Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Upgrading Ships to Item 2.0, Part 2

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:15

   hello and welcome to around the verse our weekly look at the development of star citizen I'm sandy gardner and i'm chris roberts it is great to have you back in LA office truth yes it's back a little bit of jet lag but i just returned from about a month over in europe at our foundry 42 offices in Germany and the UK and we could sit down with both teams to work through the various aspects of 3.0 and squadron 40 which were very hard at work on you can find out exactly what all of our officers have been up to by readings made monthly report which we're releasing tomorrow yeah and to tide you over until then here's an account of an update from our UK office which I think you'll enjoy hi everyone my name is Nick Elms and I'm the creative director here at foundry 42 in the Wilms office in the UK Aaron is on holiday this week so it's up to me to

2. 00:01:02

   give you this month's studio update as you would imagine the Wilms office is still a hive of activity with tasks bugs and features all being worked on to both squadron 42 and 3.0 let's start with the ongoing Sprint's with the air traffic controller sprint the initial groundwork has now been completed and we're moving on to more of the functionality including communicating with the ATC from your cockpit when you want to land you now target the station using the player interaction system select the option to request a landing then you'll be given the start of a communications channel with the NPC to have a dialogue with them we're currently in the process of implementing this in real-world cases so for example in RP you map we are setting up a port olisar so both requesting your ship as well as landing will all go through the ATC as part of the push to

3. 00:01:49

   make starter system more accessible we're introducing a new hint system to make the initial learning curve lower for new players as the player begins their first steps into the spouse's in-universe various hints will get displayed on the UI giving feedback on how to interact with the different systems whether it's entering the proximity of the a SOP terminal or letting them know about a movi glass feature after a given amount of time 43.0 we're changing how the player spawns into the level currently this is done by spawn points so these bedroom in the pu map has its own spawn point and then some flow graph logic to position them correctly in the bed and play the correct animation as you will imagine with a number of spawn locations and the PU issues adding up to a lot of flow graph and setup going forwards we're creating a new spawn component which can be added to any entity for example if this component is added to a bed we will

4. 00:02:37

   then assume the player will need to be attached correctly to it and play the normal lie down idle animation automatically this now means that we can remove a large amount of flow graph and simplify the setup of the level work is continuing for the missions on 3.0 with the progress on the implementation of the mission broker and mission manager these will determine how a mission and all its objectives are presented to and given to the player to complete they will also be tracking what missions a player who already has and how far through the objectives they are in the AAA locomotion sprint we are spending time refining the way the AI walks and runs around a level we have found that just following a path which is determined by the path finding code gives a result which looks very unnatural we're now implemented a new path smoothing algorithm which makes AI

5. 00:03:24

   traversal around corners in a much more natural way so it doesn't look like they're going from one point to the next because they're generally moving to get to a particular place we're currently working on making reaching that point and going into whatever animation is required to be as seamless as possible the graphics team have been wrapping up and bug-fixing the major features mentioned in our last last update such as lip fog real-time environment probes planet lighting and render to texture work Holograms and video comms in addition they've made some tweaks to our lighting model to improve the appearance of ground reflections of the Sun on planets at sunset and sunrise the u.k animation team has continued to work on the FPS weapons with the previous complete for the new gemini l86 ballistic pistol the arrowhead is now close to final with just some minor

6. 00:04:11

   polish work left on the reload States the take downs have gone from an implementation pass to a more refined animation pass with concentration on a stronger composition solid posing clear silhouettes and polish to the mocap data to better sell the overall action the AI animation work is ongoing with improvements to the posing of enemy Patrol States and reactions to sight and sound the team are also helping to export the remaining gameplay story cinematic scenes so that design can implement and better visualize the story within the levels they're working on the Derby animation team are finishing off the facial animations for the 3.0 mission givers and Eckart's body animation is being polished and implemented to last week some of the team attended a PU audio and facial shoot in London they captured some awesome footage from some great actors

7. 00:04:59

   and we think it will go a long way to flesh it out the universe the VFX team have continued tests with a new lighting entity this time focusing on smaller scale interior electrical effects they have also been testing the features in the new particle system as provided by the graphics team including better trailer options and depth buffer based collision required for sparks for example the first low-key exterior VFX passes under way including refinery flames and general ambience the new cutlass flight-ready VFX including interior damage and thruster effects are now done work has continued on the atmospheric flight effects print with heavy focus on play testing book fixing and testing new features has provided by the graphics and engineering teams the ongoing polish for the VFX for the new weapons and rework versions is

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   continuing up to the 3.0 release on the outside the origin 600 I concept process has now finished and we're really looking forward to seeing what you guys think it's one sleek ship the next ground vehicle has been rocking along and we're just about to kick off a whole new round of ships on the ship weapons front we've taken the Klaus and Lerner styling from the FPS weapons and use that to influence the work on the Klaus and Verner laser Peter on the other end of the spectrum we're looking at some cool looking Max ox neutron repeaters the art team has also been hammering away at further Shubin mining station interiors working out a few more areas to improve on for its believability this is done by zero in on the functionality of the area's work has also continued on providing further infrastructure to the habitation pods including comms arrays

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   water collectors and small deployable communication units our space scenes have been in a major facelift for the 3.0 release we've been very busy adding large volumes of interplanetary space dust within the stanton system adding texture and visual interest to our space overworld has been a big priority for the 3.0 release as part of this sprint we've reworked some of the distant nebula in the stanton system but there's still lots more to come we've been working on large-scale nebulae rendering techniques using the pyro system as a test case these techniques will help us create our interstellar scale nebula also for squadron 42 we're exploring the look and feel of the coil which plays a major role in the first campaign we're using powerful fluid simulations to help us achieve this look any work we undertake on improving the space 43.0 as always is a great benefit for squadron 42 work is ongoing for the truck stop

10. 00:07:22

    station materials this includes finalizing the panel shapes adding some hue and gloss variation and elements of wear and tear and dirt the unclogged frames also being finalized with structural elements surrounding the machinery and high-frequency detail we have continued to work on the solar panels trying different ideas out and getting them to a stage where they gel well with the rest of the truck stop the rest of the truck stop team are finalizing the main hall pieces before proceeding to the front and back sections of the station special consideration is being made to ensure all pieces of work as well as the modular set don't look visually repetitive detail layer areas around the landing pad is ongoing and this includes adding more visual complexity to the back of the landing pad as well as the borders around the edge of the pad in relation to the surface outpost more of the archetypal outposts have had a dressing and the lighting paths this

11. 00:08:09

    includes an emergency shelter which can be found dotted around the moons as a place for crash pilots to take refuge also an illegal drug lab which may or may not be on one of the moons planet integration materials for the outpost exterior have been tested and tweaked for sand and ice biomes this determines the amount of dirt build-up that can vary for each biome and can be adjusted for each outpost for variation branding prototyping has been explored for procedure locations with the ray re brand as a test case this includes the main logos and text along with the secondary logos indents lines and signage this would procedurally swap brands depending on who owns the outpost with regard to the ship team the reclaimer work has been completed on the drone we're keen to focus on the drone deployment and storage mechanism as we're excited to see this become

12. 00:08:57

    functional when drones come online the engine room has also been completed making use of repurposed assets from the idris all reused assets go through the process of reskin with reclaimer materials to make everything feel consistent and cohesive the exterior damage setup is nearing completion with internal geometry being built to be exposed when the ship takes damage work on the derelict ships and wreckage elements are coming to an end for the initial batch and support is now in place for design to create mission scenarios based on derelict ships in space or on planets the material variations of each ship have been created so that depending on which planet the ships are placed on they will look visually embedded to the surface type [Music]

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    all its remaining for this phase are the technical elements such as LEDs these areas and collisions the Gladius cockpit has been revamped and relit for the new cockpit experience spring this has been an exercise in improving the players feeling of immersion and has been a collaboration between several departments on the outside it's been achieved by clearing a channel between the top support screens to reveal the Gatling gun on the nose and making a range of interactive buttons for more interesting animations and remodeling the throttle for improved functionality the cockpit canopy has been extended for a better clarity and new interior lighting has been added to help bring it all to life on the whole see exterior work is

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    currently being done on finishing the landing gear mechanisms and detailing the inner Bay Area's while we create the initial animations and work towards a final art the front section of the interior is now modeling complete and is getting a detailed lighting pass using new light groups controller once this is complete the tunnel section and rear engine room will be modeled and lit in the same fashion the live design team are plowing ahead

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    with content for the PU and they've made sure to spend a bit of time giving much-needed love to some of the existing arena commander of star Marine maps Gangstar has received a new lease of life with the addition of procedural asteroids which give a much more cinematic dogfighting experience both of the star Marine maps have received a number of balancing changes based on feedback from the community in Echo xi we've made some adjustments to the capture points and in last and and damien we've added a sneaking uva route from the Marine spawn zone to landing pad be on the UI front we've been busy chipping away all the various features that are making their way into the new MOBA class we've made progress on getting the home screen fully functional and displaying elements of the active status atmosphere readouts suit status readouts as well as personal overview we've also got player loadout management

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    working as an app in mobile us this interface should easily carry over to handle ship loadout customization as well as is currently in the arena commander for an end menu we're also working to get mote the mobi glass UI in general to be projected using the new render to texture tech which will make the UI looks much more properly integrated within the game world workers continued on designing and implementing the upcoming character customization menu on the front end which will be included in 3.0 from here players will be able to create and customize their various characters and the pu obviously depending on how many character slots that player has initially the level of customization will be limited where you'll be expanded in the future to provide much more granular control of characters features the audio team has been working on several features for the 3.0 release these include the procedural

17. 00:13:53

    planet ambience system which is designed to place appropriate sounds around the player dynamically as they traverse planetary bodies we've also been refining the approach on how we produce ship armaments and first-person weapon audio further ensuring they're satisfying to the player by reflecting player-driven modifications and customization this example I'm gonna show you today is for the bearing size 2 laser cannon we've basically changed the sound to a kind of new more exciting big sound using our new system which I'll explain so this is what the new sound is like

18. 00:14:56

    so as you can hear it's basically yeah a lot bigger a lot punchier a lot more kind of pronounced the audio team has been producing sound schemes for the different kinds of diegetic user interfaces that will feature in 3.0 including the kiosks the audio direction of these very to suit their technical and this presents some great opportunities to reinforce they're looking for preparations begun in earnest for a Foley session at Pinewood Studios to ensure audio coverage for character clothing and armor and content to extend the footstep system further progress has also been made on the foundational audio tech such as dynamic

19. 00:15:43

    Bank loading the active status system the audio propagation system and music logic system as well as content production for derelict ships bespoke 3.0 location sound design ship damage effects audio support ship improvements and more besides we're really excited about all the new content and gameplay that 3.0 will bring and as you can see from what's been going on here we're getting closer every day all remains for the UK update is to send out a message thank you to you our backers without which we would not be able to put together this amazing game see you in the verse placing procedural asteroids into arena commander should add a fun new wrinkle to dogfighting ya know it's actually great to see the new technology when building the 3.0 and beyond

20. 00:16:30

    actually make all the aspects of the game better and handsome and also it's also cool to see one of the new stuff that we're working on that was in the report like the space you know the space Rex on the moons and we'll have land space can be really kind of fun to discover and explore very cool one of the biggest upgrades coming to the game is item 2.0 on last week's episode we use ships to explore how this system opens a whole new world of possibilities for star citizen yeah that's right so when it comes to ships allows for softball components ties into the new interaction system and even upgrades the seats and conference place making that the aspect of flying and controlling or using a ship much more tactile and visceral which is being sort of goal or started in essence beginning for more on this here is part two of our feature on

21. 00:17:19

    how item 2.0 is changing the way you'll play the game last week we spoke about the incredibly important migration of all our ships to the item 2.0 technique today I want to describe some of the challenges we faced we had B seats and the seats are pretty nifty they allow me to enter exit' and do some basic things but there are only four vehicles they're part of the vehicle logic so one of the stepping stones before we got the 2.0 was to turn that seat into more of a generic system it was kind of like the in between the vehicle and then 2.0 system and what that allowed us to do was to separate these seats into individual items to do email your enter exits so we started porting stuff over

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    to that system and we came across some problems that the original system solved but the new system didn't say we have a single theater fighter and we opened up the canopy and then the ladder and then you walk up and you enter it now with the original vehicle seats you can do that there there are these things called post actions and I think pre actions basically we play an animation to open those gateways and then the player can enter the entrance and everything in close problem is with that one point oh the new seats is you couldn't actually talk to the vehicle to play those things but you could play an animation on itself so these 1.0 seats were mostly used for things like the multi-crew ships where you didn't have to play those animations on the ship you just need to play it on the seat so you needed like the

23. 00:18:56

    retaliate er has this dashboard so you you interact with it and do stuff that was all separated of the vehicle but if you needed to still play those animation vehicle you had to go back to vehicle seats so what that led us to do is now we have two different seats they solve two different problems and what we want to do was remove these two seats and go with a 2.0 version that solved both of these issues what we had to come up with was we needed a seat and this thing called a seat dashboard and then the seat access the seat is only responsible for just plopping the player down and giving him control the seat by itself doesn't do anything then you have the dashboard this is basically that infrastructure you see in front of you that shows the UI shows this shows the joysticks and you have the seat access which dictated how you got into that seat now we can do all that which is

24. 00:19:46

    fine however we needed to brake as you can see we now have three different items where those other original things just pad like the vehicle seat to Ted it just on the ship so now we have to break out all of these assets and put them into different items we have to break out all of the animations into the different states yes the system allows us to do a lot more it allows us to do things that's some of the animation team want to do but because of the way the old vehicle seats and item seats were designed we had to go back and revisit how we did those change the art change the whole process take our animations cut them up in different ways just to get them onto the 2.0 infrastructure so it's like the stuff we want to do way back then we couldn't do so we kind of had to do some fake a route but because

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    of that fakery we had to go back cut them up to how we actually wanted to do it finally after you know this is stuff we've been talking about animation design for a long time it's just an extra step we have to do to move everything over that's one of the reasons why it's taking a little bit we actually have a big master plan of moving all the ships over and it's like all right before we can move this guy over we have to cut that animation up from here to here to here move this here move this here okay does it work as we're doing that ship by ship by ship and of course all of our ships are very special snowflakes they'll do something a little bit different here so we have to reach since we we have a defined plan of how this new setup is going to work we just have to figure out how that's going to get cut up correctly so that works with the new infrastructure one of the precautions we're now taking with all the new ships is learning the

26. 00:21:22

    problems that we did the past of what this ship is doing wrong or different that's causing havoc a very beautiful ship that's causing us some fun is the gladiator you have two seats on the top and then you have a Bombay door on the bottom and you have this line that has to come down to allow either one of them the original thing wanted both the seats to come down so if I'm piling the ship and my co-pilot want to get out I have to come out with him luckily we're able to split that up so that type comes down then either one to come but you still have the problem that Bombay door because that's part of the landing system and the seat system which is two different seats connections that don't know about each other and the old system didn't

27. 00:22:09

    really handle that too well but now I'm in 2.0 we're going okay you can't leave until that Bombay is open so we're going to open that first then you could come down then the seats could go back up so we have like systems in place but ships or special cupcakes and we're going to make sure that they work on this new flow when we're splitting up the ship from moving the vehicle from being the seat to this kind of sub hybrid thing called the 1.0 seats we had this thing called a seat hose and the seat host was basically kind to trying to remove that bit of logic of seat from the ship to a generic thing and it was like your very beginning sort of structure it was kind of a weird mixture of things the idea for that thing so that fecal turret

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    generic stuff could use this have seats but because of that a lot of things started using this thing called a seat host so you had things in the player code checking to see if there's if you're attached to an IC test you had things in UI checking to see if you're ni seat us she had a lot of these embedded things checking for this thing called an IC to us which was horrible but it was the only way to get stuff going until we separated these things into components we now have to take those things that we lied on the C toast and make them more into a more generic thing one of the biggest challenges is going to be of course the UI things like the visor relied heavily on the seat host things you pull event the pull information out of you know these events will get dispatched when you know I my ship again this guy starts firing this

29. 00:23:47

    guy you I will listen to it and it has to go oh I'm not the guy shooting so I'm going to ignore this block but not everywhere did that so you have the UI listening to all these crazy events and it had to rely on this thing called a seed host but if the seed has disappeared and in the registry crashing all sorts of problems we came up with this new infrastructure for the UI for the seats where they relied on more of the item components themselves rather than the seat level and what this allowed us to do was worry about just the item so you would have a UI for power it just relied on knowing about the power plant didn't care about the vehicle didn't care about the player was attached to and the beauty of that is I could technically slap this arm to a a big bending machine that the power plan

30. 00:24:36

    you can see its power coming but that was the dream and separating that UI bits and pieces is one of the biggest overhauls we had to do not just for UI but than all the other sections of the code and we're still dealing with it because we're at a point where we have to maintain both the admin 1.0 and the atom 2.0 until we could fully flip the switch saying one point I was not supported so you have some new UI with that seat host some UI with just the power and it's kind of that weird thing you're trying to deal with to not break the old until everything you get switched over to the new system one of the other big architectural changes we've been working on is going back to the vehicle if we had items on here we have this thing called an vent system

31. 00:25:23

    that sensitive nth to the vehicle and that would dispatch it to everybody else but since we want to get away with that vent system for one everyone knows about it and to it was immediate and it was on the main thread what that meant is if I sent it event and I sent it to everybody the main thread basically has to wait until everyone got it they all did their update and then everything happened instantaneous so radar picked up some enemy census events saying this thing was added the UI would get it but to create all these resources just to display a lot of things would happen when one event gets dispatched so one of the things that we changed is instead of having immediate call the vent system we have this thing called a multi-threaded event system and instead of everybody connecting to the vehicle's event system they have their own and they can link to each other so now if you I want to know

32. 00:26:11

    about radars getting uh you know stuff appearing on the radar you can listen to this thing called the radar data bank and the radar data bank when it picked up something from the radar the radar would send an event to the data bank the data bank wouldn't process it right then and there it would process it in that batch update that I was talking about during its own time hold the events out do its thing and handle that big load onto that thread and then when it would do some it would then dispatch events to other system then they would do that same very thing so we've just offloaded this heavy system into batches and also allows us to guarantee that when this guy sent the event the other guy would pull it down when he was ready not immediately occurring and with that nice event system we could actually do some nifty

33. 00:26:58

    things where we could actually localize those events so before I was saying we have the we separated the person who controls stuff from the actor to this thing called an item user the item user has these main events we call them input events and he has an input in an output event system he could get inputs from all sorts of things and he could send off outputs so if I press a button he might go oh I need to turn on lights he'll translate that to an out event system he will dispatch to all the items heat they control but they'll only pull it down when they're ready to so the player hits a button and maybe switch on light the switch on light gets sent to an event to get it finds the controllers that he controls figures out oh this guy needs to have it cured this event that

34. 00:27:47

    light controller will pull the event down in its batch update go ok I need to turn on lights so I'm going to go through all my lights send them an event saying hey go turn on they'll go in their batch update and go oh I should be on or off I'm going to turn off off on whatever button you hit so now we've moved this thing that with a global thing on the vehicle so I send the event here and there everyone gets it to a more localized system that all gets usually utilizing that batch update and the whole big infrastructure of our controllers and items this other thing that we have with this item 2.0 infrastructure with their old system with their vehicle when I sat down in the seat I would get control of weapons items and all that stuff and each thing would kind of handle their own set of logic I'm in the fire button to shoot

35. 00:28:35

    and then you would it would do its thing and shoot we wanted to separate that into a much more coherent structure and so after talking with design we came up this this new concept where you have the control manager which is the ship and then you have the user and then the user connects to the control manager and he controls these things called literally controllers so you'd have a power controller a light controller a door controller basically these are the things that have control of sub-items so the controllers handled the input and then they sell things to the items it means you want to power controller so this power controller might have control of sub power plants it will talk to you I saying here's all the power plants that you have what do you want to do

36. 00:29:22

    with them so if I hit UI or maybe a button to throttle it's an event to the control that controller will go yes you could do that no you can't do that and it will then tell the items to do something so now we basically we have these sub items that are really kind of dummy that handles very specific logic what power plan just needs to provide X amount of power and then you have the energy controller that basically input from UI and input from the user and it translates what you want to do to those sub items so we have these very specific things that handle the I guess to be called the control hierarchy is ash said and last week's episode although it's a lot of work to implement this tech it is a game changers every sense of the word item 2.0 touches every facet of the game and will ultimately create a much more

37. 00:30:09

    immersive interactive experience thanks for watching Seacrest out so as you can see item 2.0 not only allows it to implement new features but also streamline others it's obviously a lot of work but will provide a much more immersive experience and you know much I like the motion you do that's it for this episode of around the birds just a reminder that we'll be updating spectrum tomorrow so it will be offline for about half an hour to 11:00 a.m. Pacific now make sure to swing by after that to check out all of the new features yeah they're pretty cool you see threads with different view styles and all the rest of stuff and also don't forget Mason see report goes live tomorrow along with another update to our production schedule thanks as always to all of our subscribers whose continued support makes shows like this possible click on the link in the description if you want to learn how to

38. 00:30:57

    become a subscriber yep thank you to all subscribers and of course star citizen it's a reality because of the amazing support we get from all backers so thanks to everyone who's making the game possible we hope you enjoyed watching and we will see you around thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest in

39. 00:31:45

    star citizen and squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon you