TL;DROpening the star map from the pilot seat will now show the star map, elsewhere it opens the interior map when available, the star map starts zoomed further out, and a keybind jumps from star map to interior map.
Yeah, I've actually been working on this this week. So now you will be able to sit in the ship and you'll open the star map and it will open to the star map, and if you are anywhere else it will open to the interior map if you have an interior map. We've also started the star map out further now, so it will zoom back out so you get a view of the system that you're in a little bit more, rather than being face up with a planet's texture. Another thing I've added is a keybind so that if you're in the star map you can just press that and go straight into the interior map. We don't have the other way yet, but we have that way. So hopefully it's gonna work a lot more smoothly now and you can be in the context you actually want to be in.
TL;DRFilters for amenities and points of interest are wanted and designed, such as searching for where to buy a ship, but they are not the top priority right now and are future work.
So yeah, this is obviously something that we do want. So it's in the designs, it's in the documents, but it's not maybe the top priority right now. We need to get this stuff just working as good as possible and then we'll just have to prioritize after that.
So it's essentially what you see as the amenities. So for anyone who's been playing the PTU, you've seen that now when you use the star map, you can click a location and then you get a list of amenities there. So you can see, oh, I can buy ships here. So essentially we would reverse that and you could say, I want to buy a ship. Where can I do that? Rather than having to go through every single place and then see, oh, I can buy a ship there. So it's going to make it way nicer.
I mean, the other thing for the interior maps, it's pretty much just showing room labels and stuff, but in the future, we're going to have a lot more amenities that are pointed out on it, like icons depicting here's where you buy weapons, here's where you retrieve your ship, or whatever it is that's going to be useful, then we'll have filters based on those categories. But that's in the future. Do some more kind of back-end work for that.
Yeah, so there's a lot of stuff that we've added on as part of this process of bringing it over from Squadron, where it was this thing that was suited for Squadron specifically, and then it goes into Star Citizen and it immediately needs so much more. So what started out as just move it into Star Citizen has become quite a task, but I think...
I guess in that respect, it's also accelerated the robustness. Like for the maps, for example, it's the fact that we need to get it in PU and working all properly with all the different systems. It's also going to go back into Squadron as well. It's not just Squadron going into PU. All the stuff that we've done is very general, and so it'll also benefit Squadron as well.
TL;DRPersistent map pins are definitely the plan, but the back-end work is very hard, especially with server meshing coming, so they were not done yet, though the team is still working on it.
That's definitely the plan, yeah. But there's a lot of back-end work that we need to look into, and especially with server meshing coming in. So a thing that happened for the 3.23 work that we've been doing is that we started talking about, okay, we want to get these pins in as part of the star map now, and you should be able to place them and share them with people and all of that jazz. Then we looked into it and, well, it was quite hard to do and we're getting server meshing. So everything's going to change and it just wouldn't work with the future.
The technical challenge is immense. The pin itself, drawing a pin on the map, fine. Persisting it in this sort of super complicated structure that we have is tricky, tricky to say the least.
Yeah, for sure. That's part of the vision again. So you should be able to share that. So we can see in 3.23, you can place the markers on the area map, and in the future, you should be able to place them on the star map and those should be the same kind of thing. You have a list of all your markers that you've placed and you should be able to share them with your party and so on. But as I just said, we will need to look into the tech of it and see how that actually works out.
Yeah. And hopefully it doesn't break gameplay if we allow players to just actually quantum travel there. That's something we'll also have to look into, but that would be kind of neat. Place a marker. Spring a trap.
TL;DRServer meshing complications mainly arise around seeing other players and locations, while the map is being made independent of streamed-in entities, which could let players view maps of explored far-away places.
The geometry for planets and stuff is streamable, but when you start talking about being able to see other players, other locations and stuff, and whether they're exactly on your server and all this kind of stuff, that's the stuff that gets complicated.
But actually the interesting thing to mention is when we do account for, in our map system, things not always being streamed in, maybe the spaceport on the other side of the city isn't streamed in so you can't really see it or whatnot. When we make that work across the board, the map should work regardless of whether things are being streamed in or not. It should be totally independent of the entities that are existing. It opens us up to look at maps of far away places anywhere that we've cataloged them. So if you're on another planet, you might be able to see the map of what you've explored and not even be there. So that's an interesting byproduct of that, two benefits in one.
TL;DRThe team wants UI that looks cool but stays usable, admits the mobiGlas went over the top, and says readability depends on ongoing tuning, graphical fixes, sorting issues and in-world post-process effects.
Yeah. So we want it to look cool, right? But we want to be able to use it at the same time. So there's a balance to be had. We're not going to release something that looks like a vanilla web page, that's just black text on white background for all the UI. For sure. See, there's the extreme where you've got all this chromatic aberration and bloom and fog and effects and stuff going on, and it's not particularly readable and it's difficult on the eye. So we've got to find a balance where it looks cool and it's diegetic and it's in the world and it looks futuristic, but ultimately very usable. You've got to be able to use it, and it's got to not be bad on the eyes.
No, and I think with the mobiGlas in particular, because I think that was maybe the worst offender in this case. It's supposed to be this holographic thing, so it got a bit over the top and we got overexcited. It can look even cooler. But no, we very much appreciate the feedback, and I think everyone's very happy with the results that we've got now and it's coming out really well.
It'll be a continuous process. And there's also some graphical fixes that we've fixed recently as well. I think on some of the low-res render-to-texture stuff, there's actually some color correction weirdness going on that graphics seem to have fixed. So that's probably going to increase a little bit the brightness of some of the elements, because now the colors are consistent between low-res and full-res render-to-texture. And there's also some sorting issues that we need to work out in the system with regard to 3D planes and 3D objects. There's sorting issues that we've sort of fixed, but there's a proper solution we're going to do post-3.23.
So it sounds like some of it is technical, some of it is bugs, things not working the way that they're intended, and then some of it is pushing to find this happy medium.
Because if there's a 3D plane in the world that's behind another, the thing that's trying to render a drop shadow or whatever, it's the thing that's over it. And when it's sorted incorrectly, you're going to null out any of the benefits of the backdrop or the drop shadow or whatever we put in.
And some of the diegetic UIs are in the world, so they receive the same world post-process effects, like chromatic aberration and the bloom and all these kind of things. So it's trying to combat them sometimes to make things perfectly readable, but because we're doing a diegetic game, because these things are in the world, you can't just sort of say, hey, don't apply these effects, because it would look really, really strange. It would look really out of place, like a game just putting stuff over the top of the screen after you've rendered the game world. We're not really after that kind of look. It's meant to look like it's part of the scene. So these kiosks or even the mobiGlas are part of the game world.
TL;DRThey say readability comes first in internal wireframes, with style added in later art passes, and they want to keep strong visual identities while dialing back when it hurts usability, with polish coming near the end.
I think we do start with readability, but it's internally, right? That's not what the players get to see first, because we make our wireframe designs and we make it like, okay, this is what this mobiGlas app is doing and this is how we want to interact with it. That's all fine. So let's move on to the art pass. And then it's more, where can we get the coolness factor into this? And I think it's good that we're not ashamed of that, and also that we can dial it back when we've done something wrong, when we've gone overboard. But I think we do have a strong visual identity with all of these different sci-fi styles and different brand styles and so on. We are doing a good job of really pushing for that, for keeping that consistent and making it feel like a coherent world where all of these things exist. And yeah, sometimes it makes for a lesser user experience, and that's obviously not great and we want to improve that, and that's why we're super happy to get this feedback from players. But we never want to end up in a place where we just remove all the different styles and everything and just go, okay, here's the most legible font in the world. Let's just put that right there, in the best size, in the best place. It's always a balance.
And I think a lot of the times it actually can start out having a high level of contrast. You've done an initial visual polish pass on it. And then we'll get very focused on actually doing all the functionality, like the holo volume changes to a window, and then we're doing all the functionality based on that. And we just haven't had a visual polish pass until the end, because we're focused on the back end, the code and the functionality, all the really base foundational stuff. And then pretty much just near the end, we're starting to finally do much more of the visual polish pass again.
TL;DRThe speakers say shipping unfinished-feeling work is exhilarating, they always wish for one more week of polish, but endless refinement would mean nothing ever releases.
No, for me, I guess it's quite exhilarating in a way, but I always wish there was just one more week. Just let me play around a little bit more with the materials. Let me put some animation in and make it a little more polished, or more feedback. Like right now, I need to put in the routing feedback. So when you press R, right now it silently fails and you're like, why isn't it doing anything? So if you have that, it's just a small bit that makes it feel a bit more polished.
There's another thing. You can always keep improving, and that's just the process of design, right? So if we kept adding this one more week all the time, we would just be driven insane, and nothing would ever release.
TL;DRReadability is harder than expected because diegetic UI is affected by exposure and lighting; vehicle HUDs and MFDs still need work, and colorblind and font-size settings are planned, helped by data-driven UI.
Well, readability, yeah. It's not as straightforward to solve as we thought it would be. We have a constant battle with this, partly to do with exposure compensation, i.e. when something's super bright, your eye adapts to that brightness and changes the brightness levels of the scene. Obviously there's the problems of drawing some coloured text onto a black background, i.e. a starry night, and then all of a sudden you're on a snowy backdrop. How do you compensate for that? We've still got a few more irons in the fire, especially on vehicle HUDs, about what we're going to do to solve this, and not just drop shadow. I think what we've got on the lens now on the AR stuff is really going in the right direction. It still needs tweaking, but we're pretty happy with that. But we've still got issues with the head-up displays that are on vehicles, and the exposure compensation on MFDs we still need to look into. But yeah, it's weirdly tricky. The more diegetic you are, the more you sort of buy into the idea that these things are in-world and you're not cheating and you're not just drawing over the top of the screen with some flat UI. I used to work on driving games years and years ago, and you draw the world and you draw the car and then you draw a HUD flat over the top, and that would be crystal clear and you could see your lap time and stuff, whereas this is entirely different. As soon as you put stuff in the world, it can be at angles and the sun can shine on it or a big shadow goes across it. Even your mobile phone has a lot of exposure compensation. Your eyes have exposure compensation, but phones have exposure compensation, so if you bring it out in direct sunlight, it's super bright, and if you get it out under the covers in bed, it's all dark and stuff. I don't know why you'd be getting out your phone under covers in bed, but maybe that's just me.
Accessibility is a completely offshoot of this where, yeah, I think it's one in 12 males have some form of colorblindness, and some of the colors we've chosen don't really work with people that suffer certain types of colorblindness problems.
No, and again, we have all of the different manufacturers and so on, different styles for every ship. So it's like, oh yeah, this ship works great. And then another one, you didn't at all understand that you were dying or whatever.
Well, I blame the manufacturer. But in all seriousness, yes, we're going to put the settings in that will combat that problem, but also accessibility options for changing the font sizes. This obviously has an impact on the sort of graphic design look that we initially have, but essentially it will become usable for people that have issues reading the font sizes or the particular colours that maybe that manufacturer uses. So yes, yes, yes, and yes again for options to help people with colorblindness, or for font size accessibility options as well.
In addition to that, as we start really converting all of the legacy UI into Building Blocks or new tech, it's all fully data-driven now, so that makes it much easier to just transform values where we need to, like inject a scaler if you want to have bigger fonts or lower-sized fonts, and also colors. It's all data-driven, so it makes that much easier. It's not static anymore.
TL;DRYes, because UI is in-world it receives environmental and post-process effects such as desaturation or dehydration distortion, which makes it a hard challenge, but the team is adamant this is their approach.
Yes. I can't remember the effect, but there's a desaturation effect, right, where everything sort of goes black and white and everything goes a bit hazy. The UI goes black and white with it, because it's in-world, so at that point it loses its colour. Or there's things where you get this extreme post-process effect. I think it's like when you're too thirsty, whatever the word is for too thirsty. Dehydrated, thank you. Yes, we get this really chromatic aberration and it affects the UI because it's in the world, like you're trying to read your phone and you really need a drink.
And as you've seen for the shopping, now we moved the UI to be in-world as well, and that just made for such a big challenge to implement. It is a tough thing to do. I think that's the bottom line. But we are adamant about this: this is our way. This is how we do the things. And it should feel real. It should feel tangible.
TL;DRSome mobiGlas apps are not updated yet; Comms may be replaced by an org-focused app and Knickknacks by a new app at some future point, with no further detail given.
So for the mobiGlas, if you've seen the new one anyway, there's some apps that we obviously didn't update. So for the future, we will have that. The Comms app will be replaced by something helping you do your org stuff instead, maybe. So that will be playing into a lot of social things. And Knickknacks will also get, well, it will essentially be replaced by a new app coming sometime in the future, but it's going to be a better user experience to keep track of all of your things. Oh, Jared is going to beat me up now.
Orgs. You're going to have a dedicated app to do all your org communications. And well, there's a lot of things that we have grand plans for. But yeah, I don't want to say more than that at this point.
Yeah, so we are currently looking into a design for how we want to solve this. So there's a lot of different issues at once. And I think the short answer is just, yes, there's a plan. We still have things to figure out. So it's in the future, but we are for sure getting it. And you can already see that we have improved the quantum stuff for 3.23. Way less quantum markers. You don't get this massive circle of just a hundred markers everywhere you look. So that's a start. So we're doing things, but it will get better.
TL;DRQuantum marker clutter was hard to fix because filtering by distance doesn't work and overlapping markers need a systemic solution, and the reworked marker system, no longer in Flash, now lets them tackle it.
I think I might have caused it. I might have dropped myself in. Yeah, we talked about how we show all the points of interest. It turns out there's a lot of interesting points in the universe. It was about filtering, right? So filtering what you want was really tricky. So it just didn't happen for a long time, because you can't filter by distance, because you obviously want to go to places far away. So yeah, it was an extremely tricky problem to solve, and it's taken this long to actually get to a usable solution. When we talk about the markers, we've had long discussions about, well, let's merge markers together when they start overlapping. So do you have enough information? One of your friends with a planet, do you get the information about that kind of stuff? You don't want the information where you just get a blob of overlapping text, that's no good, right? Do you make them avoid each other, or do you make them like, hey, your friend's here and also there's a planet here? How do you describe that as a bit of UI? Deeply tricky problems to solve in a sort of systemic way. Everything needs to be systemic. We can't just say, oh, right, here's just the ruleset, because the ruleset is endlessly complicated, because we have an endlessly complicated game.
The systemic solutions are what take so long. It would be easy enough to go in there and stick a proverbial patch on something and just stop it temporarily. But everybody knows the most permanent thing in any video game is a temporary solution, and it would end up just blocking and breaking a bunch of things down the line. We always look for these broader systemic solutions that can keep solving these problems as we add new things.
And when we don't, we always get tripped up. If we sort of cheat, say, oh, well, let's just come up with some bodgy rule, right? We always get tripped up by it, because something else comes along the way. And again, when I've worked on more traditional video games, let's say driving games, if you're going to draw the world, you only have to draw enough of the world away from the track. Whereas in Star Citizen, you can go anywhere, and all these things interact with each other in a systemic way. You have to find a solution that works correctly all the time. We've really made a challenge for ourselves to do that. Love it, though.
I think if you ask the same question about other things, why it's been there and taking so long, and it's been there for years, it's because it's an old system. We don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole. It's a waste of time. That's because we have this new system that we're working on, and all the focus ideally should be directed towards that. We're in the middle of development.
And for this question specifically, the marker system has now been reworked. We have a new marker system, so it's no longer in Flash. We can actually start looking into this. We now know exactly how things are done, and we have our best men at it.
Scrollable chat, for sure. That's in 3.23, as far as I'm aware. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but yeah. And search bars in general, for most new designs, we're looking at adding search functionality. Emily, you did some stuff for the star map.
Yeah, the new chat is very nice to use. I think people are going to be very happy with that, but it will also be improved down the line. The content of the chat notwithstanding.
Yeah, so we do have a new design for this stuff, and it's been simmering in the background, but it's not been the top priority thing when we're looking at bringing all these new cool features. Obviously we now do have the compass strip on the HUD and everything. There's still tuning to do, and yes, all of those things are the goal. That's the end goal. Decisions have been made on how this should be implemented, but they have not been [implemented yet].
It's in your head. It is in your head, but we do have a new restyled version of it. So my suspicion is that since we do have the style mock-up, hopefully we'll get that style in-game. It should fit with the other UI.
But you do make a good point. We just got done talking about all of these diegetic in-universe elements, but the personal interaction system is not. That is actually a sci-fi visualization of a choice matrix in your head. I suppose it should look different.
TL;DRThere is no plan to match the external view, which has no UI, but the ship HUD is being worked on to be cleaner with more options to turn elements off.
So this is someone being a bit funny, I think. The external starship view has no UI at all. That's it. But I don't think there's a plan to do that. We won't go that far. But we are working on the HUD experience for ships, for sure. That's a big one. And it's going to be cleaner. And we're going to add more options for people to turn off things that they don't want to bother them when they're flying around. Also, just looking at the new flight mode that we're getting in 3.23, it's a very clean experience. It's very nice to just fly around in flight mode and enjoy that. So that's not quantum, because then you get the markers still, less markers than before, but then you can go into flight and just do the thing.
So I was thinking the other way around, which is, can you see the UI from outside the ships? As in, you can see through the cockpit, and if someone's flying a ship and you're EVAing behind them, you can see their UI. Because that's like being on the bridge of a ship, right? You can walk around and see what people are doing on their various consoles and stuff. So you could EVA, take a sneak peek, check out what you're doing.
TL;DRRouting between zones now works via a temporary fix when zones are streamed in, with a longer-term transit refactor and star map routing refactor planned, and routing from planet surfaces might be considered in future.
So this is actually one of the things that I fixed recently. You couldn't route between zones. I had it working initially, but it turned out that it didn't work in a server environment because, again, things aren't streamed in, and those entities that I need, those transit entities, don't necessarily exist. We do have a temporary solution for that. So it should work so long as the zones that you need to route between are streamed in. But there's a longer-term plan to make that work totally regardless and much more reliably. I think they're doing a transit refactor. So there's some dependencies as well on some systems. So the routing within the last couple of months has gotten a lot more robust. So it's a lot more reliable, but there's still quite a ways to go. And I'm kind of at the point where I'm starting to depend on some other systems, and I've got to wait until they're further along, and then that's going to benefit the map. Because it uses AI, and if that doesn't find a path, then it's got to use transit. So those are two different systems that are being developed, at least for the interior map. I don't know if you can comment on the star map routing.
Yeah, the star map routing, I know we want to refactor that as well. There are some issues at the moment, obviously, because you set a route and then you go there and it's moved since then, so it blocks things, and that gets really frustrating. So we obviously need to look into ways to handle that in the future, so that whenever you go anywhere your route always exists and you can always do it, you don't have to reset it and all of this. So there's a lot of work still to be done on that.
But when it comes specifically to this, it's also a bit of design, right? A decision was made that you can route from your ship because it's the hardware in the ship doing the routing. But from seeing feedback, discussions have been started. We'll see what happens in the future with this one. It might be something that we want to implement, where people can do it from the surfaces of planets and so on.
I think the main reason it's in the ship at the moment is because the system is tied to checking whether you have enough fuel, right? And if you don't have that ship available, it doesn't know whether you have that fuel. So we need to account for that and consider that if we're going to allow you to do that from just standing anywhere.
And for the folks in the chat that are picking up on transit refactor, it's not anything super sexy or amazing. Just consider that with server meshing you have to be able to divide all these areas into different servers, and that includes sometimes landing zones if you guys all decide to go to one, and the trains need to work across servers. It's just some underlying tech stuff.