Zane Bien

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.

Obviously not an extensive list, but what kind of filters off the top of your head were you thinking about?

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.

Yes. Emily might have some answers. I was just stealing her thunder a little bit.

Yeah, so there are a lot of plans and a lot of thoughts that we have. We obviously want to use the AR space for markers. If you're going into a hangar, have a gate bracket so that you know the bounds of where you're trying to go. A ladder sort of system so you have a guide to where you're trying to go. And then also we want to make use of the radar display that you have as well, to actually utilise the area map tech again to display your ship and the ground underneath you. And then obviously if you have a landing pad, it will show you your landing pad, and if you don't have a landing pad and you're just trying to land anywhere, it'll have a line with a shadow kind of thing and it will sort of guide you to whether you can land there, whether it's flat enough, that kind of thing. So these are the sorts of things that we're thinking about doing.

And that'll tie into how we want to show terrain and things like that in our map system, because I want that to be a thing.

That's the thing we always find out in the last moment.

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.

I think we have a line to tread.

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.

But we're still dialing that in, to get the tone right.

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.

Yeah, finding a balance of good art but good usability.

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.

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.

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.

And then when you fix that, there's another thing you think, oh, it'd be cool if we put this in as well. It never ends.

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.

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.

But in the future, yeah, we do want settings for colorblindness and we do want settings for being able to set font sizes and so on, but that's...

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.

What's good about it is we're not talking about Building Blocks 2. We are happy where we're at with this, right?

Building Blocks itself has grown. Building Blocks continues to evolve. You continue to add new functionality.

We need to optimize it greatly. There's still a lot of optimization work that we need to do.

That's kind of down to, weirdly, it's like a victim of its own success. This happens a lot with our game, where we go, oh, we've optimized entities. Someone puts 1,000 entities in and it's running slow. Okay, well, we've made it run twice as quick or whatever. Oh, that's great. We've now put 3,000 entities in. And then within a couple of years, it's now 300,000 entities in. It's a battle. Well, a battle's a bit negative, but it's a virtuous circle. We speed things up, you can do more stuff. We speed things up, you can do more stuff. And it's the same with the UI. So we speed Building Blocks up. We started off with tens of nodes, and now we talk about hundreds of nodes, and we're looking to do thousands of nodes in like a millisecond. So yeah, there's lots of optimizations, but doing the optimizations just means we can do more and more cool stuff, like lots of little widgets and stuff, all moving and animating and stuff like that.

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.

Yeah, it's a really old animation. We've updated the UI, but we need to also update the animation at some point. It's probably something that we're going to be in discussion with the technical animators about, how exactly that should work. We probably want a minimum time spec. Make it look good as long as it's under X seconds. So it should be pretty quick. But we just need to update that, because it's just basically like this. So it's got to feel more organic. Our whole thing is you've just got to make it feel diegetic in the world and grounded in the world, and you might as well just put it in 2D at that point. So that animation needs to be updated. But it's going to require some work and coordination with some other teams to do that.

It's very Pip-Boy-like, but we have phones today that have gesture controls and stuff. When you pull it up, would you actually have to hit a button, or can it tell, hey, I'm trying to get my mobiGlas, so could it just pop up? Those questions are probably to be discussed.

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.

I'll just sort of give you my opinion, which is this is sort of our first drop of, and obviously we're going to do the vehicles as well, but we've got the first drop of the new visor and lens layouts. And what we want to do is make that as good as possible for everyone, as much as possible, right? So in an ideal world, you'd want nobody to want to customize it because it's perfect, but we don't live in an ideal world, so we're open to design decisions from there, I suppose. But ideally we get to a position where the design's good for the absolute majority of cases, and it's not people going, I just hate this thing, I want to turn off the interior map, or I want to turn off my health bar or whatever. If the health bar is not as intrusive, or, I'm just paraphrasing, the other thing that just comes on and just notifies you something and goes off, then maybe it's not so intrusive that you're going, ah, I must turn this thing off. If we get as much right, then you sort of reduce the need for that much customisation. But presumably the customization question is still open-ended.

Yeah, I guess to a degree, right? Because I fully agree, we are working on this UI actively. This is always improving, and we are making it as good as we can. But bottom line is it's always nice with customizability, and I think that would be again for the far-flung future, really. We need to make sure that we have all the UI at its best. And then we can start looking into, okay, now it's worth giving people the power, because we've done our best now, and let's allow them, and also let's allow ourselves to take the time to look into something like this, because it's also...

Which is equal on this sort of accessibility options as well. If you get it right, then hopefully a lot of the accessibility issues are not as strong. We will still have all these accessibility options for changing the text height and stuff, but it takes you away from the best version. You might make it more usable for certain individuals.

There are certain aspects like turning the minimap on or off. You want to allow for that, because maybe you don't want to see the map all the time. You want to use the signs. You want to let yourself discover the environment without tools. It's kind of like letting go of technology in a way, going off in a forest or something. But having that there, at least initially, that allows us to gather a lot of the testing. Is it going to break on a specific machine or a setup? And so we can gather more data initially, and then we could figure out maybe a hardcore mode for the HUD, where you don't have certain things. It's just wipe everything away.

Yeah, turning things off is certainly something that's going to be easier.

I feel like I would want to play under that mode sometimes.

It's a lot easier to turn the minimap off than it was to write it in the first place.

So I think the main thing is, as we mentioned in the Hold the Line video, we're trying to really emphasize the physical interactions with the world. And that makes the experience a lot more immersive and engaging. Because obviously, if you can do everything from the mobiGlas, how compelling is that? It's not far-fetched to imagine in the future we might be able to control everything with AI and brain chips and stuff, but it doesn't really make for compelling gameplay. I think with the hologlobes, the big thing about it is there should be certain benefits to using something that's specially geared towards the ship you're using. For instance, networking. If you have a lot of crew members that you're working with, I think it would be really nice to be able to amalgamate the data onto one display, like one hologlobe.

Everybody's standing around holograms.

Yeah, so it's amalgamating their individual data into one sort of display, and then they can do strategic planning and stuff around that. And then the same goes for the cartography deck or anything. Also, what I kind of want to do as something really cool is to have a Prometheus-style terrain, like a cross-section of the terrain on a hologlobe. So that when you're scanning for resource deposits and things like that, it's something that the ship specifically does. And then obviously I think that information would then be able to be saved to your mobiGlas. Because I think your mobiGlas really is about displaying the data that you've acquired over time through the use of various equipment, and the other displays are about actually gathering that data.

I think you should be able to. I think we should offer various ways of actually sorting through that data. So one of the ways that I think would be good is to be able to have user-generated folders so that you can organize your own data how you see fit, but also be able to organize it by hierarchical locations. So Stanton system and then planet, moon and so on, and be able to filter your markers that way. And possibly also tagging the markers, so you can tag them individually, and then that will go into the sharing of it, because you might want to only share a subset, right? So you need to have good ways of filtering by subsets.

And then being able to add notes to the map markers, titles, stuff like that, full labeling of things.

Yeah, I mean, we already showed the titling. I think we should be able to have that flexibility, because otherwise you don't want to be stuck in a box. So yeah, we'll look at that for sure.

Yeah, we're going to start drilling down into it. One suggestion that we probably will look into, we're not saying we're definitely going to do it, but we can potentially get data from the surroundings as well. So if you've got a mining deposit, we could potentially automatically say what's in that deposit on your little marker. So things like that we've got potential to do one day.

Well, we definitely will have the ability technically to do it. This is sort of a design decision about what you can track. We already have a thing for tracking with the AR markers anyway, so there's no reason why anything that's on the AR wouldn't also be integrated into the mapping system to show exactly where you left it floating around some moon somewhere.

I mean, for now, you'll definitely be able to see where your current ship is. If you just got out of your ship and you're wandering around, you'll be able to see that on there. For ships that are, say, locked up on a space station, so it's not actually in the game world, that will probably, for now, live in your inventory and the other menus.

But yeah, stuff flying around is much more likely than the ships that are associated with you.

One thing, we never really showed the radar very much at CitizenCon, mainly just because it didn't really fit with the flow of everything, but we've improved the radar generally, and you can zoom into that and see it full screen the same way you can with the star map. So the kinds of things that you would see as contacts on your radar, you'll also be able to see in the big version too.

Yeah, that's another use case for a ship hologlobe, actually: the radar, and you're seeing all the ships and possibly the whole fleet and planning a battle.

Yeah, it's so cool for multi-crew gameplay if you're stood around and you can see your friends flying around you and wandering around.

So it's very much a pervasive UI throughout the game. It serves many, many purposes.

Well, I checked with Rich Tyrer about this just now. And so yes, at the moment, that's the way it's going to work.

So I think technically it'd be harder not to, thinking it through. It'd be really hard to exclude that data. If you know about the ship, you know about the inner workings; you might not necessarily know who's walking through it at any time, but you might go, hmm, that door seems to have opened and closed.

So it does have gameplay implications, so it might make it trickier for some people, but also for people who do want to snoop on that stuff, it's going to be a fun bit of gameplay as well, I think.

So a couple of layers to that. One is whether you can see people walking in your ships. Another one, whether you can identify them. If they've done something to hide their presence, maybe you don't see them, but you'd still see your own doors opening and closing in your ship.

So yeah, a couple of different layers. The markers on the interior map are what you detect on the radar. So if you can detect people, like we saw with the ping stuff in the demo that we did, then they will also appear on the interior map. But as you were saying, if they've got some mechanism of hiding themselves, then maybe they won't be so clear on the interior map as well.

We have the ability to hide and show different render layers. We could hide all doors if that's some gameplay requirement. Also, you're able to see the weapons on the ship as well and all the different components. We can hide those individually. I don't know if it's something where we get a base schematic of the ship, and then you have to hook into the ship to get that extra information or whatever. We just have that capability in the display.

Yeah, the fact it's live is really cool, and we haven't really explored that too much for now, so maybe there'll be some interesting gameplay that comes out of that as well.