Mike Snowdon

Let's do a Tuesday. What's a Tuesday like? Tuesday, well, I get in very, very early in the morning, check all my messages. There's usually a few, although to be honest, I'll probably check them the night before. Just check through the emails, check through the team's messages, see what kind of things need dealing with instantly. Do a little bit of editor work on the side, because as the director, I sort of don't really do as much of that. But play around with the editor, test things out, test the builds, make sure that they're working for when everyone else gets in. By that point, people have started to come in themselves, and then inevitably people in the team will be coming with questions and they'll be needing things reviewed. And before you know it, you're in the meetings that are the established meetings of the day. And eventually it's the end of the day. Typical day.

Basically, with particles there's a high transparency cost to them, because there's opacity or there's lack of opacity, and that incurs a cost. That's the transparency cost, but there's also the overdraw aspect of it, and Leo will explain it in a more concise way, but for me it's basically: we can quickly blow the budget, we can really hit the frames per second with our transparency costs if we get too carried away with adding particle after particle. So it's how they all stack up over each other. And the overdraw preview basically just shows a heat map. It's a toggle and it just draws the screen as a heat map. And it's got a guide showing you basically if it gets to this color, it's too high, so the overdraw cost is too high. You're wasting particles that can't be seen because there's something else in front of it. It's great. You just toggle it on and off. You can see, 'Oh, wow, great. I can't really see many effects on the screen right now. There's maybe some subtle dust scrolling,' but you stick it into the overdraw preview mode and it's fully white, and that's just too expensive and we need to dial that back.

So it's a great way to see things hidden behind other things that don't need to be there because you can't see it from that perspective.

Exactly. And like Leo says, the great skill that Leo and his guys have got is that they make our lives easier. They do as many things as they can to make our job easier, to help us stay within the limits of, again, the budget.

We try to. But for the overdraw visualizer, shout out to Alejandro. He's one of the graphics programmers; he did a side project and he basically gave it to us. We've taken it over and we'll maintain it. This is a nice collaboration again with the graphics guys.

Well, there's a massive crossover with graphics and VFX programming anyway. Don't want to sound too cheesy, but it's almost like the same family, isn't it? And you're a niche part of that department. So shout out to them.

From my point of view, there's a lot of similarities, but they do have very different challenges. Squadron 42, obviously I can't give away spoilers, but everyone knows it has VFX. It's got lots of them, lots of destruction, but more importantly, as a game, it's more traditional in that there's a series of levels that you linearly progress through. And with that, there's a lot more control. So the effects can be controlled much more. And when I say control, I mean we're much clearer on camera positions and things like that. Cinematic sequences, we know that the camera may or may not be fixed at certain points. And therefore, again going back to the overdraw thing, we can look at it specifically at a frame, a point in the location, and we understand that that's what we're working with, and we can start to dial in the effects to suit those specific viewpoints. Whereas having some kind of similar sequence in Star Citizen, which is much more modular and much more free and not at all linear, you've just got to be able to factor lots more things in. And I guess that's why the tools that you provide to help us have as much information as possible are super useful for it. Again, talking about budgets in Star Citizen, we don't really know how many ships are going to be in any one place. It could be hundreds, could be dozens. All of them, right? And inside a gas cloud, which is full of all kinds of other things. The scalability of Star Citizen is a vastly different challenge to the Squadron 42 cinematic experience.

I'll start with our producers. Without our producers, we couldn't get anything done. So Mark White, Colin Whiteley, this is for you guys. Thank you very much for producing us. And then we've got our senior VFX concept artist. And by the way, I know everyone. It's just hard to remember them all on live TV. So we've got Rob Lujan, who's our senior VFX concept artist. So Rob, you're awesome, so keep being awesome.

What's he working on though?

Oh, sorry. So Rob, at the moment, he's working on... am I allowed to say what he's working on?

Well, say it and then I'll tell you.

Okay, he's currently working on some quantum travel improvements. So he's working on concepts for different types of quantum travel.

No, you can't share that yet.

Okay, so that's that. And Rob's also doing loads of weapon stuff as well, so he's doing great work. Then we've got the senior VFX artists. I'm just going to go with first names. We've got Rory, we've got Karthik, we've got Ali, we've got Guillaume. These are all our senior group. Rory, Karthik and Guillaume are all working on Squadron 42. You're doing a fantastic job on that. You know you are. Ali's working on Star Citizen, because we've basically got half the artists on Star Citizen, half the artists on Squadron. I can't really go into much about what they're doing because it's all spoilers, but they're doing lots of locations, lots of destruction sequences, et cetera. And then we've got VFX Artist 3s, Ryad and Diego. Ryad's working on Star Citizen, doing some Lorville skyline improvements at the moment. And we've got Diego, who is Mr. Houdini, so Diego's doing loads of amazing stuff with destruction for Squadron 42. Again, can't go into too much detail. Then at VFX Artist 2, we've got Joyce. Joyce is actually on maternity leave. Joyce works on Star Citizen and does everything: ships, locations, feature work, weapons, all sorts of stuff. And then at VFX Artist 1 level, we've got Will Wallace, who's just come back from a career break travelling the world, and Will is on Star Citizen, doing great work at the moment with the MISC Hull C. And then we've got Enrico and Nicolás, and they're both on Squadron 42. So I can't really go into too much detail about what they're doing, but there's lots of cool location stuff. And then we've got Ricardo, who has just joined us this week and is working on Star Citizen. So he's just onboarding. We do an onboarding process that lasts a couple of weeks. It culminates with doing a weapon effect. So welcome to the team, Ricardo. It's great to have you. And we've actually got four interns. All the way from Sweden, we've got David, Kevin, Axel and Nazir. Two of them, Kevin and Axel, are working on Squadron 42, and David and Nazir are working on Star Citizen. Nazir's doing GPU conversions, David's working on the MISC Fury. And then we've got Jake, who is embedded QA. Jake just keeps us all right. Anything that's not working, he highlights it. He helps us debug problems. So Jake, you're doing great. And then I'm going to hand over to you for the programmers, Leo.

So we have Kiran and Francesco, VFX programmers, and Alexander Meyer, also one of the interns from Sweden. Kiran has been working on the quantum travel effects. Then Francesco has been working on fire hazard visuals. And then Alexander has been working on particle tools, so he's more of a tools programmer. External Ref, it's called, the project, but it's something to organize our particle libraries a little bit better. But I appreciate you guys as well.

Yes, absolutely. Thank you for saying they've aged gracefully. They are quite old. I would agree that they are definitely a prime candidate for an improvement, and especially because we have a lot of better options now with the toolset that we've got. We've massively expanded our GPU particle system since we did the EMP effect, and lots of effects actually as well. So yeah, absolutely, it is on the list to be updated.

What's it going to look like?

Well, we'd have to go through the pipeline, wouldn't we, Jared? So we'd have to go through the VFX concepting process, work out what we can and can't do, work out if there's any kind of things that the designers need from it that the current version doesn't offer. And that's how we kind of define the look, really, just taking all that into consideration and concepting.

So it's a back-to-one kind of thing with it. It's not just taking what's there and remastering it, right?

No, no. Starting again, really. To be honest, we didn't even have VFX concept back then when we did the EMP effects. So we would definitely go through that pipeline now.