Star Citizen Live: Dressing the Scene

That's a very interesting question, actually. Well, I personally don't. The props team personally doesn't. We do have guys working on that. For instance, truck stops. What we tend to do is, forgive me as an artist explaining this, it's not necessarily my area of expertise. But I can try my best to explain it to you now. But please forgive me if there's any inaccuracies. We basically have a system where we have volumes allocated on surfaces. So for instance, we have a table. We have a volume inside that table that can fit a certain amount of assets. And each asset is given a volume. So for instance, the squeegee ball would be given a volume. And if it fits within that table, we can, based on a tag system, so say for instance, this might be tagged as toy or something along those lines, we can say, okay, this desk should spawn toys. And we use that to generate very rapidly a set of presets that we can then use to be placed around, say for instance, the truck stops. So yeah, basically we do. I hope that was useful.

One of the things about Star Citizen in general, we build a lot of procedural systems that touch a lot of aspects of the game. But some games use procedural systems as the end goal. They build a system, then the procedural system is what makes the world that you see and that's it. We tend to use our procedural systems as the starting point. It lays a foundation and then we have artists come in and go through and give it that personal touch. We use the procedural systems in many cases to save us time, to give us a foundation, to bring a bunch of stuff in there. But you never quite can beat that hand touch of then having somebody go through and just moving that coffee maker, even if it's just as little as an inch to the left. But it's like, no, this is more appropriate to where it would be. Nobody would put their coffee cup this far from the sink. It's stuff like that. It's this combination of using procedural systems and the hand care of the artist, I think, that's one of Star Citizen's hallmarks.

I completely agree with you. I think largely procedural placement of assets can yield pretty good results, but also if you're trying to tell a story, to create a procedural system that can tell a story, I think is quite a significant challenge. So sometimes it's good for fleshing stuff out, but if you kind of want that touch of humanity in a scene, I think, as an aid, procedurally aided environments, I suppose, would be a better description for them rather than procedurally driven. If that makes sense.

Because, I mean, it's everything at every level from the big moons down to the individual scenes. You start with the procedural and then you go through and you kind of, all right, this would be a little more interesting if this cliff face were a little more jagged than it currently is, and you just make the adjustments.

Yeah, exactly. And it's those sort of small touches and that flair that can kind of really help with just bringing the scene to life, as you said.

It's the difference between using it to save time and using it to do your work.