UI developers discuss rolling out Building Blocks to other teams, the planned unified radar, star map and interior map, and the mobiGlas rework. They also cover Flash removal, manufacturer HUDs, targeting colors, MFD saving, ultrawide support, HUD legibility, refueling UI, chat and coordinates.
TL;DRBuilding Blocks now lets game designers and artists across the company build UI themselves, has gained 3D model support, first seen in inventory, and now has reusable, restylable pieces such as buttons.
I'll start. There's plenty of things that Bone could say on this. But I think the important thing from my side is that we've rolled it out from something that the core UI team used to use, and we were working out how to use it as well. It's got to a point now where it's good enough for the rest of the team to use. So we rolled it out to game designers across the company, some of the artists, and that kind of thing. So it kind of makes our jobs easier, I suppose, because it's not just six people trying to get the UI done for the whole company. Now, those particular teams can take control and they can make their own kind of demos and functional versions of stuff. So that's a really big thing that it's brought to us. I'm sure Bone could go a lot into the technical things that have changed over the past year as well.
The past year, I think the major thing that we've been working on at the core tech level would be adding 3D. It's a big feature, and as soon as you jump from drawing some text and some images to, hey, I want to be able to draw models, I want to be able to draw characters, vehicles, and all these kind of things as part of the UI scene, things get pretty complicated. We've been working on that as part of the year. That involves lighting for those models, how the materials look, do you do holograms? How do they appear in the UI? Do they appear in a screen? Do they appear over a screen? Do they appear without a screen? If you can have hologram UIs of floating letters, ships and stuff like that. There's all kinds of exciting rendering tech that we've been involved in with that. I think the first thing we've seen it in is the inventory. That was really, really quite complicated. We show 50 models at a time, and each of those individual models has its own scene, its own camera, it has three lights. So there's just thousands and thousands of little objects we have to manage all the time. So that's what we've been doing over the past year. So as a core technology group, we develop that stuff ready for the gameplay teams to use. So I'm hoping that we're in a space that they start using it, and then they'll develop their UIs, and hopefully the players will get to see that in a couple of releases' time after that, because we're right at the start of that chain. So it's now in a state that the gameplay teams start to use it, and then they come back to me and say, hey, it's not quite working correctly yet, and then I fix a few things, and then they can start developing their features with those kind of things.
As well as the 3D, actually, we've put a lot more time into reusable pieces as well. So maybe when Bone did his talk before, I know Zane showed some restylable stuff, which is really cool. But the actual process to do that was pretty complicated. So if you wanted a button, you had to make it from a square object and put some text on and all that kind of thing. And we've got a system now which means we can package those things up. So if somebody wants a button, instead of having to build it from other pieces, they can just drag a button into their scene and change the name on it. So we've added quite a few bits like that. It doesn't make a massive difference to what people see at the end of the process, but for less technical people, game designers and artists, it's a lot easier for them to just build a screen out of pieces. And also, all those pieces are restylable as well. So for example, at the moment, we've just added a Crusader style to the game. So if someone's already set up a screen, we can just turn it to Crusader and it will change colors and some of the graphics will change and so on, which is kind of cool.
TL;DRSupport work has grown, mostly debugging calls during releases, but Bone sees it as positive and easier than the old end-of-cycle UI crunch, while Simon says some teams' UI files get tidied up.
Well, I think clean up is probably a bit overdoing it, but I definitely get a lot of calls during the release phase of saying, hey, I've made all this and it's not working quite how I expect it to. Now, is that because they've implemented it wrong or is it because maybe my stuff's wrong or the core tech is wrong? Trying to help them debug what's going on and find out what the problem is. I think that that's grown, but that's a really good thing. I can only see that as a really positive step because we get lots and lots of people contributing now. And being a support role is a lot easier than what we used to do, which was having a really compressed role at the end of the release cycle, which is all the gameplay teams have finished their feature and just go, it just needs UI now. Can you just make the UI for it? That was really tricky because you had to really get involved in lots of other people's work and understand what they want, then design it and write the tech and the UI for it. These would all be completely individual systems. You'd be working on vehicles one week and then you'd be working on the mobiGlas the next week and then you'd be working on the front end. That was really difficult. You'd get these jack of all trades, master of none, because we were diving in and out, but they were all equally very important at the same time. But now that that's spread out, offering support is a lot easier because I'm supporting them in a role where I know the tech and I can give advice about the stuff that's going on. And I also can hopefully write tools to help them debug their own stuff as well.
One thing that's interesting is with AI in games, you get this thing called emergent behavior where the game starts doing stuff that you didn't expect. We almost have a similar thing with the UI tool where it's not AI that's doing it, but we'll decide to do a particular thing and we hand it over to people to actually use and they come up with all these crazy ways of using it that we never expected. They're usually doing really cool stuff, but I suppose there's two sides to it. Sometimes we'll get something that works really well, and then we'll look at the file that's been made to construct it, and it's like spaghetti. There's just connections everywhere. So we sometimes go in and kind of tidy that up a bit and let them know, here's another way you could do it that's going to be a bit more efficient, that kind of thing. And other times, it's like, there is no better way to do this. So Bone, for example, might go away and write a new system that does that thing that they want to do or do it in a better way. That's where a lot of the support lies as well.
TL;DRThe star map update is progressing as one large system combining radar, star map, possible AR markers and interior map, with tracking groundwork done and ramp-up expected soon, but no release date.
OK, so it's progressing. It's a really big system. What we want to do with it and what we've designed in the background, which we're not showing anybody yet, is this really big system that kind of combines the radar, the star map, potentially some of the AR markers, and also the interior map. We think really that should be one thing, essentially. Chris Roberts has always had this idea that he wants to be able to start from the radar and zoom out from that. Then you can see the star map and you can zoom out and see the galactic view, essentially. We've been writing around that idea. We've got this really massive design that ties all those systems together, which is pretty cool. We started writing code systems to support that. One thing that's tricky with it, there's all this data from all over the game. So we've got the planets and stuff. We've got the radar data. We've got even things like missiles. We've got to somehow tie that together in a way that we can put into one place. So we spent quite a lot of time working on the tracking system for all that stuff. So that's all good now. And we're kind of at the stage where we want to start building the real thing. So the challenge is spending the time to fit all that stuff together. So that's something that we've been kind of ticking along in the background, but we're going to start ramping up on that very soon, I think. Couldn't give you a release date, but we're really keen to get it going and it's moving.
OK, so I think anyone who's seen the ARK Starmap will have a good idea of, I suppose, the general idea of where we want to take it, because we do all like that. It's easy to interact with. It's quite clear. You can navigate between different pieces of it easily, a lot more easily than what's in-game at the moment. So that's definitely inspiration for us. So visually, I definitely wanted to try and push it a bit further than that. So try and get a bit more of that sci-fi movie feel to it. And in terms of functionality, because it's kind of your window on the world, I think what we need to do as well is have a bit more of a Google Maps, Apple Maps style navigation thing going on. So for example, if you want to find the planet on the other side of the solar system, being able to search for it, maybe just quite easily navigate to it from this central interface. I think all that sort of stuff is going to make it feel nice. And so we're looking to take inspiration from the best maps out there overall.
TL;DRUI staff are separate from the mining team so both can work in parallel, and giving feature teams UI ownership through Building Blocks removed the old UI bottleneck, though not everything can be worked on at once.
Because these are UI guys. They're not building the mining. The team who is doing the mining can continue to work on mining while these guys work on their other stuff. It's not an either-or proposition; all the teams don't just work on all the features.
Yeah, that's true. The main way that we support other teams at the moment, we're kind of the start and the end of the process. So Bone's team makes the initial bits for people to make their feature from, I guess. And then UI team will sometimes lend support on the visual side as well. So at the moment, we're working on some refueling stuff. So EU PU have been working on that. They've made this system that works really well. They've done UI that is OK. It doesn't look great. But they're not a team full of UI designers and artists. So what we'll do is pass some of the stuff over to our visual guys to upgrade it and make it look cool and Star Citizen. The end product is really good. In general, it's the code side that's involved with things like the star map.
I will say it's working. Those who have been following the project for a while, going back to 2014, 2015, 2016 days, might remember a familiar refrain: this feature is waiting on UI. That was such a common refrain back in those days because of what David just said earlier about how you'd get to the end of the feature, then it's like, okay, slap a UI on it. It was very clear that UI being downstream of everything was not the solution for a project as broad as Star Citizen. So not to keep harping on the success of Building Blocks, but these new refinements to process that you guys have made and the new tools that you've provided have definitely sped up the process. That said, like any team on Star Citizen, there are only so many things we can work on at any given time. You have to prioritize and stuff like that. So not everything can be worked on all at once.
I was at this point of that, when everyone was waiting for UI, and this is why Chris correctly pivoted the team at that point and said, this isn't going to work, because we want to grow how many features we're going to develop. Unless we just magic out of thin air another 20 UI guys, it's just not going to grow. It just turns into a great big bottleneck. So that is why around 2017, I think it was, we did change the mechanism, so you develop the UI and go wide and spread it across a lot of these teams. I want to say put the onus back on them, because when any trouble comes in, it's not just developing it, it's at release time. Inevitably, there's a few problems with any given feature, but if you have 10 features and each of them have a few UI bugs in them and they all have to be done by one UI team, it becomes a real bottleneck. So it was really good to go wide across the company and each of those guys then get the ownership of their particular feature from start to finish and not just go, it's done, just needs UI. We're just waiting on UI guys. It's like, you are the UI guys now, with nice fancy graphics and animations from the art and design departments.
TL;DRBone declines to give a precise measure but says the move away from Flash is past halfway, with the process settled and major remaining items including star map, mobiGlas, ship MFDs and the visor.
We've definitely got the process down. We know exactly how we're going to do it. And we've got designs for a lot of the things that we want to change over. But a lot of it is balancing new features, I suppose, with going back to the old stuff and porting it over. One thing that we like to do, and I think Chris Roberts likes to do this as well, is when we touch an old feature, we don't want to just take what was there and just put it in exactly the same. We'll tend to work out what the problems were and redesign little bits, maybe make it visually better as well. It's quite an involved process to convert things over overall.
I think it's a really good opportunity to revisit. These are inevitably some of the older features across the game, so it gives you an opportunity to revisit them and say, what's not great about these things? What would improve it? Would it look miles better with some 3D models and stuff or better animations? Things like the inventory on the mobiGlas was just completely redesigned because it wasn't a favorite feature of ours at the time, so we looked at it and went, right, actually, if we're going to redo this, let's rethink it in a more appropriate way. But certain other things are, if it ain't broke, let's just make a neat version of this that we can manage and maintain a lot easier. Maintaining the old stuff has become quite difficult now. The knowledge base of people that want to work on this stuff is reducing.
Also, Flash isn't really supported anymore by Adobe. The further we get through time, the harder it is to fix the Flash stuff. So we definitely want to get that ported over when we can. I think the major features that we want to do: there's the star map, which we're working on, obviously. mobiGlas is a big thing. The MFDs on ships and also the visor, so the lens and visor that the player looks through. We want to update that and bring that into the modern day, I guess.
TL;DRThe mobiGlas rework is ramping up with in-game visual prototyping to be iterated with Chris Roberts before building, aiming to redesign rather than just port apps, with no dates given.
So at the moment, we've been focusing mainly on other things. So star map design and so on. And the back end of the star map has been taking a lot of the focus aside from just little bits and pieces of features here and there. We're starting to ramp up a little bit on the mobiGlas now. So we're looking to do some visual prototyping work. What Chris Roberts wants to see, he wants to know, taking the new tech that we've got, all this 3D stuff and so on, what can we do to make the mobiGlas feel cool but still be usable. So the first stage of that is we're going to do some in-game prototyping and work out what can we do there? How cool can we make it look yet still be usable? So there's a bit of investigation to do there. And it's going to take some iteration between ourselves and also Chris Roberts, the game directors, and so on until they're happy with, this is what we want the mobiGlas to be. And then when that's signed off, then we can actually start to make the thing. So I don't know how difficult it's going to be, to be honest, because essentially, it's like we're making a new operating system almost. Once we've got that core in place, we know how it looks, how it works in 3D, and so on. Then in theory, it's just a case of porting all the old apps across. So take the mission manager and update that visually and so on. I think it's one of those things that once we've got over the initial hurdles, it'll start to speed up. But I'm not giving you any dates.
No, we don't do dates here. This is a good time to reiterate something you dropped kind of casually early on. We don't just want to do conversions of these things from Flash to Building Blocks. It's not just make the same thing. If you're gonna spend seven weeks, I'm just pulling numbers out of the air, converting this thing from Flash to Building Blocks and it's the exact same thing, why not take nine weeks and actually redesign it? Make it better, improve upon it. Look at some of these features that backers have been asking for for so long and take that effort to redo it and make it better at the time. It does mean it takes a little bit longer than just converting it over, but ultimately it's worth it in the end, or we hope it will be.
What we're aiming for is, this is the version of the mobiGlas, the final version of the mobiGlas. Once it's done, then maybe we'll polish it a little bit in future, but essentially it's good.
That's a good question. I think a few people have mentioned having games on there, so we don't have it in the plans at the moment, but it would be a cool idea. I'm not against doing that one day. There are plenty of other things to do in the game, I would say, plenty of other parts of the game to get right before we consider mini games on the mobiGlas.
It's definitely something that we need to improve in some way. But there's not really been any discussions on the UI side for what we can change there. I think it's probably more the kind of thing that the vehicle team and the Actor Feature Team would look into, to be honest. Once you can let people see in the dark, it's obviously got a load of gameplay implications. People can't hide anymore, or maybe we need to put ranges on things and that kind of thing. So there's loads of gameplay implications to figure out. So I don't know where that is up to. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody's thinking about it right now. But it's not really a UI team thing just now.
TL;DRAn intermediate, non-final HUD is in the PU for now, while the proper manufacturer HUDs wait until the Gladius one is just right; Drake and RSI art is in progress, with no firm rollout timing.
One thing we decided to do was do a little bit of a halfway house, because initially we got this cool thing that we've been building. We've been trying to get it really good for Squadron 42. So that was the initial focus for the Aegis HUD. And we felt that with the amount of improvements that were going on there, the PU was missing out. So we've done this kind of intermediate version at the moment, which is what you can see. I think that's since the previous release. It doesn't look final. It's not intended to look final. It looks kind of cool, but it's not where we want to end up. So we've got that version that has all the features in. We can do simple things like change the colors and fonts if you want to. But in terms of rolling out the proper final HUDs, the way we want to do it is essentially get that initial Gladius HUD internally, get that 100% how we want it, so all the features on there. So we have missile mode how we want it, bombs how we want it, all the different lock-ons and that kind of thing. And we're getting pretty close now, I think. But Chris Roberts basically wants to wait till that's just right, and then we're going to decide how we're going to roll that out to the rest of the game. While we've been developing that, it's not so difficult for us to do artwork as well. So we've started visual development on the Drake HUD as well as RSI. So those are ticking along in the background. But when they'll get rolled out to everybody, I'm not totally sure yet.
We've shown folks some of the early concepts for the Drake HUD. We haven't shown anything for the RSI HUD just yet. But we do a show every week. It'll come.
One thing we've started to do is, it's not the ship HUDs, but we started to roll out some manufacturer styles for the other screens in the ships. So for Crusader ships, for example, I think in 3.15, you'll see on some of those, we've got some new door panels and we've got a style that we can apply to the elevators and so on. So that work is starting to creep in there, even if it's not in the HUDs that you see right now.
So I spoke to John Crewe, and he said that VET, they do have plans for quantum in future that might not involve custom QT waypoints, but it should give the same end result. So they're prototyping some ideas at the moment, but there's not a lot more they can tell right now.
Yeah, that's something that we're looking into right now. We have had feedback about expanding that system, because obviously just having good, bad, and in between is quite simplistic. So we've been looking at potentially adding some extra colors in there, some extra icons, and so on, so you can split out a lot more information from that. So we've been having those conversations this week, actually. The system will come online at some point, and we have got plans for it. It's kind of at that phase now where, as designers, we kind of know what we want to do with it. We need to get final sign off from all the directors and so on, and then fairly soon that should start to make its way into the game, I think.
Yeah, this is more a matter of priority, so there's no technical blockers. It's possible right now, it's just you wouldn't write it with the current system because it would just be wasted work. So we're in the process of upgrading the way that the UI works on MFDs, and part of that upgrade will include much better customization, and the much better customization will inevitably lead to wanting to be able to persist that customization from session to session or in different vehicles and stuff. So yeah, that's part of that block of work that they're doing; it's pretty much built into that task. So technically no blocker, but the blocker is a priority issue more than anything else.
Yes, at some point. So we have got plans to bring this back at some point. It ties in a little bit with what we want to do with the radar, because now you've got that spherical radar thing at the bottom. So some of the functionality relates to that, so it's part of that design to a degree. And yeah, it's definitely planned.
TL;DRYes, the UI is being built to flex with non-standard aspect ratios, though the front end is letterboxed and diegetic UI plus a visor redesign make it tricky and still in progress.
Right, so aspect ratios are the thing that gives most UI designers, UI engineers the absolute fear. It's just the bane of our lives. But I totally appreciate that, especially on PC games as well, people have some cool setups of 32:9 and 48:9, but also some strange people have 4:3 aspect ratio screens and things like this. Or at least you can run it in a window that is 4:3 and all these kind of things. Yes, we have to build in a lot of tech to deal with this. So we have stuff that's kind of like when you resize your window on a web browser or something and you see all the text jiggles around and it aligns itself properly, all being well if it's designed correctly. So it's all flexible like that. So the system is designed to be flexible. The coordinate system can change with the aspect ratio. So you don't see stretched things and things like that. So at a core level, yes, it's inbuilt, but then there's a design level that all the assets have to be designed in a way that can be flexible. So that's pretty tricky because you have to make lots of choices about, well, if it gets all squished up, do all these things go along the bottom or do they get clipped off at the end or do they shrink down, and all these kind of decisions that have to be made for each individual design. And then we've got individual responses for things. So things like the front end, we've just pretty much gone with a 16:9 aspect ratio and we just black bar the wider screens, or black bar the top and bottom if you're on a square screen. And that's a bit of a cop-out for that screen, but it's nice because you can design a nice looking 16:9 layout for the whole front end. Where it gets a bit more tricky is things like the lens and visor, because that's obviously a lot more emergent, and then we still have to make a lot of decisions about this where the tech supports this but it's just about making design decisions. Let's say you've got different icons in the top left and top right-hand corner. If you have three monitors, do you want those in the top left and right corners of those three monitors? Because that's not really in your eye line. You're going, oh, where's my map or how many bullets do I have or whatever it is. Having three monitors is a bit more about having a lot of peripheral vision. It's not about moving all the UI all the way out. So there's a lot of design decisions that go along the lines of that. So yes, we're working on that also. And finally, one of the bigger challenges of Star Citizen is it's diegetic. So that means all this UI is actually in-world on physical objects. So we've got maybe a 16:9 panel, or even the mobiGlas is actually a 16:9 panel that you're holding in front of you like this. So that comes with challenges of saying, well, if I've got a very square monitor and I'm trying to look at this wider aspect ratio screen, where do you position your camera? Because there's only so far you can move your arm back and head back to try and see this oblong thing in a square hole. Same goes for using the kiosks. Do you just get a lot more peripheral vision? Do you have to move the camera back? Does the guy have to stand further away? We have to make decisions to make it logically correct and fit into the universe properly. We don't cheat at any point for these things, but it becomes really tricky. We are redesigning the visor too, because currently the visor is such a physical piece of geometry, a piece of glass with UI on it. It sits in front of the camera like this. So as you move the camera around, it goes with the camera. But that inherently has problems of, well, it's a piece of glass at a 16:9 aspect ratio. So what do you want to do if you want to draw things outside of that piece of glass? It was sort of restricted. So we're redesigning that and coming up with different solutions to make that work properly. But on the whole, yes, we're working on it. But it makes me cry on quite a regular basis.
TL;DRPlayer-chosen HUD colors aren't the plan for now; the team wants better automatic legibility and unique manufacturer looks first, and says customization is technically possible and could be considered later.
There's kind of two bits to this, I suppose. There's the legibility thing, how easy is it to read, and then there's the customization thing. So in terms of legibility, we're always looking into better ways to do that. So we have a thing at the moment where it automatically makes the screen a bit brighter and increases the drop shadow on bright backgrounds. So that's a little step in the right direction. But we're always looking at ways we can improve that. Ideally, we want to get to a point where players wouldn't need to change the colors to be able to see the stuff. I think we're getting there. And then in terms of customization, the direction at the moment is we want to make each manufacturer feel unique. So especially starting with the ships, we want people to be able to say, OK, my Drake ship looks like this with these particular colors, and my RSI ship looks this way. So we're definitely heading more towards that direction at the moment. Technology-wise, it would be possible for us to allow things to be customized, but I think that's something we'd look at after we've got the ideal vision in place first.
Just to reiterate what Simon's saying, ideally it wouldn't be an issue that you'd want to change the colours if the legibility was perfect across all these different environments. Again, it's the same story with it being diegetic. The visor and the lens and the head-up displays are actually in-world, so the same effects are applied to them that are applied to real pieces of glass in the world. So the exposure is different, and what's behind them we can't really control. We can't control if they're looking at the sun or the blackness of space. So there's automatic exposure control, a bit like you get on a smartphone. It brightens up in a bright environment, darkens down. It's obviously more complex because it's translucent. In an ideal world, we would fix all the problems so people wouldn't have to or feel like it was a requirement. I don't think it would work long-term anyway, because you're flying somewhere that's snowy, for instance, and you decide to pick colors that would look good against the snow, and then you suddenly fly into space and then it doesn't look good. It's not really a solution that you have to keep configuring your colors to be able to read the UI. Really, the UI should be adapting to the environment properly. And hopefully, we'll solve that or at least get it dialed in a lot better.
Well, we've definitely talked about it for visually impaired people as well anyway, because certain colors are not as easy to decipher. We have talked quite a lot about how we can customize this and make it a lot more approachable for different people to use.
TL;DRRefueling currently has a rough placeholder UI built by the design team, and UI staff are working closely with them to make it look good, with players expected to see it soon.
OK. Well, refueling is a good one, actually. It's going really well. So when we started out, there was a game design doc that EU PU made, which was pretty cool. And then initially, I had some conversations with those guys. We just roughed out some really basic ideas for the UI. So I would just draw some boxes and put text on, so they had an idea of a very vague direction where I would take it. And then we left it with them for a bit. And they've been implementing the actual system. And then using the Building Blocks stuff, they've put in this placeholder UI. So it's all working. It's good. It just looks a bit rough around the edges. And then, I think I mentioned it before, we haven't taken it off them. We're working really closely with them to kind of take that and make it good. So process-wise, we've got one of the guys who is kind of a mixture between a graphic designer and a UI designer. So he's taken those initial screens and rejigged the layout a little bit and resized things and also applied this nice color scheme and little graphical elements on there. So he's going to make these visual versions that are 2D, they're just kind of in Photoshop or whatever. And then on the other hand, we've got one of our technical UI designers who's taking those concepts and kind of marrying them up with the stuff that EU PU have created. So actually implementing it in Building Blocks. So that's the ideal process, and it seems to be working really well just now. So I'm pretty happy with that. I guess everyone will get to see it quite soon.
Yeah, it's a good question. Chat is one of those things that we need to port over at some point soon. We've not really looked into what we want to change design-wise. I'm sure there'll be things like that that we want to sort of polish up. But yeah, it's on our to-do list, basically. So when we get to it, we'll check out what's there. We'll see what the competition is doing. There's a lot of other games out there that do a good job of chat. And we'll work out what actually we want to put into it. And then hopefully what you get out of the other end is great. But we haven't quite got to the point where we're working on that yet.
TL;DRThe team plans a coordinate system relative to the body you're on, tied to the new star map and radar, at minimum showing your location, with location sharing wanted but undecided.
I guess the way that games are made in 3D graphics, you generally have this XYZ coordinate system, which is fine. If you want to see where this pen is in my room, I can say it's three across and two up, whatever, which is fine. But then when you're in space, actually, imagine you're on a moon that's rotating, that's orbiting around a planet, which is orbiting around the sun. So those XYZ coordinates aren't going to work. What we think we need to do is have a system that relates to what you are on. So if I'm on that moon, I want to know what's my angle relative to the center of the moon and how far out am I from that? So we'll probably go with something along those lines. In terms of putting it into the game, it's going to tie in quite closely with the new star map and radar. So we definitely do want to have that in there when we release a new version of those. The minimum will display where you are so people can say, oh, this is this relative to the Stanton system, for example. What we would like to do ideally is have some way of sharing those details. So maybe you can right click and send the location to one of your friends or that kind of thing. We still have to work out the details on that, but we definitely want to improve that whole area overall.