Inside Star Citizen: Tools Time | Spring 2022

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] oh hello we talk a lot in the isc about what developers are making for you the star citizen community but what you may not know is that any large games development there's usually a small team dedicated to making things strictly for the developers themselves tools development is at the very heart of what makes game development possible and why each year is often more productive than the last when building the never before built it's often impossible to know exactly what you're going to need when you start but as time goes on developers begin to discover all the bottlenecks the process is that while necessary can often devastatingly impede their momentum and perhaps most commonly processes that

2. 00:00:49

   work fine for a small game but don't always scale with a project as massive as star citizen so we thought we'd take this week's show and dedicate it to some of the true heroes gamers never see behind the curtain and enter the world of tools programmers up first let's go to montreal and meet some of the team there and learn a little about their most recent effort the mighty mighty bridge depend who you ask for the the toolkit might be the most important team of a prediction in our team the focus is to develop tools for artists designers and technical artists the scale in star season is insane so we can't ask for artists and designers to make all the game fully by hand

3. 00:01:38

   technically we're on the pre-surgical side but our tools team is also geared for our like our on montreal office the main idea is uh if there is a need if there is a problem or if there's anything that could be made any faster or more simpler for a user then a tools programmer can go in and make their life easier i am the most important part of the most important team you know as star citizen is evolving we add more and more features over time so that means that we need to be able to set up and place new type of data and and so you need new tools for that we need to automatize a big part of the job to move further and faster

4. 00:02:27

   obviously there is a lot to do because the world we try to create is huge and what we tend to do as technical artists is trying to make the link between the developers and the artists themselves because the artists are the ones or the level designers are the ones that tend to use the tools while the programmers tend to answer their needs one recent example of a tool we developed is the multibridge mighty bridge is a plugin for the game editor that link the game editor to any other software right now the main usage is to be able to work in houdini and have some effects directly in editor with the mighty bridge the communication is done in two-way direction it can send information and ask stuff to houdini for example and houdini while doing the

5. 00:03:17

   computation is able to say okay you want to place a cave here give me all the objects in this 50 meters radius so that i can add up the recipe and then send back the result and with other technologies you don't have that two-way communication so it's also helped us doing more complex recipes and adapt the content to the game level the reason why the mighty bridge is important is there is a lot of technical resources and knowledge in all kinds of amazing tools like as i mentioned before houdini and by providing a way that artists can interact with the editor from the tools that they know and love and have learned to use over many many years they can make more easily the stuff that they want there's no time in between of like thinking about the logistics of

6. 00:04:04

   everything it just like does it for you we made the mit bridge thinking about the future so that if we want to use other technology we can plug them into the editor using it and for example if we want to use blender or vsmax or maya or substance designer for example that we are using but if we want to plug them into the editor we could use my keyboard to do that tools programming is a core to however whoever interacts with anything to make content i've been working in the industry for 15 years i never found a project that has such ambitions and i feel like this game tends to always say there is a goal and we will do whatever it takes to to reach that goal

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   mighty bridge is just one of the ways tools programmers work to improve the workflow of all developers allowing for an unprecedented two-way communication between independently developed softwares that were never intended to speak to one another shaving the downtime and removing the need for important exports all over the place but that's not where this week's tools time story ends for we're about to go big with a tool that we've been dreaming about internally since 2019 a way to test our game and infrastructure at the scales we need while leaving developers free to continue developing let's meet the cloud test launcher i remember there were tests in the company where people asked can we get as many developers to join to see if servers work

8. 00:05:42

   well we can do this this way but we have limited number of developers even if there is quite large number of them if you take into consideration how many players there will be in star citizen you will quickly find out that we need to have some way to emulate those users the idea was created like four years ago the first iteration was that you can go to the developer machines install the software one person could simulate that traffic using those machines then came the next iteration of this idea where we wanted to move that to the cla

9. 00:06:32

   actual cloud right now club test launcher allows us to create machines on the fly when we need them launch multiple clients on those machines and simulate actual traffic it actually launches a star citizen client connects to the servers and creates a very realistic testing scenario because you can say that there is network traffic you can say that those players even if they are emulated they are actually doing something in star citizen just like a normal connected client would so this is quite a big deal as you know we are going to introduce

10. 00:07:21

    server meshing and to be able to do that we need to have reliable testing methods and cloud s launcher is one of those methods for example say that a client should go into a ship and fly somewhere maybe through a jump point which will it would involve switching servers and so on for us in near future that will be a very valuable tool to perform testing of course cloud test launcher is not a single person project many people helped in development i would like to shout out to martin senior which is my team lead who developed early versions of the cloud test launcher also to java who helps us

11. 00:08:11

    in testing phase also ahmed and scott who helped us with the network part and cloud part of the development of the cloud slanter without them this would not be possible so what did we learn this week well we learned that mighty bridge allows our developers to use the right tool for the job wherever that tool may come from and to do so without having to leave the game editor that cloud test launcher will free up our developers in qa from tedious load bearings testing and allow them time to focus on new features and fixes respectively and that at isc we're going to continue exploring every aspect of game development before our time here is done for inside star citizen i'm jared huckaby we'll see you all next week

12. 00:09:20

    you