Around the Verse: Episode 1.09 (2014.08.07)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:02

   [Music] Welcome to Around the Verse, the best damn Star Citizen news show ever. I'm Sandy Gardner. Damn straight. I'm Ben Lesnik. It was a huge week for Star Citizen. We hit the $49 million stretch goal. Can you believe it? 49. I mean, remember back in the day when we were planning this whole campaign together? I I never thought we would be here. No, me neither. But I am very excited for my space plant. I want to know what that looks like. I think it's just going to look like an ordinary fern. We We're just trolling you. I know. I want one of those Venus fly

2. 00:00:49

   traps. You just creep me out. Well, they're already small. They're cute. Our new $51 million goal is interactive. That's right. Uh for the first time ever, we're letting you guys help determine our production schedule. Uh we've created a poll to determine what our web team at Turbulent works on next. Uh they could be building the uh Star Citizen interactive map. They could do org drop 2, which will include uh the or browser, or drop three with the forums, or uh the Galactipedia. That's uh the last option. And uh just let us know which one you want the best and uh we're going to get our top men on it. So what do we do? We vote at RSI is what you do. Yep. Patch 12.5 is out and is performing exactly as we hoped. High five on that one. And we've added 150,000 backers. So, we're up to 350,000

3. 00:01:36

   and we'll have more soon. By the way, I think that was the most awkward physical interaction anyone has ever had. I know, right? So bad. And a high five. Ready? No. No. We won't do it again. Okay. Be sure to check out the monthly report. That's right. We uh we aren't just making Arena Commander. We're building all sorts of modules and access of the Star Citizen project at offices around the world and monthly report is a good way to see some of that. And Friday is your last chance to pick up an M50. I got mine. I did not get mine because I am going to race with a 350R. Well, then I will see you out there at the Murray Cup Racing and I am going to blow right past you. She's going to eat my space dust. Yeah. No, it's not going to happen. We updated the Star Citizen pledge store on Monday. That's right. And it's more than just a store update. The store helps new users uh who aren't accustomed to the Star

4. 00:02:24

   Citizen culture get into the game, but it was also a complete reworking of how the site treats ships. Every single ship has its own interactive database. Now, you can go to the page and see the hollow viewer, the uh production images. We added over 350 ship pictures to the store, 20 3D models, and pages for 40 different ships, including ones that aren't even out yet. So, absolutely check it out. And now it's time for news from around the verse. [Applause] Let's do this module by module starting with Arena Commander. Of course, the big news for Arena Commander is that patch 12.5 is out and it works. Good news. We're also working on a number of small fixes, including audio enhancements and game rules updates. The

5. 00:03:13

   team has been very very busy in Arena Commander, but we can't talk about everything as it would spoil the surprise at Gamescom next week. But trust me, it's all hands- on deck here. A lot of programmers working late nights and some pretty cool stuff. Squadron 42. The team is generating animation lists for the generic mocap shoot. That's actually more exciting than it sounds. It's uh when you see characters in the background, like a bartender serving drinks or uh someone mopping the floor of the ship. That's right. Sandy actually did those animations. So, when you see a janitor on your Bengal carrier, that was me. It's her motions. Exactly. They finalized plans for mission six. They've created the uh design spec for future vertical slice items for the uh later episodes of Squadron 42. Finally, a prototype for the pad landing system has been created.

6. 00:04:01

   That's right. Uh Squadron 42's missions aren't just going to be on carriers. There's also going to be missions that take off of hangers like the ones you right now. And once they get that technology into the game, it'll carry over to Star Citizen and we uh basically all share the wealth. Persistent Universe Art has been working on VFX for the new hangers and the jump point effect. The design team in Austin has just been going crazy working on their game design documents. Uh in fact, they've finished so many this week that I'm going to have to read them off this list. Navigation, mapping, shop inventory, landing takeoff, the emote system, buying and selling, and landing zone resource supply and demand. We're going to need Tony Z to come and talk about some of these things soon. That's quite the list. They've made progress on three sample missions which will be used to test the PU. Two words, magnetic minds.

7. 00:04:50

   What does that mean? Find out. All right. Ships. Gladius hanger animations are ready for review. New concepts are inbound, including the retribution and the cockpit for the mining robot. M50, as we know, is live in the hangar. Finally. Mhm. And uh gray boxing continues on the Gladiator, the Retaliator, the Javelin, the Panther, and more. Damage states for the Constellation variants that you've all been waiting for, and the 350R are in progress. And finally, we hear you. We are working on the issues with the Avenger. Now, it's over to William with MVP. Hey everybody, I'm lead moderator, Will, here to bring you this week's MVP. This week's MVP goes to Fire Spikes because he's creating a real life UEE space helmet. Even though it's just in its

8. 00:05:38

   sanding phase, this thing looks awesome. Take a look. So, thank you very much, Fire Spikes. You're this week's MVP. Pew pew. Thanks, William. Now, over to everybody's favorite bug smashers. Same shirt, same bug. Actually, different bug, but the same shirt. Bug Smashers.

9. 00:06:27

   Hey everyone, welcome back to Bug Smashers. This week we'll be talking about an actual release bug where when you target somebody and then the bootup sequence occurs on the HUD, you'll lose that target, which is bad. All right, so this bug was, you know, pretty easy to replicate. You have your target, select them before the boot up sequence happens. And once you have them targeted, the boot up sequence will occur and then all a sudden, oh my god, I'm not targeting this guy anymore. No, that sucks. That means I have to retarget him. So I have to cycle through everybody. Now I can target him again. Kind of annoying bug. So what we're going to do is, you know, we have an event system where we send and receive messages to

10. 00:07:16

    and from different elements. And it was just a a case of one event happening before another event. Um that was resetting, you know, our targeting sequence after the boot sequence. Put a break point on this function. This function will remove our target selection whenever something gets removed from the radar. put on a break point, go in the game, do it again. We'll see what's happening. So, we have an events system in with our vehicles, even our players and items where we could send a arbitrary event with our own data structure and then any item or even the vehicle or player could listen to those events. So if the radar wants to report that, hey, we found this entity here at this location, we could

11. 00:08:06

    have different items, even the player vehicles, listen to those events and, you know, act upon them. This allows us to have a very robust and modular system where we could have vast amounts of different items and logic that just do their own thing and they could communicate with each other with these you know event systems that are particularly designed to only um send out information that you know other items or things that want to grab and listen to. So if we send an event and no one's listening it'll no one will ever get the information. It's not going to send to every single thing. It only sends to what needs to get the information. So, it's very robust and it's very, you know, customizable to whatever we want to send. So, one event to another is going to be completely different to others. You know, we use

12. 00:08:55

    this system pretty much throughout our entire item system from, you know, our radar to our coolers to our weapons so that they could communicate to all various types of modules in the game. And if we have, you know, one event sending before another event, then we could have some problems like in the case of the earlier bug. It's a really interesting system that we just have to be careful in how we use. So I target him up and I popped. So let's see what's happening. Let's scroll down. So here's our call stack, which is the game code, what it's doing and calling. And the HUD has just finished processing the boot sequence. So, it's starting to activate a bunch of things. And right about here,

13. 00:09:46

    where where is it? Enable display. So, this particular display is getting enabled. It's requesting the radar to reset itself and that will eventually go to the radar system and the radar system will listen to this event. And look at that. it will remove it the entity, add it back, and then update the position. Since everything pretty much already checks to see if the entity is already in its list, we technically don't need to remove the entity cuz that require that makes everything restart. So the quick fix is to disable this code. All right, so this bug, you know, is easy to replicate. You select your target, the boot before the boot up sequence occurs, then the boot up

14. 00:10:32

    sequence will happen and you lost a target. This was just um you know an event sequence that happens before another event that canceled out an event that was just like ah crap. So what we did was after we prevented the um the bootup sequence from resetting the targets and then all was good. It was actually a really quick and simple bug to fix and hopefully you guys will appreciate the fix to the camera event segment. Now here's James with Chad Zamzau. The Chad Zamzou experience in San Antonio before. No, but you didn't work at the Austin office. No, I didn't. Okay. That's actually where I would have preferred to have worked. Nope. from Almond.

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    as we know Moon Collider's Kill Kytherra AI system is used in the game. What's your role in the process of actually getting into Star Citizen? Have you worked AI systems in the past? If so, how does Kytherra stack up against alternatives? So, uh, I haven't worked on AI systems before. Um, I'm actually a grad student coming straight out of digen, uh, with a focus on AI specifically. Um, but this is actually my first full-time job here. Um, and as you know, uh, Moon Collider is the main developer for the AI for Star Citizen, but, uh, they're over in the UK, and I'm more or less act acting as their proxy here state side. So, when something goes wrong with the AI or there's some immediate, uh, AI needs, I'm there to fulfill it while, you know, people in the UK are asleep. Cool. Second question from Harlot. How big of a variety can we expect between

16. 00:12:43

    AI's different races? Will the Zion, Banu, and Vandal fight and behave differently? So what we have for our AI are uh what we call profiles which allow you to you know tweak values to make uh different AI behave differently and we have it uh divided into subcategories of profiles. One of them actually is a race uh subprofile so we can specify some traits that would uh be inherited by all humans or all Vanuel and whatnot. Uh we don't have them filled out right now but it is something we're planning on doing. So, for example, like uh the VanDuel being the uh kind of uh savage race, they'll have a more aggressive AI and they'll definitely go for it. Next question from Dragon of War, what is the most difficult thing you've encountered with artificial intelligence

17. 00:13:30

    so far? Particularly challenging thing for uh this project is that um really uh space flight sims haven't really been much of a thing for the past like 15 years or so. And so as far as uh AI research and development goes, um it's been much more focused on uh like first-person shooters. So while there's plenty of you know like you know things you could uh look at and research about how to make a first person shooter AI, it's really kind of bare bones as far as like modern techniques on how to make uh you know space flight some AI. So that's kind of a very very challenging part there is kind of going into unexplored territory as far as modern implementations go from VO. What kind of order/chains can we expect to give to our wingman turret gunners and etc. I mean things like

18. 00:14:18

    shoot main target only in tur t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t turrets, conserve energy, or shoot prime target, then secondary if in view, ignore others. You know, playing the Vandals form as it is is right now, we don't have uh you know, giving wingman commands yet. Um and uh mainly it's not really it's not something that we're working on right now, but it is some something that we do have in mind for the future. Like uh for example, I'm just recently playing uh Free Space 2 and one of the things I really like from it is like the extent of commands that you can give to your wingmen. Uh like from you could like break it down to individual ships uh wings or all the ships under your command telling them to like do specific things like uh say attack uh the target capital ships uh weapons or subsystems or uh protect my uh target from uh

19. 00:15:08

    attack and that would like have them be like even intercepting bombs from hitting the capital ship that you're ordering them to defend. And that's some the sorts of things I really would like to see in Star Citizen as well. Man, we're really high up. I'm so high right now. And you said you were afraid of heights, didn't you? Yeah, I did. But is it okay? Yeah, it's fine. Work hazard, right? We know that you guys are gathering or planning to gather a lot of data from Marina Commander. If so, what data/metrics are you guys using and how does it influence AI design? I really would like to have uh metrics and whatnot, but I don't think we have them in uh Arena Commander right now. Uh but I would certainly look forward to having it in the future. But what we have what we do have right now is uh Moon Collider has made has expanded their debugging

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    features in their Kyther inspector to allow for you to rewind time and see past data. Oh, that's cool. Uh for the AI simulation that's been going on. So you can kind of, you know, rewind and replay history to kind of, you know, do better diagnostics on the AI and improve and improve it from there. All right, so that's all the questions we have for you. Thanks for joining us, Chad. Thanks, James. All right, back to you guys. These interviews are getting pretty complex and strange. Interesting. Now, here's Matt with some behind thescenes details on the Glade. Now, you may recognize this guy. This is a slightly modified VanDuel scythe. And one of the things we are doing is we're making a a new ship

21. 00:16:44

    in the family of this of the VanDuel. And we need to mirror the geometry from this wing over to the other side. But this presents problems. This breaks animation. This breaks the normals which are uh I'll show you the normals here. So our artists go in and they hand move these little lines and that tells the how the light hits the the polygon and reflects and it changes the shape of those edges. So, we want to preserve all that hard work. But Max's internal tools don't do

22. 00:17:35

    a good job of that. So, what I've done is I've written a mirror script, and I'll show you how that works. So, right now, it's mirrored the geometry, but it has a several other processes it needs to go through. It has to reset the transforms, then realign the vert the uh the axes and then re-ake the animation onto the model. Now, I do have a bug and I'm working through that today. This is uh as it happens and um I am in about 20 seconds you'll see the result. So, in the past I've worked on a lot of uh RTS games. I've worked on a lot of openw world games and I'm really excited to work on Star Citizen. Uh it presents huge challenges. Um just the the scope is pretty

23. 00:18:25

    fantastic. Just the amount of content we're going to be generating and the opportunity to write these uh these tools is uh pretty awesome. Okay, we're done. So, what we have here is the VanDuel Glaive and the animation has been baked to the other side. Now, you notice there's all these little boxes here. I'm using those to tell me what's going on with the transformations of each part. And those all represent the the pieces of the ship, the damaged pieces of the ship, the LEDs, the debris, it's all got to be calculated

24. 00:19:14

    and mirrored correctly so that when it blows up, it looks cool. So, um, I'm working out a bug and it's showing me that this node here is scaled negative. So I'm figuring out a way an ingenious I have an ingenious plan to uh mirror this without a negative scale. So once I complete that then we will be able to uh mirror anything in the game and save a lot of time preserve our normals. I'll show you that. See those normals are preserved. The animation's been preserved and I just got to get that scale out of there. So, what happens when you have a negative scale?

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    This happens. See how it's collapsed into the body like that? So, as soon as I get rid of my negative scale, we'll have a symmetrical vandal glaive. And I hope you enjoy that when it comes out. Thank you for watching. That's all I got. We have a new contest and this is a big one. That's right. Our friends at Scitec are sharing not just a pair of uh Rhino Hodess joysticks, but uh two flight chairs as well. We're going to throw in a couple M50 packages to make the ultimate Star Cizen racing reward. And in order to get that reward, uh what we want our backers to do is take the grayscale image of the M50 available at the website right now. Uh color it in in the racing scheme you think looks the

26. 00:20:50

    coolest, send it to us. Uh we'll pick one winner from that and then another winner will be determined via raffle at Gamescom uh where everything will be announced as well. Have you seen these playy chairs? I have. I really want one. I know. I want one too. I finally showed one to my wife and she was like, I guess you can get one. I want one too, but I don't think we can swindle that. We have one final surprise for you. Everybody gets a poster. Uh as you know at our events, we like to give out physical stares and posters and this year we are giving everybody a poster for their hanger. Uh, we have two designs this year showing the Constellation and the M50 racing. Um, we're giving everybody a thousand UEC. You can pick the poster you like best and add it to your hanger. And which one are you going to pick? I'm going for the M50. I'm going for the Constellation. So, we just differ again. Now, let's leave you with an art sneak

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    peek. This is the gray boxing of the Retaliator. What you're looking at has no textures, but it's still pretty cool. So that's it for today's show. We won't see you next week because we will be at Gamescom, but we will see you the following week. So in two weeks, we'll see you around the verse. Perfect.