If you have a chair and your character has to sit on that chair, and you have one that's 25cm high and one that's 50cm high, you can't have an infinite number of animations to sit on all these chairs. You need just one chair height. Every character in the game will sit on chairs at the same height, and everything in the game needs that. Everything needs a defined measurement.
Started off with a block out for the metrics – a 'sitting console' metric. It defines the chair, the height of the console, the height buttons will be pushed at, etc… Josh was going for 'cramped, wires & exposed stuff' for the console. It's very Aliens-y, industrial tech type feel.
If you're a good artist, you're always talking to the other departments. Animation and art they have metrics for lots of things, but they have to be in-line for other things as well. As an animator, It's very helpful to know modelling and rendering. It's always good to know what's ahead of you and behind you in the pipeline. Bryan knows modelling, rendering, rigging, etc… if he's handed a character, he can see if it's going to break. If it's something like a ship that they're getting ready to work with, he knows what's required on the ships pipeline face as well. Makes people downstream's life easier. The more they communicate, the less rework will be needed.
Jake thinks the Austin studio is best placed. When they start it's nearing the end of the EU day, and then in the middle of their day the LA people show up, they can interact and communicate with the other studios easily. He starts by keeping up with the other studios, then meetings for things like live release, CitizenCon preparation, etc… He can hit up the global pipeline producers so if there's something that needs to go to animation, or if there's an issue with something, he can help make it happen, whether it's doing an email or starting up a Skype chat etc. This morning they're talking about setting up usables, things that AI NPC's use subsumption to go and interact with, and this morning they were running into some animation issues with those. They talked with the people in the UK to find out what can be done to solve it etc… Communication isn't just about the teams in any one studio. Various studios have builds at the beginnings of their day, there's a lot of syncing, and the teams feel very unified even though they're all over the world. Makes it so if they're doing their jobs right, the dev's don't have to be involved in the communication as much, it's the producers that do that so dev's are free to work.
Josh looked through the old model; the Phoenix is your 'baller' connie. it's like, top of the line, Maserati, Bentley, comparable to the Million Mile High club. He was looking at the wood finish and thinking it could be more 'baller'. He was looking through car interior designs, found some wood patterns he wants to use. He thinks there's too much wood in there, wants to use it as trim, and start using more 'baller' materials. He's gonna find more exotic materials to use.
With production it's a lot of communication between the US and UK, who are the primary live release studios. For 2.5.0 there was a long list of blockers that Chris normally says 'we can't release with these'. They identify those, if it's not in Jira they put it in, then they find resources for the bugs. Lots of Jake's job is making sure the blockers get a high focus from the resources assigned to them. At the end of each day there's a hand off, saying these are the remaining blockers, these are what're being handed off, etc… Everything gets handed around between the studios, so there's no real lapse in communication, no situations where a bug will sit for days without getting looked at. It's always being picked up and the highest priority issues get called out to focus on most. As the blocker list gets whittled down, they look at criticals. Then they look at 'high' bugs, etc… At some point they see they've got most of the bugs fixed, and they pick a release date. Then they keep working, and inevitably thing go wrong, and fixing one bug causes more, so they push the date back because blockers have to be gone, and you can't always schedule for things. At CIG they're a lot more forthcoming with that information than normal, they tell us lots of what's keeping them from releasing things. The word of the day is communication. They all talk to each other, all the time. Jake gets tons of emails, QA has 'flair' threads, where they point out the new blocks, Jake hands those off to the UK, etc… lots of communication to get releases ready for live.
It's all about communication. On email all the time, have a laptop on at all times even in meetings so he can keep up with things, and not everything goes through Jake, some things go to the various other producers around the company, so no-one's getting overwhelmed at any one point. A lot about making sure things get handed off, making sure that documentation is there for specific things for QA to test, what things they need to do if there's a new feature, what things aren't ready to test yet, etc…
Happens all the time, it's a part of being a distributed company. Just have to include it in the handoff, and say we need someone to look at it tomorrow. Sometimes you say 'I know the person who normally does this is in the EU, but there's someone in LA who's familiar, lets ask them and try to diagnose, so when the person in the EU is in tomorrow, it's all laid out and they can just start working.'
For Tyler in QA it was a tool called copybuild. Back in the day, when you needed a build, it was a manual process. connect to network drive, need 'this' folder, 'this' folder, the .exe, etc… it's easy to grab the wrong thing. Eventually they got copybuild. It's basically drop-down menus, I need this build with this version number, I need a dev build or not, etc… made the process easier.
or Bryan – the best tool he's ever used, it's a program called Direct Folders. Bookmark anything on your computer, and it works in browsers as well. Makes him much faster doing his work. Back when he was at ID, there were nested folders within folders. Being able to bookmark folders is awesome, and it's free. For 20$ you get the pro version where you can make nested folders within your bookmarks. Second tool is KUtools for Excel. It does a lot, but Bryan uses it for a way to go into a folder and whatever files are in that folder, or hierarchy of folders, it'll give you all the assets in an excel file. And you can say 'i only want mdx files', or 'I want all files' etc… If someone says 'I want to know what's in the mocap library' he just generates a new list in excel.
Josh – for the ship team, it was the damage shader system. It's why they redo ships. They used to do the damage system differently; you used to build a ship, and then it took forever to build the damage pieces. You'd have a piece – the nose, you'd have pristine, then damage 1, damage 2, damage 3, damage 4, etc… And you'd do that for each piece. If there's 37 pieces to a ship, you had to do all those tiers for each of those, and then you had to do LOD tiers for each one. When the damage shader came online, not only when you shoot a ship it literally puts the hole on the ship, but now they don't have to make damage pieces ever again. It's saved… countless, countless hours. Doing the Connie with that hierarchy could have taken months.
When they're doing changes, Josh normally gets assigned a designer, then he and the designer (with Chris at the top) will kick back and forth ideas. It's why they like things with the Reddit thread, they can look to it to help with ideas. If the ideas deviate from the original plan; the other day they had a list of features, some which would simplify the pipeline for the Cutlass and the variants, and some were 'we really want to do this', and they run those by CR, and he's either thumbs up or down. The last one he was okay on everything. So the proportions on the Cutlass look more like the concept now.
The interaction with the fans really recharges the team. Barcitizens, events, everything… seeing what the fans think and how they react is great for all the team. It's what Josh likes as well. Fans give lots of good feedback, and answering fans questions is great. The game industry is normally so secretive, CIG is awesome because the devs are allowed to talk to people. It's why Tyler says 'everything is subject to change', because Josh says they want to have less wood trim, but it's all just 'where their heads are at', things change over time. It's what Bryan said back in the day early in Wingman's Hangar. People who aren't in the game industry; this is a great look at what goes on behind the scenes. When you start a game, there's a lot you want to do that over the course of the years change. Scope changes, you figure out what you can and can't do, and that's what CIG are doing now. Somethings work, some don't, etc…
It's one of the great things. They go back and forth not only internally, but with the backers as well. One of the things they've started doing is blocking out time for developers to go into the forums and interact with people. Check the forums, they've been pretty active lately. Communicating with the public is just as important for CIG as communicating in-house. Fans help steer things in cool directions. They try to be mindful of what it is people are asking about ships. Though they know they can't please everyone. No ship can have everything. You want specialised rolls for ships. Tons of good ideas. A C130 pilot posted some pictures in the Reddit thread, pointing out what this stuff does, and it was great info to help Josh in his design stuff.
All in the works. Biggest hurdle they have to solve is, when Bryan initiates, the other character has to do the same. With NPC's it's a little easier, there's more flexibility, they'll navigate and play the animation. If two players go up to each other and want to high-five, you probably have to like 'accept the high-five' or something. But there's a gameplay element that, they have to make sure not too much control is taken away from the player. It's a balancing act.
You want to come up and pick up a mouse, and the mouse could be at any angle. How do you pick it up and grab it? They had a system, Grabby Hands, they worked and polished for a while. They were faking it where you do a little 'swipe' that as you swiped it would attach and blend into the hand. Could walk around, set it down on a box, then pick up the box, etc…
2.0 version of that is a looting system. It's got more defined metrics. Before, if you picked up a pistol, there was a little animation that'd fake getting it into your hand correctly. With the new looting system, you have one handed and two handed pickups, where you can come in and pick up an object of a certain size. There's some fudging, but they want to stay within the metrics for it all. There's right handed and left handed, there's things for holding a datapad in your hand, which is different from grabbing a coffee or whatnot. They've already established lots of metrics for useables in the universe; consoles, doors, railings, etc… but they're also starting to get into the realm of metric'd props that you pick up and carry around. After CitCon, Bryan is now the metric guru, he'll be going through and grabbing objects, saying every object within a certain class, he'll put it in hands, they'll make stuff look good, and they'll create a node inside the object so every object, when you pick it up, it'll have an animation where he goes down and picks it up, and he'll have it in his hand. In the hand, you can inspect the object.
If you wanted to put on a helmet; You'll grab it, look at it, you can examine or inspect, if you want to buy it you can look around at it and look at the stats. Then you could purchase it. But you say, I want the object, whether you got it off a dead soldier or whatnot. I want this guy's helmet. Now you can walk around with it, put it under your arm and walk around, and then when you're ready to drop or equip, you can go back and examine it, then you can drop it, equip it, whatever. And when you're done with it you can take it off, etc…