looking biomes and worlds using the earthlike biomes as a base um yeah I guess it's more like a a con
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side question than like a tech limitation gen is never like plan Tech never really limited Us in terms of what we can do it's more like um yeah what we do on the content side and making it realistic um obviously we've made a really nice progress already towards getting closer to what Earth and nature has to offer it's always our primary target and go just so it's from just because it's familiar and um yeah it's a really great reference point um and now we're really looking forward to doing more alien things and adding things that make it look feel less familiar and um just different but without going into The Uncanny Valley kind of thing so it's it's a balancing act but um we have a nice Baseline now and now we just go from that and make it more and better an alien and yeah do you
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do you think will will eventually get to something that's that's just completely unrecognizable some something far more uh thinking like uh fuia and Star Wars or something where it's all a bunch of magentas and neon blues and stuff like that just like a completely alien world is that something uh we're working towards um it's definitely we've tried this in the past actually hon was meant to be like blue trees in the beginning then we that's right iterated onto it and it ended up being more or less Africa now um but yeah we we definitely try that again and again until we get it right but it has to feel good and feel believable and make for nice experience to be in the place but it's definitely on the on the road map to possibly be a thing okay um next question uh what we
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saw during the panel was impressive I agree uh but could we hear more about how these tools have quantifiably made Planet generation faster and of higher quality well um Quant quantifiable is a weird word here cuz we're not done so we haven't measured how long it takes to make a planet CU we can't make a whole planet yet but the design and the whole way that we've built this Tech is with speed of iteration and quality in mind we're already getting quantifiably better quality in areas and we want to keep working until there all of the areas are of a higher quality as well but also we can't kind of measure how quick all this will be until it's done
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until all the supporting systems are done so just because we can pump out a planet in a day doesn't necessarily mean we can work out everything else that makes that planet an interesting and unique location that requires content from all sorts of other things from narrative to um level design to locations to law there's no point pumping out a million alien worlds that are all lifeless they've got to have meaning and that's kind of what we've done really nicely with pyro I think you make a good point there oh go ahead go ahead Ally I was going to say just to clarify we're also not going to be pumping out a planet in a day or a million planets though certainly not I mean I mean yeah I mean it's it's long as a piece of string isn't it you could pump out something in a day whether it's of the you know worthy of releasing in a
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day would be a very different question right right now will I really like your answer to B basically there's there there's what the tools can do can do and but there's still so many more aspects that go into creating a planet at the uh scale and Fidelity of Star Citizen so it's it the genes the Genesis tools and everything will streamline one aspect of that but as you point out there is still narrative there is still creature creation there's still all these other things that make these that make the that make a planet Thrive so we won't know how fast this improves the process uh until we crank out a couple more um you know as as we go to through Nicks and then castra and then eventually terara after that so it's one of those things uh I'm
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sure we'll have I'm sure this is not the last time we're going to be talking about Genesis or planets and stuff like this and as we learn these answers uh we'll share more um absolutely letting the hyperbole get a little ahead of me no no that's that's thing no it's it's easy to get carried away it's easy to get carried away it's it's you know we're in year 13 we we we try to be very resp responsible with how much we we we promise at this point it's you know it's about doing the work and actually you know getting the work done now um one of the big elements of that uh that brave new worlds presentation was weather and I want to jump in we have a lot of weather questions so I want to jump into some of these weather questions here um outside of thunderstorms what other weather conditions or systems are we looking forward to implementing so I'll take that so the um
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there's several have been discussed internally um we haven't confirmed which ones we'll necessarily do first but like the things that have been talked about that potentially on the cards things like sandstorms obviously snow and then potentially variations of those like acid rain um uh rather than the type of thunderstorms which are we're intended to be our first Target um in terms of what we're excited by I personally want the sandstorms I think Tech is quite well geared for that they'll look really good and you know we've got some recent fil that typee of give a lot of nice visual cues um yeah so I'm looking forward to seeing some of that in the game personally be real honest with me H how much does seeing a a major film something like something like a what you know what you're talking about you I
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will just say it's Dune and whatnot how how much do that does does that ever sway our priorities like oh no we really want to do that and stuff like this you you can be honest I mean on the tech side not not enormously I don't think okay we're slightly at the mercy of um you know the creative directors to tell us where we should put our energies um yeah I mean it I guess yeah I mean I've seen plenty of films that have like you know recently that have sand and sand storms in them and snow I haven't seen an acid rain film recently maybe if there was one it would jump to the top of the list perhaps of course we do have planets like huren and several arid moons that would all benefit from from that Tex so it's a so Sandstorm specifically is something that would benefit quite a few different locations um stick with weather for a
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bit is there a plan or a road map to improve Cloud layer look from orbit uh grid effect night shading Etc uh there are bits of info from devs on Reddit but we would love to hear more yeah that's probably going to be my question then um so thankfully the list for what we need to do for clouds is fin starting to get shorter instead of longer but that's that's nice we like have the fundamental framework falling into place um but there's obviously still quite a few more things we want to try and do like improvements to shaping shading uh performance as well and make them all more stable um as far as the tiling issues are concerned that's more of a Content thing as opposed to a tech thing as in U we have plans to make
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tools that will definitely improve that and just produce better looking cloud formations with less of those issues showing up um obviously it would be nice if you could throw unlimited resources at everything but uh we are still making a game and we have similar limitations to what we can render on the screen as all other games it's just that our scale is a bit worse or better depending on who you ask it makes it a bit more difficult but um we definitely have plans and and know how to tackle those issues a bit better in the future and it's just iterating and iterating and learning how to to best make the the data to drive the system in the best possible way yeah I know that I know that cloud Tech has been something a lot of folks here were waiting for for a long time and yeah obviously what we have is great but like anything with Star Citizen we're not one to generally
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rest on our Laurels so there will be a time where the development wheel turns its you know uh hands back to back to clouds and we get to we get more resources and more time to to make that even better uh hey Graham Let's do an audio question I feel uh with Star Audio and the new Doppler effect will we be able to hear the sonic boom in atmosphere also do two parts also will ships like The Inferno be able to have a delayed bur sorry uh like the A10 warthog and will we will we be able to hear okay this this is like three questions in one guys okay let's just do this one piece by piece willstar audio and the new Doppler effect will we be able to hear a sonic boom in atmosphere ultimately yes uh it's on our
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development plan and um it's it's not the most sort of difficult thing to do but the the more difficult things to do are are the sort of fundamentals of making the Doppler sound good making every sound that play in the game work well with it uh but we do have the data that we need in order to drive sonic boom and as you saw at citizen Comm we did uh some Shock wve stuff on distant explosions and and that's pretty much the same concept so um yeah we will get there absolutely all right we'll do the second part of this question uh also will ships like The Inferno be able to have a delayed Bert sound like the A10 W hog again yes um it's all down to I mean it's kind of a Content thing really to get the uh the bird sound itself but there's no reason why we can't uh then
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delay that and uh create the sort of horrific experience that you seem to be wanting I'm going to add a followup here what are the challenges involved in making a delay seem intentional and not a mistake or a bug so they are those challenges are absolutely significant um one of the first things that came up when we first implemented a prototype of this was that when you walk away from somebody speaking and you start to see the lip syn go out that's kind of like it's it's realistic but people have seen movies often enough that they don't expect it so we have to strike a balance between realism and and the sort of the experience people are a little more used to on screen um there's also the
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challenge of camera zoom that's that's huge so when the camera's zoomed in and the audio listener is actually significantly further away than uh than it appears on screen that causes problems so we're having to overcome some of that as well uh but yeah there plenty of challenges okay um I think with there's a starch question let's just hit here uh would Genesis produce any actually large settlements on the scale of small towns or cities or would that require more bespoke work so yeah it will create it can create as big as we want really but the intention is not to create cities we don't have hundreds of cities we want our cities to feel very unique we want
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extra care and love to go into them so we're not currently planning to build anything as big as a city with it and you'd probably need to adjust the algorithm a little bit you know to the scale of content to make that work um but towns definitely um lots of small mediumsized towns um yeah we certainly want as many as them as design think fits the game and lots I'm I'm actually personally looking forward to lots of really tiny things I on like mini settlements I on like you know the guy in his Caravan and you know and all that I want a bit more of that in the universe um yeah hopefully lots of small to mediumsized towns um and once they get a bit larger I think that's where you really want to handcraft it and make sure that it has a strong narrative backing for it from design that makes sense um during the presentation uh there was
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there was a lot of terms used to describe different footage R&D phase uh early uh uh ear early footage gray box um folks know this uh you know there there's a nice set list of terms for like ship development but the thing doesn't the same system doesn't really equate to graphic stuff um and when the pan and when this when the panel was ended this person was conflicted over where their expectations should be set is all of this still R&D with clever renders or is this technology at a stage where it could potentially be used to actually build a planet at this point so um it's it's kind of a bit of a tossup really we we use the term vertical slice specifically and that's something I I'll kind of dive into a bit we've we've kind of tried to do a bit of
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everything so that we can see the whole picture and then kind of tweak our design from there and start finishing out each bit and that means that yes we could build a planet but there's no way we could ship it it's not performant enough it's not varied enough it doesn't check all of the boxes that we want there'd be all sorts of problems with the tech that is working for the difficult bits but not working for the bits that mean that you can have 30 in a solar system and then 30 in another solar system and so on um one of the reasons we've approached it like this is because there's kind of such a fundamental change in the tech like the Genesis and the planet Tech improvements are not just kind of changes to the output of the existing system it is it is a fundamental kind of reshuffle and redistribution of work which is largely because
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V4 um kind of addressed the needs of planets although the planet Tech that we have kind of address the needs of planets as they were at 3.0 but nowadays there's a lot more requirements from that Tech whether it be kind of server meshing things Base building things hares persistence so we've approached it from this vertical slce which means yes we can build a planet but it's not the standards we want um but we're now at that point where we take that we can say okay well here's what worked here's what we need to redesign here is what we know is great we've solved some of the big Tech problems now we're transitioning some more of a kind of Milestone based approach where we're saying okay well now we're going to finish out GPU spawning and now we're going to finish out the orbital look and so on and we can start kind of taking chunks of tech and finishing it and I think one of the really important things as well is that
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we're not aiming to release this as one big Floodgate and suddenly everything is out and boom you've got Genesis it's going to be features coming online T bit by bit and one of the one of the early bits of tech is actually already in the the 4.0 streams that are going out to epu right now the they um the planetary rewrite of how we uh store and subdivide our planet and into patches and so on is already out there in the world and working and that's kind of one of the benefits of having done this as a vertical slice it means that we're starting to root the benefits already um in terms of gray box uh Seb you can probably explain better what you meant by gray box in in your sections so I should drop you in oh um yeah sure um so like in art in process we usually have like white box
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gray box and then final and polish um for vegetation doesn't really work that well but like white boxes don't really represent vegetation ases super well um so we just make a very rough version of it um also we were asked fairly late into the process of making the videos to add those labels and we might have been a bit sloppy um so like the Swarms were definitely further along than the jungle for example jungle definitely very much what we consider white box um swamps and redwoods a bit further along with the Swarms being the Fest and uh yeah it's all it's all coming together uh and we are working through them and uh a lot of what you've seen in white box is forther long now and might be close to Polished and and final and then we just need the all systems every other system to make it into new planets and then release the
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the thing maybe one day no I don't know SE I love you um so yeah so basically uh as as will was saying uh it's not an allinone thing it is a Genesis within star engine is a collection of multiple different tools that are all being developed at different Paces uh with different Necessities with different requirements uh of them with different dependencies of other stuff so certain things will come online but faster than other things which is another reason why we can't quantify at this point just how much faster it it'll make making planets until all that stuff comes on line with everything else but you like I said you will already start to see stuff in 4.0 which is the planetry stuff that you mentioned and then with 4.1 42 subsequent releases uh as different
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elements are come online and are ready to be ready for prime time they'll be used to reconstruct certain elements of different planets and stuff to support other features like Base building and stuff like that so um I know one of the things that often happens because I've been doing this for more than a decade here now is this idea that oh anytime you say this is this is uh going back to the foundation or going back a this is a rewrite of this and stuff like this why do they keep remaking this and stuff like this this is the normal process of game development the difference part is that you don't normally see this exposed uh to anything else um it's one of the things that makes Star Citizen unique being in a being in a live service environment during the process of making the game so it's not any different or anything unique to Star Citizen in Cloud Imperium games it's other than you get to see it so
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um let's do a little asset distribution question so with the sheer density of forests and similar biomes in Genesis how might this interact with gameplay like Landing ships or driving vehicles around right it's um yeah obviously we for citizen we made the biomes look their most intense most dense we want to see a what we want to see like what does it need to look like it's most dense I guess um but obviously with the new system and everything being having ideal conditions and less ideal conditions um you will have varying distances they could be over multiple kilometers and just like have the forest or like have a something turn into a forest over a large distance or it could be over some meters we get like clearings in the forest um the system would
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support all of that we just only shown the most dense and the most purest version of each biome at citizen con so that's why they look very dense they're not very friendly for landing everything but um it's going to be very unique and buried everywhere on the planet so you might have very different experiences depending on where you are we did see some areas where there were paths carved through through like the the jungle and the forest and stuff so it so it is possible to to create paths and stuff through this stuff technically yeah but they will also just happen naturally based on what data we put into the system and what um how ferti the soil is in certain areas and maybe that was a water washing it away and then you have like a clear a path cleared out from certain species of vegetation I don't want to grow there or
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there's more I'm not going to say more rocks there but um there could be more rocks that don't all for vegetation to grow but stuff like that uh and it's all going to be more more systemic and um hope and also more physically plausible we won't have rocks everywhere anymore they will be where they would be deposited based on erosion of hydraulic or U thermal thermal nature um so yeah okay so all be married all right so if paths generate naturally and stuff throughout the system with the rules set and everything um well traveled paths eventually begin to you know to to you know they get start to get wider and they start to form what some people might refer to as roads anything you want to tell us about roads I don't
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I can increase I can say regarding roads is that it's definitely something we want to do a lot of the rivertech when it was made was made with kind of like and roads in mind in terms of there's a lot of similarities in terms of kind of like dynamically creating and destroying things as you approach it on a cross a spline because if you just load a mesh for a 100 km Road that's obviously not going to work but it takes some time and some invest into the tooling and into making the assets and getting designed and so on um it's we want to approach it we're not approaching it this second yeah just to add to that we've got um yeah Will's done a lot of the ground workor for that so on the planet side we kind of a lot of the work has been done or wouldn't take much to go to
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take it further you know there's not a huge difference on the planet side between a river and a road um where the work remains is there's a bit of Graphics work to do obviously a road doesn't look like a river we need whatever stylistically we need to change there um and presumably you know the whatever assets will be distributed at the side of the road would be slightly different to a river um but probably the biggest difference is we assume it would would come from St architect like you have to place all these locations on the planet and then we have to figure out what would be the logical distribution of Roads there will need to be rule sets you know does this planet support roads is the areas of the planet that will and won't have roads you know maybe Outlaw bases don't have roads them they maybe want to be posted with a big Motorway to an outlaw base but you know some places will so it's that element that is the biggest part that's missing uh and then
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obviously there'll be a bit of once you have decided to connect to towns or locations there's some code to figure out what is the best path to get between these two do I carve straight through every mountain side or should I weave around them yeah so there's a bit there so on the planet side kind of done it that mostly on the tool side of deciding where the roads would go and then a little bit of Graphics to actually make it look like a road literally since planets were first introduced in 3.0 this roads have been the most pressing and recurring question uh anytime we anytime we talk about planet Tech on either ISC or SC so um it difference was a few years ago it was like oh where's the road going you know I'm driving out of HST where now we have a plan there will be somewhere to go so at least there's there's good reason for it now
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fair enough fair enough it's a good answer I I I I I I I think folks will appreciate your your cander on this um let's jump back into weather uh if it stops raining will the puddles in ground remain wet for a while or will they dry out immediately yes we've recently just changed that so it does do what you would hope it would do so um it keeps track of the average amount of water in the ground and it evaporates over time using a a physically plausible model um which we tweak to be uh type of a cross between whether you want it realistic or what feels good for the game play based on the scale of our planets the wind speed and stuff yeah it will stay wet for some period of time after the rain has passed so all good there cool and I don't know if this is a weather
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question but you know some somebody's thinking creatively if you die in the water for instance in a swamp or whatever uh do you float all we can recommend there is take a really good friend with you to an ocean or a lake on Microtech uh shoot them in the head and see what happens you mean do that right now be my guest okay just the views and opinions of will Hae do not represent those of cloud Imperium games Robert Space Industries or its subsidiaries will we ever see go back to asset distribution will we ever see lakes ponds waterfall Falls Cliffs or deep ravines I mean you already see Lakes there's um what 15 of them on Microtech
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and about 18 of them on Hurston um we want to take a look at things like smaller pwns that might form without kind of a necessary um or a visible water source but it's not kind of scheduled or Road mapped and along with waterfalls and deep ravines it's stuff that we want to be able to do and we are approaching a place where we're in a better position to implement that but they're not kind of like things that we have tasked out and planned out uh Cliffs is something we are going to take a better look at as part of the the current planned work for Genesis uh people are always sharing that old Canyon screenshot from dayar and that wasn't a viable way of doing that across a planet but we're hoping to uh come up with a more holistic approach for for
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doing these Cliffs and we've already improved the the cliff rendering in terms of what is shown on the terrain mesh itself which is a big part of what's what's missing at the moment uh so yes on that one and the others are kind of like from the from my heart I want to do them but uh I have to wait for my heart to match the the bullet points on paper fair enough um Graham uh those questions more a followup to the star AIO presentation from last year but we'll get into it so star AIO looks looked great great however the audio engine in game is already having a hard time weapon sounds stop randomly and some audio simply doesn't work is this technology a replacement of the entire audio engine or simply an extension of the system we
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have now uh so it's absolutely been designed as a replacement um some of those issues that you hear are due to some fairly naive coling of sounds which um obviously in Star sit and you can't predict what's going to happen we have a very limited budget of how many sounds we can play how many ships we can play sounds for things like that um and Star Audio is yeah it's absolutely planned to replace all of this stuff and improve all of these situations so um in the example of weapon fire cutting out um we have a much more intelligent budgeting system that will take into account the sort of importance of those sounds to the player at that moment whether they're visible on screen how close they are how many other sounds in in the sort of similar categories are playing so uh we can definitely improve all those
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things with Star Audio um it's just the case of working through all our systems because we have audio systems hooked into pretty much everything the game can do so we need to work through all those things one by one and get them all hooked into Star Audio and eventually sometime down the line when you won't have any of the old system okay um I'm going to follow up here uh kisaki in the chat uh simply asks audio race tracing it's something we've uh talked about a little in the past myself and Ali but never really been able to uh dive into it deeply but um it's certainly something I'd like to revisit because uh you know for things like reverbs for um you know understanding what materials are present in a room understanding the uh the damping effects of those materials that's something that
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we really would need something like rate racing to help us with um yeah but it's uh let's let's let the graphics do their side of racing first and then maybe we can talk after that fair enough fair enough um uh looks like maybe it's a starch question any plans near or far far to incorporate ancient alien ruins SL bunkers into the dynamic planetary systems uh this person thinks it would be cool to uncover lore and a possible storyline about ancient Galactic Civilizations that would be so cool and maybe we'll do it but would be lame if you spoiled it now right can't tell you the things you need to discover until you discover them yeah um I I I will I will say the seeds for
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such things have already been uh uh planted with with things like this here for those who recognize what that is from citizen G your past um St like that so yes we don't want to spoil that but um I think you'll be happy at some point Point uh let's look back to are there any plans for variable Planet rotation speeds uh obliquity obliquity there's not word word we don't say every day obliquity uh axial tilt orbit eccentricity and and atmosphere makeup or lack thereof uh as far as our side goes for Planet
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orbiting uh it could be turned on but it's going to make Quantum traveling anywhere very difficult because the the system isn't kind of set up for that as far as we know uh in terms of more complex kind of orbit most of those things uh are totally possible with the systems that we have in place uh we would depend on design and law to explain maybe why we want some of those things um but yes one of the things that we do need to do of course is axial tilt to match our Seasons the seasons are going to be coming and actually we don't need to Wait Unlike orbit we don't need to wait for any other system to turn on Seasons we could turn on the seasons and just have it know where the Tilt would be even if we can't tilt or move the planets yet uh so that is dependent on
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us finishing out that stuff and finishing out the the content in terms of making it look right and so on um but yeah very excited for this sort of stuff to come online when it does okay um that you make up you bring up a good point that sometimes even if a thing is technically capable you can't turn it on or enable it because of other game related systems that are will break or aren't quite ready for it like the quantum travel system that's a good uh I'm glad you pointed that [Music] um will planets such as Microtech get snowfall and snow accumulation um so R be five obviously we need to revisit some of the data that every planet is based on and um to like
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the goal is more physical posibility and um this is definitely a big part of what we want to do will has talked about the separation of different layers and snow being the last one obviously it makes sense to drive is purely by by climate and temperature being the most important one for that um so yeah it will definitely there will be a technical requirement to do that and obviously we really want to do it as well just for more consistent more believable and um it's going to be good I think is this one of those things oh go ahead no oh I thought will we be able to build snowman that's for physics probably and Graphics not me so who knows Ally snowman uh I mean I probably I'd be looking for
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leaving a snow trail and yellow snow before we get to Snowman yeah is this one of those things where snowfall might come before snow accumulation or is this one of those things where it's a one one you don't get one without the other so we like I mentioned ear we don't have a we haven't decided for certain yet with PR of directors which weather systems will come first and obviously the more we work on weather the less we work on some of the other aspects of of Genesis so some of that is still to be decided but if if snow was to become a thing then it would be easier for us to release snow in places where it is already has snow on the ground that would be a much easier thing for us to deliver so that would be a potential shorter route for us uh to make it snow in somewhere that has never had snow
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just there's a few extra TCH technical challenges there you know we have to build up the snow and then we have to make sure the assets that are there all the trees and rocks support that technology so there might be asset you know touch-ups to be done so it's a bit more complicated for that side of it and then to have the snow evaporate over time melt um so yeah so snowing on Microtech is more likely to happen before snowing at the poles of a you know more temperate Planet okay uh with the implementation of Genesis and the next iteration of Planet Tech and stuff will planets like Microtech be adapted to have biomes located in the correct places based on latitude for example fro biomes around the poles or and temperate forest around the
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equators yeah I think it's basically the same on side on the last question as well like it needs to be like we need to make it all more plausible and the data will be and then it'll just happen fair enough we kind of need for the weather we need we need the data to be more physically correct so that the weather can match you know we can't have it snow snowy in somewhere that's 20 degrees cius you know like so yeah so it comes hand in hand the weather will be based on physically based stuff but then yeah Seb has to go and make sure the planets are following them physically based rules with V5 it'll be automatic with the the new planets but the um when it comes to the older planets we have we have to touch them up to make sure they do that they are plausible okay maybe some bit to get
00:38:20
more snowy or less snowy as that happens to make sure um it all makes sense physically okay um will the mud well okay let's look at two two two point two-part question here uh will Reigns create mud yes okay uh one of the design points for the new planet Shader is that the different soil categories like the kind of visual appearance of soil will kind of have a matching set of what they look like in different amounts of humidity so you'll have a cracked CL way in a cracked soil and a whatever and then you'll have a a damp and then a saturated and then like an oversaturated or I don't know I've just pulled those categories out but um something like
00:39:07
that so that's kind of based from the beginning that we want to incorporate that into our data and then we will so some of it will come from static data like being next to a river or just being in an area where there is higher water availability but then kind of transitioning these based on local rainfall is definitely part of the plan yeah okay uh the second part of this question is whether that mud that's created from the rain will affect uh the term they use is crossability but basically uneven terrain or difficult in D andd we' call it will it make it for will it make difficult terrain for people on foot or in wheel vehicles uh we can report the surface type back to physics and then other systems can change their behavior based on that I don't want to speak for
00:39:57
the other systems that would have to then come and change their behavior so the the physics on the on on the wheel vehicles and the actors and so on uh but all of these systems already do respect different surface types uh it's audio is another important one of course as well cuz soil and mud sound very different so by changing the the surface type at some sort of threshold uh we hope to be able to provide the information needed for this to the systems that would then change those behaviors yeah this is one of the I in I I I don't know what I'm trying to think of what I'm trying to say here um only star citizens and I mean this as a compliment would hope that rain would create mud that would create difficulty uh traversing and accomplishing their uh
00:40:46
their goals it's a it's a it's one of the shared uh interests between us and our our fan base here and I I love that I love that question it's basically what I'm trying to get at and I hope it's something that materializes um do clouds move in One Direction across the planet or are they actually Dynamic and move in all directions forming cool patterns from space all right um conceptually obviously we've looked a a lot at a lot of papers and weather simulations and how clouds more form and move on Earth and conceptually they will follow the general planet's rotation um from from orbit and from a larger picture point of view um they will be um deviating from this direction though just so you get like
00:41:36
what you get in nature um obviously we might not be able to do the full thing like running a full weather simulation on the on the servers might be problematic for performance to say the least um so we we're trying to to make it as efficient as possible but also look the best um so they will be able to deviate from the the primary Direction they have moving in uh how far we can push this we don't fully know yet we're still exploring um what we can do with the tech how we can improve it bit little bit further and what we can do with the data to make it do more with the same amount ideally and um but yeah we definitely plan to have very varying weather patterns moving all over the planet in believable ways based on the data that the planet is providing okay um I want to throw two questions from the from the chat in here
00:42:25
uh the first is from uh Jesus pug first time chatter uh can we cut down trees what as in today no as as in the the spec for what we're working towards uh we are we're incorporating some kind of Technology decisions into our Tech at the moment that will allow us to better kind of support individual behaviors on assets which is a long wind wed longwinded way of saying that there's a lot of stuff that goes into being able to scatter 20 million trees across the planet and then being able to point at one of them and say I want you to be chopped down
00:43:12
um but we're bearing it in mind good answer that's how I'm gonna leave that no good answer I I knew I could trust you to answer to throw the the the curveball uh the other question is the current question that's uh dominating the uh the chat right now and that's what any of this means for our cour our Corp is not built like any of our other planets everybody knows that uh it's it's not built with the planet Tech system um does weather come to AR Corp do do any of these features come to AR Corp and can any of these features be used to uh improve or further develop our Corp in the future or is that something entirely different I mean does when it does use the planet Tech I mean it it's there's some a lot of special
00:44:01
cases on AR cor but it it shaded differently the we type of abuse the system a little bit to get the results we want on Art Corp to say the least um it probably will be a similar story we're not planning on like you know spending a year making bespoke art Corp Tech um but there is parts of the new system that we're hoping will allow improvements on our up um obviously things about you know the amount of light that will gather underneath a tree and wherever a fern can grow isn't really relevant but there are many other parts that are relevant with like the density with um the way we position things we will um we type of intentionally kind of randomize we have a grid pattern for where we're going to put things but then we randomize it we
00:44:49
could kind of just remove that randomization and get an actual grid pattern more naturally um and yeah a lot of these rule sets they're built for for nature but some of them again will will they're more powerful this time so we might be able to abuse them again to get something nice out of Arup but that type of we we're not focusing on that at the moment we're making sure that we can deliver every other planet and we're hopeful that we will then be able to do something nice with our cop at the end as a result because all planets must eventually use this tech there is no option long term they almost must use it um it's just a question of how much we have to change to make it suable for Corp and which we won't fully know yet until until we give it a bash yeah our Corp is unnatural Abomination it'll definitely get weather though that much I think we can say
00:45:38
it'll definitely get weather okay very cool um will Genesis allow for more realistic placement of mining nodes uh being placed on on the areas of exposed rock layers like Cliffs instead of being randomly scattered on a planet's surface that's definitely in the cards for sure um I don't know if we really wants to talk about the whole entity thing but conceptually yeah we'll definitely be able to have them but now they're like tied to the biome they in but in the future we can be more specific and spawn them on on Cliff sides or where they would where the Rocks fall down at base of a cliff and then you would find them there and stuff like that it's it's definitely possible I think I mean yeah I think we want to
00:46:27
um treat a harvestable like any other asset in that if it's a mining Rock we want to spawn it according to parameters that we would spawn a regular Rock we kind of don't care whether it's a here's a game entity that you can mine versus here's a static piece of Geo we kind of want to do them with the same rules and it' be the same for the because you get those uh the Revenant trees that you go in no revenants are bushes then there's the heart of the forest tree or whatever we want to SC them just like any other vegetation based on the same data and the same rules so if you're asking is it going to be more realistic then I would say yes uh I think Seb also alluded to the new kind of entity management spawning e stuff I don't think that's going to help the specificity of the
00:47:15
locations but it's definitely going to help the um the the density of these things um and I won't elaborate into that right now because that's um no the managed entity system is a is a very techy boring subject that you can't cover without a TED Talk well now we know what we're doing early next year I'll come by your desk on Monday and talk to you about it um Graham so we you talked you mentioned that Star Audio is intended as a complete replacement of the uh current audio engine system um we've been talking about Star Audio for a little while we introduced it I believe last year at citizen con um what are the blockers uh remaining uh what What's between us now and the eventual
00:48:05
implementation and swap out of the system um well the some of the biggest blockers are um just the sheer volume of systems that we have running and uh the design of Star Audio is that we take all the features that are uh embedded in those game systems and make them all part of the engine um and we're chipping away at that so that's the biggest blocker for it to be covering everything is that we need to have every single possible audio feature covered within the engine whereas right now there's a lot of game code a lot of very specific code for certain situations that's been designed uh for those specific situations so it's all about um making everything as generic as possible and making all these features available to whichever game system wants to use them so um it's the biggest
00:48:54
blocker is the sheer volume of work involved that's that's the way I could put it um will will large ships be able to compress trees and plants to land in these dense forests we talked about the paths and everything but what if we just try to force it this is kind of linked to what I said before with chopping down trees um there's kind of a few complications that come here if you think about I want to knock over a Tre in my ship that sounds like a simple Behavior but this this kind of there's all the gameplay stuff about like how how you would go around and chop a tree and the the kind of design behavior from that and so none of that's done so we need to wait for that and then from our end there's kind of Three core bits that we need to worry
00:49:44
about there's promotion which is taking our very kind of Highly optimized um tree asset that renders in a particular way and is spawned by a particular system and replacing that with something that we can inter with and uniquely address and tell what to do there's the manage system which I alluded to which is essentially about um making spawning of entities server meshing friendly and persistent and then there's persistence itself which is kind of like okay well you've crushed a forest with Idris there were what um 700 trees under there that we now need to remember have not done something and actually just creating 700 entities and chucking them in the entity graph is not an efficient way of going about that so we need to make complex
00:50:31
decisions like if a tree becomes fallen over next to your base you probably care about that tree but if you knock over 500 trees on your way to new babage we could probably come up with something different to record that there are Fallen trees in this area but not 700 unique entities for each fallen tree so there there's a whole ton of work that goes into stuff like this and it's not even like it's not even really kind of planned for or guaranteed at this point all I'll say is that we want our system to be able to support more complex behavior and start to approach these problems I don't know if Ali or Seb want to give anything more on that um but absolutely do not take this as any sort of guaranteeing just that
00:51:20
yeah so I guess the only to add is yeah there's the the problems of like World keeping track of how trees you know if you crash your Rus 10,000 times and now there's a million trees that have being chopped down we have some serious issues to type of figure out there um and as obviously seb's staying quiet but obviously if we want to chop trees Seb has a lot of work to do um unless they're just going to evaporate in a puff of smoke um that makes life easier um but yeah if they if they depends on the level of Destruction they're going to get um that also affects the The Entity graph stuff you know it's it's whether we just remember 700 trees ago away which is 700 bits of data or whether we have to remember that 700 trees have been carved up into 75 pieces and scattered around the universe then that's obviously more for the entity
00:52:07
graph the network people people will be quite angry at us if we push it too hard um yeah yes there some things to we're type of on the path we know there's a momentum heat or a black hole dragon is in that direction so we are Paving the way for these kinds of decisions because at the moment it's just not plausible but we're p caving the way so that decisions can be made as to the specific you know how many trees can they be chopped or they just blow up and or fall over and you know yeah there's lots to be figured out in specific yeah it's a Paving the way for this kind of thing it's a slippery slope from being able to chop down one tree with an ax or a chainsaw to crashing your Javelin shallowly like the like the Enterprise saucer section in generations and just taking out a 3 km wide
00:52:57
swath of of trees and microt Tech which is exactly what people will attempt to do so and in another game you might say that the trees grow back in 10 minutes but that's kind of not our game is it so we we have to deal with the type of level of realism that we're aiming for the implications of that it's a little bit harder if you're going to gamify this we could make a lot simpler yeah uh uh stake is in the chat is like he almost said three mile I'm trying I've been living in the k for 2 and a half years now I'm try I'm trying really hard to convert to kilometers it's not easy um in how much detail will planetary data be used to shape weather patterns and what weather are you looking to simulate um all right so since we need
00:53:46
to address the whole General V4 data versus five data anyway for the planets uh and the clouds are just part of that process anyway like they will come out of the same tool set basic basically um our aim is to have a default weather behavior for a planet if you generate a generic Planet will just create ideally uh the weather patterns for cold air moving underneath warm air pushing it up causing cumulus clouds to form into cumul cumulonimbus clouds hate that word but um and everything in between ideally and then also having warm air moving over cold air which will cause the straters family of clouds to form um and that's like our default Behavior we want to do for every plant if we need to um
00:54:35
and on top of that there will obviously be different things as then you have like a a very plan specific need for certain WEA weather pattern or like very different or alien planets uh with alien clouds whatever that means we don't know yet um and we just try to do that as well um but yeah the idea is that we can cover as many different cloud types as possible with the resources we have and um yeah then vary it based on planets individual Planet needs um so yeah why why why do you hate cumulo Nimbus it's a very hard word to say they're really great I love the clouds themselves they look really good and they they only ones that make lightning really cool so more or less some exceptions but all right all right well
00:55:24
we're in the end game here last weather question uh any plans for Nature's wrath Beyond lightning strikes uh we going to get as crazy as tornadoes hurricanes typhoons H how crazy are we aiming to go with this um I mean hurricanes and uh typhoons well the same thing just different names depending on where you are on the planet uh it's just like very strong winds and uh from orbit you have this this giant circling weather front moving around uh we might not be able to do it like that from orbit um we'll definitely be able to turn up the the knob a little bit on what our weather looks like compared to what you seen a citizen con obviously needs a lot of work from different departments to make this all a coherent experience um tornadoes it's not really a weather
00:56:14
Cloud thing like they move at a very different rate and the clouds will be able to move so it would be more on bfx and and graphics and I don't want to commit them to do anything that they might not be able to support anytime soon um but yeah definitely we will have certain planers with Cyclones on them if they will move the way they do in nature we'll need to see how far we can push the system or if they will be bit a little bit less but um yeah I don't know yet we'll see we we're still learning we're still working with the data and the tools and expanding them exploring them making better data and um you can expect a lot of iteration for the weather over the next few months and maybe years uh um Ali uh any any thoughts on Aurora Borealis that one does actually come up
00:57:02
a bit um we would kind of like that one um the all of the stuff in the atmosphere um ends up being quite difficult though especially when it um when they interact with each other so the clouds and the atmosphere in the same volume and then the rain is covering the same and then ground fog these things are all overlapping and quite problematic for the aora balis um I take it I mean I've not looked at the science it I assume it's always above the cloud layer isn't it and if it is that that at least simplifies the problem a bit for the rendering side um we've certainly made accidents that look like Aurora um before in in V effects and Graphics usually bugs sometimes intentional from artists um yeah that's one I'd quite like um personally and is possibly easier than some of the others um but
00:57:50
it's also quite separate you know we we have to intentionally decide we're going to stop doing this Aurora is what we want to do we haven't quite had the uh the creative Direction telling us like do that now maybe we want auror for this next release but it it's certainly plausible that came from up above okay uh last two questions um here's an oldie B of goodie uh will planets ever be scaled up more than their 1/8 size to real life for more realiz for more realism or as it is the mountain feel small write a check will uh right um I I think we'd like that because we feel the we feel the
00:58:37
small too especially as we introduce more and more advanced atmosphere it it kind of it breaks our a nice illusion that our planets are full scale which I I hope all of you continue to believe because I certainly do in my heart um the the the thing about bigger planets is it stretches the the complications with Precision more which we're hoping to be able to do away with but that's one problem obviously we need high resolution textures at the moment if we have a global texture and it's say 2K that gives us a certain number of kilometers per pixel and then obviously we have local data too but if we make a planet have twice the surface area then suddenly we have half as much resolution for the same kind of budget so we need to consider those decisions and consider how the tech can deal with that uh but you also get kind of gameplay problems
00:59:25
with that as well if I make a real life-sized planet we have fast ships but like suddenly getting from one place to another takes 10 times as long and it's not necessarily good for gaml to have that so that it's it's a convoluted question um we appreciate the reason that people are asking though we feel the same um but also there's a certain amount of the the the why question which I guess you can ask for a lot of our features which is what we have Works what we have is great should we invest more time in making it bigger is that a good use of our time versus going and doing rivers to or finishing out something else sooner roads whatever roads so so so if you put up a poll that said roads versus bigger planets I bet
01:00:14
roads would win so yeah the eight times is probably you like say it probably pushes all of them aspects too much you know two low res it's too much memory it's too much of a knock on for the gam playay a smaller increment would be more appealing I think you know like a doubling or something like that because just being able to double the scale of our mountains would be nice uh and double the scale of our Global features you know mountain ranges um would be nice so some two or 3x you know would be moreal but 8X pushing a few too many areas at the same time probably for um yeah and then the other thing we talked about um we didn't mention is content density we have to fill it with stuff as well um we'll see with architect hopefully helps fill that Gap a bit but
01:01:01
we just don't want to like if the current game we don't want to put things miles apart as we start to see the the product of architect we might be able to see okay yeah feel things are feeling too crammed and you know claustrophobic maybe we do need a bit more space and we'll try and explore that but yeah probably ax is probably pushing it I think uh and the last question um Rock distribution I got to ask about rock distribution you mentioned a little bit of it citizen con and these things I know all not all these systems come online at the at the same time and stuff like this um a lot of the a lot of the desire for roads I think besides the aesthetic stuff comes from the incredibly disastrous and and detrimental nature of of rock
01:01:51
Distribution on ground vehicles um is there some hope for us in the future of of make of of thinning these out a bit and making the making the ground vehicle experience uh even as we wait for roads a little more uh Pleasant for people I mean we can finally do denser and better vegetation so maybe we can do less rocks now um but we do love rocks I know but hitting aside um with the new local data it will be the distribution will be different it will not be as even anymore the big rocks will be more out of the way to some extent and it will be more obvious where they are and you will most likely be able to drive much further without being constantly thrown around by hitting a
01:02:39
rock yeah it's not like we won't ever have places that do have a lot of rocks but hopefully most common scenario might be I'm driving down a valley there's a nice clear path down here but up on the on the sides there's like you know you can see the big piles of Rocks coming down each side but you can kind of make out a clear path and it's not like just a random roll of the dice whe you're going to rock like immediately in front of you so we're hoping it feels better but until we have of finish a planet drive along it at speed you know we'll have to see but yeah we're hoping this leads to much more realistic cool and if it doesn't I know where you all sit I'm in Germany I'm sorry for for a while at least so I can get to Germany I can get to Germany I can find you all right folks uh thank you so much uh that was a great show um
01:03:30
I think folks uh in the chat and if I can speak for the YouTube viewers later we'll really appreciate uh your cander and information on a variety of topics related to Star engine and Genesis so thank you so much um uh Graham thank you for for hanging out with us I know we only had a couple questions for you but you stuck it out like a champ and uh your answers were really great I think folks are really looking forward to Star Audio uh and the wealth of improvements it's going to make for the Star Citizen experience um that's it for this week's show if you haven't checked out uh yesterday's ISC uh that was with Ben Juan members of the UK networking team about uh all the different Tech preview tests that are going on right now as we head to 4.0 and that release uh next week is iae and uh something a bit different uh there won't be an next
01:04:18
Friday uh there will be something different and it's in the place of ISC and next week on Friday so be sure you check that out um for I'm Jared uh that's that's Pete on the dials that's Lauren on the buttons and that was Ally will Seb and uh Graham uh with a great answer so thanks for watching I'm Jared take care everybody 'll see you next week on whatever that different thing is see you then

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