Tobias Johansson

We want to go and update several of our landing zones when we get new systems, like has been mentioned here several times. Removal of the no-fly zone and stuff like that is a bit more tricky. We're always going to have the no-fly zone for all locations. New Babbage also has it. It's just not as intrusive, as in your face, as it is in Area 18, for example. That's a big example, where the whole planet is pretty much covered by it. So the simplest answer is yes, we will go back to locations, we will update them. We also obviously see and hear feedback from players when we have released a location. It's really good to get the feedback in, and then when we want to expand this or we get time to expand it, it's like, what should we focus on? And then maybe we heard that this is the stuff that players find most interesting in this location. Then we'll make sure to focus on that first. So it's a yes and no question. We will go back, but we don't plan on making a complete rework of an old location as it looks.

Just to add to that, there are a lot of updates going into existing locations that are sometimes not that obvious to players. Remember when elevators were just traveling between two endpoints, and you had to go to a specific elevator to reach a certain hangar? Now, with transit system 2.0, we can change that around. There are performance optimizations. A lot went into 3.9, actually. We split interiors and exteriors for performance reasons. A colleague of ours is working on the restricted area with the feature team that's developing that. So that is being improved, and previously released locations are benefiting from that as well. It's just when it comes to tearing the entire layout apart or reworking large libraries of assets, that's substantially more work. And again, not to dismiss what Toby said, we are listening to player feedback and we definitely let that influence which locations we improve. But there are also certain things, the layout, it's just the nature of the location. Lorville is different from New Babbage. It is more of that big, chunky, industrial, low-tech mega city in the middle of the desert, Judge Dredd style. And New Babbage is a little more intricate, with the domes that are connected, more like little islands. And there are just some things that we won't change.

The lore obviously comes into it a bit as well. Lorville is a harsh location compared to other areas we have.

Art direction too, of course.

I think each one is going to give a little bit of input on that, because every level designer might work a bit differently in how they start. For example, some people like to do paper, some people just go into the editor, and some people maybe like to write down a little basic story based on what they get from lore, to identify it. I'm not the person who generally draws a layout. I do more of a flowchart of how I want the location to flow, and then I go into the editor and work in the 3D environment. That's what I do at least. That's how I start. And with the document, of course, that describes every detail of the location down to the tiniest screw.

Yeah, I think one thing that we all do, please disagree with me, Fred, if you don't, but we always start with the document, right? Which also has the requirements we get from the directors: what is this location, what's the main purpose of that location, et cetera. And then it's what Andreas said, we work a little bit differently. I also go to a flowchart as the second step, but I usually start with paper after that, and I don't go into the editor until I have a few paper-based designs that I'm feeling fairly good about. Then I start implementing them. For myself, that is.

No, I agree. Starting off with a document is super important, just to get an overview of what the contents of the landing zone are. What are the requirements from the different departments? Like, hey, we definitely need spots for these two mission givers, or these are certain shops that we absolutely need here. What's generally the art style and all that. So that's basically the foundation. Then a 2D layout, whether it's on paper or whether you use Microsoft Visio or something like that to create a flowchart or a very rough layout of where what is located. That's what I would do. You can go into more detail drawing top-down layouts in 2D, but with the tools that we have to quickly sketch in 3D, basically in our editor, what we call designer solids, we can quickly draw these types of environments in 3D, get a feel for them, jump into game, walk through them and see if they work.

This comes down a little bit to what we have talked about, how we add more content to our planets, and that obviously will help with this in general as well, because in the future we could have, for example, caves where you can drive in but you can't fly. And that obviously helps, where you would be like, oh, I need to buy this ground vehicle because then I can visit this place without danger, because it could be somewhere you can access with a vehicle but can't access without one, because you would freeze or, depending on the location, it would hurt you. That comes back again to what Andreas mentioned just now, where we're trying to figure out how to fill all of this, and that's why we don't have as much variation at the moment. We have a few different caves that we place, and in the future we want to add other sorts of caves, like ice caves and all that stuff. But until we do that, we obviously first need to figure out how to actually fill a universe. It's quite difficult. It's a big challenge to fill a universe as a level designer.

Also, for example, and maybe I'm speaking a little bit on behalf of other departments, when you have things like weather effects and planetary effects, you can have electric storms on a planet that basically ground every flying thing for the next 500 kilometers, but you still want to go in there, right? Then you have to get in a vehicle and you have to drive there. That's not necessarily level design, but this is the interplay of different departments and different elements of the development that can help create a unified experience, where we could provide the location the player has to go to, but the only way to get there is through the interplay of atmospheric systems and where the front's moving in, for example. So there's stuff like that. And like Toby said, of course, caves. You want to go into a cave and you can't fly in there. Walking might be too dangerous because it's full of dangerous gas or heat or whatever. So you get in your rover and you can drive in for X amount of distance, carrying all your equipment with you, for example.

Yeah, or a heavily fortified base on the planet's surface that has tons of anti-air missile batteries. So you are either very, very heavily protected against that in your ship, or you drive in with a tank, which probably makes more sense.

Well, I guess the simple answer is the one that we have mentioned quite a few times already. We build one or two to do a proof of concept and also see, is this something worth moving forward with? If we build something and players instantly hate it, that might also affect how we do stuff. So the easy answer is that we built one as a proof of concept, and in the future we're going to expand and add variations. Our tools are also developing. Our modular tool will help with, for example, the bunkers in the future when we add more of those.

I also think that the underground facilities go through the planetary surface. And that was actually, if I remember correctly, an early test on how to make caves go through the planetary surface. Because at some point in the past we were limited to very, very few cuts or holes made into the surface of a planet. We had like three on a planet. That's not much. So sometimes we add things to the game just as a proof of concept, not necessarily of a location but of some other tech that is happening in the background that might not be extremely obvious at first glance. We also have to keep in mind that the size of the PU level design team is fairly small. There are five level designers plus me. That's it.

We're also a small team, like Andreas said, but you don't work in a vacuum, like you said. So even if we could, in theory, white box stuff faster, we still need all the other departments as well. You need sound, you need art, you need VFX, everything like that. All the teams need to get their stuff in.

There are a lot of interdependencies.

As I said before, the current density of content is in no way representative of the final product of Star Citizen. When you think of a planet, as I said about 20 times, we want to go broad, right, and add all the content in. And depending on the planet, of course, we want to leave certain areas empty for exploration, for expansion by player-built structures, for example. The content will for sure increase significantly, but we need to first identify all the different types of content that we need to add. It's pretty sparse at the moment, let me put it that way. It's also, once again, tech.

We got OC streaming recently. That already helps to be able to add more. When we started with the surface outposts, we had a hard number. I don't remember it at the moment, but it was like, this many you can fit on a moon, then performance can't handle it. And then we got OCS, and we're working on even more performance stuff, which obviously also gives us the ability to say, okay, we can double this or add more. So that's always going to be a big thing.

Not for the main area. The difference between a rest stop and a major landing zone is that a major landing zone is hand-built to the biggest degree. We're still trying to build with modular art pieces, in a sense, so we still work faster, because obviously they're big, and creating unique pieces for everything, I don't know how many people you would need to actually do that for every location we need to add to this game. But they don't use the modular tool. It's still hand-built by us and an artist placing those modular pieces together and deciding how we want the flow to be. However, we might use the modular tool for side areas. If we add a similar underground cave system to a location, we could in theory use the modular tool, and that's part of a major landing zone, but it's a different part, so to say.

For me, I can't talk too much about it because it's a future location, but to mention one that I really enjoyed working on, that was also the Surface Outposts. It was the first thing I really got to work on when I started here. And I quite enjoyed building those small areas to figure out what they could be, how they could work and stuff like that. Mostly for the experience. It was a really fun experience building them with the team and everything.

For me, it was probably New Babbage, basically building upon the stuff that we learned when developing Lorville and having that influence the new landing zone, coming out of the low-tech industrial streets of Lorville into something a little bit more shiny. So it was very cool. I think it's a nice landing zone. I like how it's come together, and it was fun working on it.

I don't get a chance to work on many locations, but I did work on GrimHEX way back when, and Area 18. And I do still have a thing for Area 18, because I like Blade Runner, I like cyberpunk. The neon and the grit and the dirt and the seedy elements of a city, that's what appeals to me.

So the short answer is yes, they will always be that small. They're supposed to be the smallest we have in the game. We're going to have bigger locations, and the next would be like a village or a city or something like Area 18 that you've seen in the CitizenCon demo. But the outposts are always going to stay in this, maybe a cluster of them, but in general, never bigger, like actual outposts.

Got it. So that sounds more like a nomenclature thing. Things that we refer to as outposts will stay that small, but there will be other settlements, like you mentioned villages and stuff, that are bigger and use larger structures. It's just that the things that we refer to as outposts will always be small.

Yeah, they will always stay this small. Because that's the point of them. It's like the first time we go to another planet and we're going to bring something, we can't bring a skyscraper. Or I mean, maybe we can. I don't know when we're going to do it. But I expect it to be something like this where it's just a box you pretty much snap down. And that's what they're supposed to be.