Holiday Livestream 2015: Ship Pipeline - Part Two

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:14

   the very last part of our ship pipeline is called flight prep so we have the final geometry of the ship we have the textures in place and now was going ahead and we're adding in the damage states to these ships making sure that parts of the ship break off animating what's required for hangar and flight ready making sure that you I is into the ship's need to make sure that audio and VFX get the involvement into this stage as well so blowing up a ship to a hundred percent damage the game balancing takes place all the pretty textures all the lighting would be effects pretty much every department in the company gets involved as producer you know my primary role is to make sure that everyone knows what they're doing to you know creating these beasts of you know ships if you will and we have a very very large pipeline need of some of

2. 00:01:01

   these ships are like floating levels whatever stage you're at there's a knock-on effect to every other discipline here so we get involved in the process for ideally after the tech art is to kind of done the majority of their work once they've got the kind of functionality in place that's when we can then go in and kind of add the the VFX could be seen as the Polish I guess to that functionality so for example with the damage when the ship is actually all broken up and that those kind of pieces can be broken off then we then go in and add the explosions and any smoke and fire just apply that to it this is the retaliate er here and basically all I'm really doing here is just throwing missiles on it just to kinda see how everything's react in could do this all day these ship artists make these beautiful ships and we get to blow them up in a blaze of

3. 00:01:49

   glory so yeah it's kind of fun we check the forums we also check the people upload a lot of their YouTube footage which is really really useful actually because they the backers can test the game like we can't because there's so many more of them and it's always nice to kind of see them put in the ships into situations than we might not have been village so actually yeah it's really nice to see and so I handle all the damage system we're over the damage system that allows us to punch a bullet holes through the ships and to burn them and scorch them and also to do the opposite of that to repair the ships and we also or for the performance of the ships and how fast they render to make sure that we can get a lot of ships on screen and they all run a nice fast frame wait for everyone yeah we're pushing quite a lot more detail in every regard than a lot

4. 00:02:38

   of other games and definitely every game guys here worked on before so the number of Polly's and the ships will be like five to ten times well at least what people are used to the number of meshes we're using is very high textured look detail is pretty insane compared to what most people have used to in traditional games and pepper the good news is there's a lot of optimizations were still got to do there's a it's going to get a lot better than it is now we've got a lot in the bag totally to it to get back to ensure that they are just can stay at this type of high level of quality they've they've been aiming for so I'll take a early white box version of a ship and then I'll take the screenshots from naw naw staff overlaying some images over the top of that which I'll label up and then send back to the artists and then they'll just build the screens according to the respect that I provide you get

5. 00:03:26

   information about your your ship in terms of you know how damaged it is you get information about your what level of shield allocation you're currently at or your emissions levels and what's neat about it is you can actually go into each of these screens and swap out the information that you display so you can actually configure and customize your experience yes these are the docks that we supply to the artists whether the screen specs or some ship elevation is awesome ship images the pinpoint exactly where the seats are on the ships and then we break down those seats into this table which lists out the actual number of screen screen types the ratios let the artist know whether we definitely need this screen whether we like this screen or if it's an optional screen and

6. 00:04:14

   will often throw it into a screen shot as well to just show visibility as soon as you put an abstract layer of you I then it kind of reminds the player that it's a game but if you can keep them in the world and you keep them interacting with things that are actually on the geometry that in the world and it keeps the player kind of been to the experience you see you see the screens flicker on and and you know it booting up and stuff and it just really makes it feel like ship comes alive and things are functional and you can do all and you're like in control of a spaceship each ship manufacturer has quite a clear set of rules that we follow to give them a sauce sonic identity so you can understand that a ship made by RSI is sonically identifiable just just from the

7. 00:05:04

   sandwiches which is really cool so that's the doors opening little hatches seats coming back and forth all those sort of nice little interactive elements inside the ship that you get is the first step when it gets put into the hangar and then after that it goes flight ready and we'll do things like the thrusters and more recently we're going to start sauna fighing the power plant and that's going to actually become quite a significant part of the sound of spaceships when you're listening to which your own ship from the interior so once that goes in it's pretty much ready to go ready to put in the hangar and if it's for a flight ready ship and is ready to go flight ready the audio goes there it's rewarding to see it's finally coming together you know and hopefully on a deadline that was a vigil agreed on the level of talents really hired some of the best guys I've ever worked with at

8. 00:05:52

   the studio and in the partner studios as well when you see the final ship labelling game knowing that it's gone through months of development and there's been a lot of heartache and a lot of pain and sweat and tears has been put into that it's it's rewarding even the smaller ships require incredible mat work to get them to be the level of quality or the fidelity they are new starters often shocked when they start here to see how much work really takes to get on them to completion we all know what the vision is we've all got kind of that high level vision in our minds from an early stage in the pipeline so yes it's really it's really kind of it's enjoyable to see it kind of come to fruition at the end of that that pipeline yeah when it's delivered you know you and you know where people have pledged and eventually the final ship

9. 00:06:41

   gets there in their hangar you know what we hope to provide is this amazing sort of showroom red bow on it kind of experience where they can go proper yeah look at that I bought that that's my ship and even better you know I can get me I can fly it so that's our ship pipeline it's obviously a lot more complicated than a to b to c but it is an incredible process full of incredibly talented people who are doing amazing things i I certainly went into this never expecting the level of fidelity and detail and passion that these people were put into the game and it is it is a joy to see everything come back just beyond our wildest dreams so thank you for watching you keep flying

10. 00:07:30

    will keep building [Applause] you