Josh van Zuylen

It was also one of our first locations where we had a landing zone that was in the middle of a huge city, where we had to develop the transit system of how to bring the players in and out of locations and travel through those very long distances. Those trains are very fast. But yeah, that was one of the challenges as well, because you have a big city that's located on a planet, you have the landing zone in the middle, and we had to add all these gates because maybe they come from a different direction. We actually timed it once: we had one gate to start with, and if you came from the wrong side, it would take you like 65 minutes or something to run around the city to get to the gate. And we were like, oh, we need more gates. This doesn't work.

I remember testing that. I just went to the editor, and I just walked from one side to the other side of the city just to see how long it took. It was something like that. That's pretty insane.

That's kind of when you start realizing the scale of everything, right? When you get on foot and start walking.

I remember talking to one of the artists a while back too about the whole scale thing, especially when it came to where the clusters of the city finish, and how we can have a player at the base of basically this massive city and get that scale feeling correct and make it feel tangible, and how they had gone over a whole bunch of iterations and designs to make it work. And it's pretty successful what we have now, but we learned a lot of lessons in that and have brought it through with the rest of our landing zones as well. But that was kind of the first time that we had run into that issue, because Levski is more of a localized location, but this is a huge city. So you have kilometers' worth of blending the city into the environment, right?

Besides, it's not like the people from Lorville want to keep everyone in or anything, but it's a city where you can't traditionally just slowly make suburbs and then a few houses are left and then farmland starts, etc. It's this very... Andreas, I think you quite like the Hurston policies there, but it's very walled in.

Like Andreas said, it was the first time we did a transit system outside of elevators. I remember conversations about this, and most people, to be honest, were like, do we really need to do an actual physicalized train that would run on tracks? Can we not have it go underground, or can we have it spawn and then go across and then go into a tunnel and then teleport to the next area? And to be fair, a lot of us were just like, come on, Chris, do we really have to do this? This is such a technical pain. And he was always adamant, like, no, I want it to be physicalized. And we did it in the end. And it was challenging. It was very hard to do. It did work out in the end. It does give that feel. And each landing zone has that interesting, whether it's a train or a flying shuttle, it is quite interesting to have, and it isn't fake and all that kind of thing. So that was one of the biggest technical challenges with Lorville, apart from the scale as a whole: trying to get the first working train.

I can remember Dan Trufin in those Tuesday meetings, just week after week showing the next version of the train, and Chris just being like, no, it needs to be a real train. It needs to be a physical train. It should hit people.

Just a small side note as well: I know there are some people who aren't necessarily super enthusiastic about traveling times, sitting on a train for one and a half minutes, like, I just want to sell my pistol, come on. But because they are physical, we do have to traverse those distances, and even though we try to make those trains as fast as possible, it's going to take time. That's just part of the scale of the universe, right?

And one thing that Lorville introduced, which is a pretty key part of the PU and everything, is the common elements. It was the first time we put in the hangars, the habs, the transit, security checkpoints. I'm trying to think if there was anything else. But the UK team was heavy at work on the common element part, whereas the German team was heavy at work on the actual Lorville side of things. So my involvement there was a bit of work on the hangars. Actually, I did the big gorilla head, as we call it, as you come into the hangar and it looks out. That was always a name of contention, but that's what it's called here. I also worked on the habs, the hab lobby at the top of the big crane-looking building, and the transit where the train actually comes in and out. And just on the subject of trains, I think honestly one of my most fun tasks here was that transit platform, because it was an opportunity to really look at reference of transit platforms around and make something that's very oppressive. I think my favorite part about it is, as you come in, you've got the gate and then you come in and you look up, it's nothing but pipes. And let me tell you, I spent like three to four days just dressing pipes on the ceiling of that entire platform. The rest came out much faster, but the pipes, I was connecting things from one side to the other going, oh yeah, this makes sense. And then you look up and it's just this network of pipes because you're below the plates. It was one of the most fun tasks I had here because it was the first time we were doing something really quite like that. So it was a lot of fun.

Favorite aspect is the utopian atmosphere.

For me, it's the plates. It really is that feeling of being under the plates most of the time. They're so oppressive. I think we really managed to put that through, right? And I think that's what makes Lorville so special. What I would change is, I think we've learned so much from building cities. I think there's a lot that we can go back to and do to the feel of the scale, either by improving materials, improving meshes. But even if we keep it within the same boundary of Lorville, I think there's a lot that we can do to the visuals to make it feel even bigger without changing much.

Yeah, I would double that. I think also the buildings especially. We learned a lot doing buildings. I would love to go back and do a pass on them and make them hold up from a lot closer, which would allow the player to get closer as well. So I think that would be a great thing. And I guess what I love most about Lorville for me is actually the CBD area. Because I was just doing low tech for a pretty long time, the grimy art style. Then we suddenly went to do this super shiny marble, this golden utopia. And that was super fun for me to work on.

It was refreshing for everyone, right?

It was a shock when you entered there from the rest of the city. You were like, damn.

I did panel materials for as long as I was here at that time. And then suddenly we had requests for marble and gold, and I was like, I don't even remember how to do these organic materials. What are we going to do? That was fun. It was a really good time.

I think that location in the CBD is probably my most favorite location. The brutalism, the sense of oppression that you get from just standing in that lobby is immense. And the only thing that I would change about it is a selfish point, and that is that I wish I did work on it, because it's fun.

I love the aspect when you get out of your hab and you see the dirty windows, and then you take the elevator down to the L19 Plaza, to the balcony, and watch all the spaceport and you see the dust and everything going off. I think that's really cool. What I would like to work on in the future is maybe expanding the outskirts, the suburbs of the city, more, adding more shanties in and populating it more with life.

Actually, Manuel, isn't your favorite part of Lorville, and my favorite part together, the restricted areas? He tells me every day, he goes, man, we should really make some more restricted areas.

I can't get enough. So we worked a whole lot of time on that last year and did some changes and reworks on that. So that was a fun experience, right?

To return to a previous question, I didn't really answer properly, right? My answer was a bit jokingly, but it's also a little bit serious. I do find the dystopian atmosphere of Lorville one of my favorite points there, because it lends itself to a lot of environmental storytelling. You can do a lot of interesting scenarios there: Hurston family versus people who are against them and all that kind of stuff, all the suffering of the small people versus the absolute decadence of the rich. So that's also something that I would like to return to work on in the future, because that is something that's really missing there.

Manuel and myself did the white box for it. He was quite fresh in the company then, actually. So I did some of the main areas and he helped with a lot of the extra stuff around. You can talk about it.

Yeah, so I personally worked on the Metro Center, actually, and some of the alleys leading away from that, and the alleys leading to Pacheco, connecting everything, and as well the plaza you come onto when you leave the habs.

Transit routes of those shuttles flying through there. First time we did a transit route that's not on a track, and we had to take a fairly solid object and make it bank and all this kind of crazy stuff.

That was a nightmare. It actually gives some freedom because you're not bound to the tracks, but it also creates more challenges.

How much do you bank? Like this in the curves? Like everyone just loses their lives. It took like three weeks to set up the transit.

For you guys, this is just something I was thinking about: how easy did you guys think it was to visualize Area 18 and how it would feel during white box? Because usually you get a feel for it, but I feel like Area 18, because of its nature of being a city planet with cities everywhere, it was really difficult to get a sense of how that space was going to feel in white box until we had some proper buildings and everything in there.

When I started with the white box, we did have the previous Area 18 to reference back to, of course, but there were certain things that we wanted to do to really sell the scale, right? For example, with the streets, we knew that we wanted to have buildings go up really high. And I know the first versions of Area 18 that we did had capped streets, which basically felt like they were going into a tunnel, right? So what we did in the white box, we tried to break that up. You have the buildings coming out on the side, but you still see a glimmer of light really, really far up somewhere, to give this illusion that you're really quite far down, right? And in general, just looking at various movies and stuff. It is one of my favorite settings, this cyberpunk-y feeling to it. So it is stuff that I also like playing and looking at in my free time. I kind of have that mindset of what to do. It takes a bit of creativity to see a white box, imagining this white thing here, that's going to be an amazing skyscraper. But it's just a box. Yes, but it could be a skyscraper.

I remember way back when we were trying to look at the initial version of Area 18 that we first put on a planet for one of our CitizenCon demos. We took the original Area 18 standalone level and basically just dropped it on a planet with the first iteration of the procedural planet tech, with all the hard surface elements on there. And internally, everyone's jaws were just on the floor. It was nuts. But in that same moment we also realized how much work was ahead of us as well, with how we were going to have to change that environment to make it not only work with the newfound physicality of the location but also performance-wise. And like Andreas is saying, this is half the reason we changed the layout as well, because a lot of those performance considerations had to be made. But also we learned a lot from the original layout to make it better as well. I look back on that fondly, because that was one of my first locations that I properly contributed to in the company. And from the art side of things, we did a lot of loose exploration into where we wanted the vibe to go for that version of Area 18, at least in the CitizenCon demo that we did way back then, that you can see is being brought through now, even though it's a completely different LZ now. But yeah, it was really fun for me.

You touched on a point there about dealing with the new tech and everything. What I did for Area 18, I specifically worked on the planet, along with Pascal. And I think I did some material work for Area 18. Taking the organic planet tech, I've spoken about this a lot in previous segments and things, but taking that organic planet tech and making that work for assets that are sometimes kilometers in size, sometimes hundreds of meters in height. And something that Boy said before as well: how do you take a flat city and put it on a curved planet, especially since our planets are a sixth scale or something like that, right? I don't know what the scale of our planets is, but there's so much work that you've got to do to figure that out.

I remember having so many conversations with you, with you pulling your hair out going, how the hell do I do this?

Yeah, it's like, hey Josh, meet me down at the pub after work, I've got to cry a little bit. But honestly, it was a lot of fun. I think me and Pascal had a lot of fun doing that. And there's so much that I'd go back and change about how we did the city. One thing specifically is just the mesh quality, really, for the planet city meshes. I think there's a lot that I can do to bring a lot of diversity to that now while still really keeping within the same performance. One really fun thing we did back then: basically, the way our procedural planet tech worked then is that you take these meshes and you spawn them procedurally on a splat map. So basically, a map that says on the red area, you're going to put in these meshes; on the green area, you're going to put in these meshes. And then it puts them in at different scales, rotations, et cetera. And one thing that I thought was really fun to do, because it felt like the planet was really still, and I really like adding movement to our locations, my favorite thing is to add movement to the locations. So, I hope I don't get too technical here, I'm going to try to make it easy: I got a texture that was panning, of these little glowing cars, right? And I got some strips of polygons that just went left, right, forward, and I spawned that across the entire planet, just to have a feel for it. And then you look back on it and suddenly there's all these little pinprick movements on the overall frame. And it just made it feel so much more alive. And I think now, with all the improvements in the tech and shaders and material work we've done, had we the chance to do that place all over again, it's one of the things that I could really, really improve, I think. Another thing, not that I want to take up the entire time here: because we went with a much more modern vibe with this ArcCorp than it was before, right? It was a bit more cyberpunk-y in feel before, whereas now the architecture is a little bit more contemporary. It feels a bit more like a downtown L.A. than it does a more 90s grungy city. But it was our first time doing large-scale panels, large-scale windows, large-scale this, large-scale that. And if you look at the quality of a building in ArcCorp and you look at the quality of a building in New Babbage and maybe Orison, it's leaps and bounds. The material work, the mesh work, it's leaps and bounds. We've really managed to take everything that we learned there every time and just improve on it, to a point where I'm like, man, had I had a chance, I could do so much more with ArcCorp.

I think I could jump in here because you touched on some things. My involvement was lead environment artist. So that's overseeing the landing zone from an art point of view, managing the team, giving them feedback, looking at schedules and things like that, boring stuff. I also did some actual artwork, looking at the composition of the cityscape as a whole. But in terms of what Luan was just saying, we had a lot of new stuff with ArcCorp. Again, Luan and Pascal really pushed the procedural planet tech to its limits at the time, because it's made for organic terrain, to spawn lots of trees on. It's not made for a planet to spawn lots of buildings on. There's a difference between a cluster of trees and a cluster of buildings and how they work, right? And also just in terms of the budgets: obviously we know an in-frame budget in terms of draw calls and poly counts, but in terms of how you distribute that between buildings, it was completely unknown. So you've got a landing zone itself with the hero buildings that you're walking around, and then you've got some buildings that you can fly around, and maybe they don't need to be such high detail, and then there's buildings lower to the ground and the small scattered ones by the procedural system. But in terms of trying to balance that all out, it was very much a new process. So it was a bit of trial and error, really, finding what we could push, what could work, knowing that it's not just a city, it's a planet city. It's a city that doesn't end. Whereas something like New Babbage is a city that does end eventually. It's a big city, but it eventually ends. And so you know, okay, let's do 1,000 buildings of 8,000 polys or something, and that's more quantifiable. Here it's like, well, I guess we just got to see how many buildings we can put on, how many polys we can push, and all that kind of thing. So it was very tricky trying to figure that out. But yeah, we did learn a lot from Lorville going to Area 18, such as don't have the spaceport in the city, which is what we did with Lorville. They're still quite close, but they're pushed away, and that helped with a lot of different things.

They're close in Star Citizen terms.

Yeah. Well, airports usually are not in a city, right? They're usually on the outskirts of a city, generally. So that's a good reason for that, right? You don't want planes flying around skyscrapers. But anyway, the other thing that Andreas touched on was the whole track and flying shuttle aspect. And I think it was actually a really good decision not to have trains everywhere. Not every landing zone is a train track. Some are flying, some are trains. And I think there was an expectation that every landing zone would just be trains at some point. But we decided collectively, no, let's mix it up a bit with ArcCorp and let's have a flying shuttle. And that allowed us to fly in between the buildings with the bus, which I actually really enjoyed. That's one of my favorite bits of Area 18, actually being able to go through the city and past the landings. It still gets me whenever I walk on the bridge and the bus is going past you. It's still such a great moment for me.

It is still one of my favorite landing zones, actually.

I mean, it's literally that, right? It's a cold location. So the biggest thing that you immediately notice compared to any of the other locations is it has a lot more of an environmental impact than any others. This was actually my first environment on the Star Citizen team, coming back from Squadron. So it was actually a really fun task to get back and play around with some of the planet tech and how that works. One of my main tasks was looking at how the city goes and connects to the planet and its biome being snow. So figuring out how snow is going to build up on buildings, how snow drifts gather in certain places. So pretty early on we did a little visual target where we took a small section of the grey box city that we were working with at that point, and we did a little bit of a dressing pass to figure out where everything would go, and then took the snowy planet and just started noodling on it, trying to figure out what we needed to do with shaders, what we needed to do with placed assets like snowdrifts. So we ended up going in with a small kit of very scalable assets, which were basically snow mounds, where we could put them up against assets and spread them around to create this nice blend between a lot of the buildings. You can see if we had a tower structure or something, we could have a small buildup of snow in front of it and then a countersink and then another mound on the opposite side, to hint at maybe a storm that had come through, and the wind, right? And then at the same time, because visibility can be quite low when you're dealing with snow, and especially snowstorms, and it's very ironic that an Australian is working on this particular thing, where there's next to no snow in Australia, we were looking at adding more lights to the structures for this. Area 18 has a lot of lights because it's a city planet, of course, but we wanted to add more lights down low where the players can walk. So in this same visual target, we looked at things where we would be shooting lights up the sides of buildings, adding them on smaller structures to bring the scale back, but also so you can navigate it through nighttime or even in a blizzard and see your way through the entire thing. So that was really interesting. And then in the same breath, we went and explored a lot more of bringing the city out into the surrounding environment. We have the main landing area of the first-person spaces where you go do your shopping and whatnot, but the city as a whole is quite spread out. I'm not sure how it compares to Lorville, Nick, you could probably tell more about that, but I really wanted to focus more on the technology and research side of things. So I had actually quite a lot of fun bringing out a lot of those outposts that we see around the surrounding valley, figuring out what they could be and dressing them up really nicely and integrating them into the surrounding mountainscape and dressing them with all the snow piles and stuff. So that was really fun and probably is one of the biggest things that sets it apart from all of our other landing zones, I would say.

From a design point of view as well, it is inside a dome, which does create a few, not issues, but it makes navigation, for example, and orientation inside a space like that a thing you have to be quite aware of, right? We also tried to improve a lot on the accessibility into the location, to add more side entrances, and just get this feeling that you can get in and out in a lot of different places and not just via the spaceport, for example. So it was a lot about navigation and orientation of the player.

I think the navigation has been the most successful in this landing zone in terms of getting you around. And the signage is quite clear. In Lorville, it's a little bit...

It helps that it's a very clean location as well.

Yeah, it's very clean. I've definitely seen people online say it's the easiest to navigate around in terms of flying and walking. Knowing where to go, it's very clean and clear and straightforward and well signposted and that kind of thing, which is pretty successful.

I have one. And it's pretty surprising coming from an artist. You probably think it's going to be art-related, but I think it's actually, for me, the sound design. I think that sound makes up a big chunk of the experience, right? And we look at the art a lot, so we get used to the art. And it's super refreshing when the sound designer submits their stuff. You go in the editor and it's like a whole new place when the sound kicks in. It's pretty awesome always to hear.

It's often one of the last things to come into the landing zone as well. When we've done all the art, well, most of the art anyway, we don't hear much of the sound, they've got to compose the music, and it often comes in quite near the end of production of the landing zone. So it is really nice to boot the game up and go, ah, there's either music or actual sound around, and it sounds like it's part of the location. It's really nice. I think Area 18 is quite successful in that.

Area 18 is my favorite for that. And I think for that exact reason too, the mood and vibe that you get in Area 18. There's a lot of other games out there that do it quite well, but Area 18, I don't know, for me it has that feeling of, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

I can second that actually. It's the whole mood and all the neon signs and the city vibe you have around. I think Area 18 also has a lot of potential for further expansions, with all the rooftops we have and all the things we can potentially do more with the city. And I think it's probably the location I would like to do more stuff on.

I agree, the ambience of Area 18 is by far one of my favorite aspects. It's just this sensory overload when you walk around, all the music. You walk around in the city, and after a while you get used to it, all the ads playing in your face and everything, and then you do your stuff and then you leave the city and go like...

Quite successful, I would say. The word diegetic is when the soundscape is coming from the environment. For me, I think New Babbage is my favorite landing zone, partly because it feels like the most realistic landing zone. It feels very grounded as a city. It feels like a realistic city. I know it's all sci-fi and everything, but the way it's structured, the transit route, talking about the navigation again, going around the domes, as well as flying around the actual city, it feels the most grounded in reality, which I've really enjoyed. And I just love snow as well. So I like seeing all the snowy dusting over the whole city, I think it's really nice.

I'm going to cheap out and agree with Boy. I used to have a career in audio before I did this. I think audio is one of the things that's the most important to me in almost any piece of anything. It drives the emotion, it drives the feeling. There's a particular moment that I find quite memorable during my time here, and that was my second CitizenCon that I was actually on location, which is when we showed off New Babbage. And there was something so incredibly special about the Carrack coming in, and the music just hit all of the right notes, and you'd see the landscape of New Babbage and you hear the wind and you hear the thrusters of the Carrack firing and the music is just swelling up. And that in an auditorium probably amplified the feel of it, sure. But to me, the music and the audio is such an integral part of the experience. And it's sad that we see it so late. It's totally understandable why it's so late, but we often just put on our own music that inspires the feel of the location. And sometimes we send that to the audio team to send to Pedro for some inspiration. So many playlists. But yeah, that's it for me.

The amount of times I've listened to the Blade Runner soundtrack while working on this game, it's insane, many, many, many times.