Star Citizen Live Gamedev: Making Ship Up IV

It really depends on the brief. If I'm doing a capital ship, our approach will be completely different. But considering how a motorbike works and how much of a human appears on a motorbike, which is a good 30%, the first things I will make sure I have in the right position are the steering wheel? What's it called on a bike? The handlebars. As my accent can tell you, I'm not British, and English is not my first language. So I make sure that I have them in the right position. I have the character fully rigged so I can move it. Generally, I also reference other animations from the game, so sometimes we can recycle things.

That's a consideration. If you can reuse an existing animation for the enter and exit, that cuts down development time, development cost tremendously.

And it's all a matter of balance. Can we afford it? Is it something particularly important that we have to do?

And when you say can you afford it, I continuously have to clarify that we're talking about performance metrics. It's a relative development term. We use the term cost to mean performance and not money or whatnot.

No, no, no. Eventually time.

Time. I think one thing as well is when you have this library of mo-capped entry-exit anims we've got for different styles of vehicles, if you have something that's a little bit more unique in its stance, like take for example the Fury, we had to make it so the seat would come out and lower down, because it didn't really make sense for the player to kind of scramble up and spin around in there. So it ended up adding some more interest into the entry-exit anim because of that limitation. Just kind of welcome, really.

How does the LOD work? Where do the LODs come in? They're at the very end, really, aren't they?

Yeah. LODs are just before we put it into game, really. So we have our white box, gray box, LOD 0, and final; LOD is the stage where LODing would happen.

So how do you make the LODs?

So LODs typically would start with... I'm assuming if you're asking about LODs, you've looked at our production art workflow a little bit. If not, there's some resources, because it's a little bit unique. But we basically start by removing our chamfers, our bevels, which are our small edges which give the nice little polished effect to our edges, and our small POM, so our POM lines and our main decals that are quite subtle. And then that kind of gets you to LOD1, and then the rest is kind of a more traditional LODing pipeline.

We actually did an episode, gosh, years ago. It's still on our YouTube. I believe the Friday show was called Happy Hour when we did it. So if you look on our YouTube channel, we actually did a whole hour with Eric Kieron Davis and, oh, I can't remember who else, where we went through how producers make schedules and plan for the development work. And it's the same process for just about everything. So you're asking specifically for ships, but it's the same information. It's changed a little bit. There's Agile and there's Waterfall and stuff like that. But for the most part, I think it's still fairly accurate, and it's a decent primer if you were curious. That's up on the YouTube channel. I got in a lot of trouble for doing a show with producers and how to make a schedule. I think there were only like 17 citizens that enjoyed it. They're like, why are you doing a show with producers? And I'm like, because they're essential to the development of any video game.

When you're in a meeting, producers are the comedians that keep it all together. They know how to run the meeting in a way that keeps everyone... There's nothing more boring than looking at schedules and stuff like that for artists, so they do a really good job of making it fun for us.