The developers show how a forward operating base (FOB) is assembled in the level editor, covering grouping, collision and who does the layout. They also answer questions on Pyro roads, narrative branding, upcoming ISC episodes, player base building, Alpha 4.0 timing and the Zeus roadmap.
In our terms, we use forward operating base. So those who were guessing forward operating base in chat, correct. I saw another pretty good one, field operation base, absolutely applicable name. But forward operating base is what we refer to them as.
Yes, it does.
Yes, it does. So what we can do is we can grab this and say this thing, and then we can put them into a group, call it whatever, and then we have this, and you can move the whole thing around. So yeah, we will group things a lot, which is very handy.
I would be surprised, and I'm going to say this and somebody's going to point out a software that doesn't do it, but I would be surprised in any layer-based software that doesn't allow the ability to group, because any subsequent work of significant depth and time is going to get really crazy with the layers, and you've got to be able to group layers.
TL;DRJohn's day job isn't 3D modeling or arranging levels; level designers do the white box and he follows it, since the hybrid teams share skills across disciplines.
Interestingly, this is not John's job. John's job is the 3D modeling and the overseeing of the teams who make the 3D modeling. The arrangement of these things is usually done by a level designer. I wanted a level designer and they weren't interested, so I had to settle for John.
So I would say yes and no to that. I would say that, yes, level design, they do the white box, and then we follow that as best we can. Obviously, some assets are bigger or smaller than you originally think they're going to be, and so what can we do to massage them into place?
I think that the misnomer is that you only do this or they only do that. We make hybrid gameplay teams where it's people of multiple disciplines, and the more each person understands of the other disciplines, even if it's not technically your job, the easier the shorthand becomes, the easier it is to communicate, the easier they can say, oh, like that thing up there. And he goes, yes, I understood why you did that, so I can replicate that here. Which is why John can do a show like this for us when, yes, in all likelihood, it would probably be more appropriate for a level designer to be here.
So I don't do 3D modeling really as part of my day job.
Well, you're lead now.
Leave that to the professionals.
Which you used to be.
Which I used to be.
And then you became a lead.
Yeah. And now I do the jobs that no one wants to do. No, I enjoy doing that work.
Not really. I think I am quite happy to let people... I quite like the high level, the how do things come together to become this location. The where's this going to go, how many do we want, who's involved, what kind of resource do we have, how are we splitting up the work. I really enjoy that aspect of it. And you don't really get to do that when you're a mid-level doing the modeling. So in a way, I kind of had to work up to that and then come here. I've been the lead in other places, but here I feel like I'm near the top of my game in being the best lead I can be for the people that I'm working with.
No. So when we were working on the DCs, there is a story behind this. Originally it started in concept art: they kept putting zero threes on everything, a bit of scale, a bit of a number somewhere. That's great. I think it gives a bit more reality to things. But the problem you then encounter when you're actually in development is that every artist then puts a zero three on what they're doing. So you go to a place and all you can see is zero three. Every file name is zero three. Everyone thinks they're being original. They're not. So that's why I opted for, in my first one, zero four. That's actually my favorite number. Not zero four. Four.
Oh, so that would be some sort of... It could be down to a material, or it could be that it's a mesh that's set to transparent, and then therefore you can't shoot through it. We try not to use invisible collision. And I think on some grating... So on this, for example, if the AI is below you, they can't shoot you and you can't shoot it, because the holes are too small. But on, say, a chain-link fence, that's when you might be able to have things pass through, because that's more likely to have bullets passing through it. So it's kind of finding the line of: do we want the people to fight each other through this, or is it just too much of a bad gameplay experience, so therefore we make it so that you cannot?
The status of every ship is always the same: check the public roadmap. The public roadmap is where you're going to learn of the imminent release of any ships or vehicles. I believe in just this week's roadmap update, two of the Zeuses were added to the roadmap for Alpha 4.0. Beyond that, there won't be any updates.
TL;DRNo date or plan is given for roads linking bases; some Pyro outposts have unreleased roads, while broader linking roads are hard and not a priority.
So that was interesting, doing that at CitizenCon. So not only did we make the biggest sandbox locations we've got in the game, no one cares about that. The roads thing. Yeah, don't know. I'm going to say that to that one, because I actually don't know.
People love roads. And in some locations, we do have roads. But you can't use them. They haven't been released yet.
What are you talking about?
Things on Pyro. Locations on Pyro have roads.
Like what location? Like the trading posts?
Yeah, the outposts. Some of them. Some of them have roads going through them.
They're dirt roads, but they're very clearly thoroughfares. They're not exactly like gravel.
No, they're not all tarmac. I get what you're saying. They're not these.
They're thoroughfares. You can tell immediately the intention is to drive a vehicle through there.
But the broader roads, linking places... hard maybe? We would love to, but we have more pressing concerns.
I don't know if Pyro is the right system for a series of complex interconnected highways and stuff like that. That's not really the vibe of Pyro.
TL;DRNarrative shapes level design when a narrative element is available, such as faction branding and how welcoming or intimidating a location looks, but it isn't always present.
I think it depends on the location. We think about who's going to occupy the space and then how is it going to be branded because of who's going to be occupying it. I think at CitizenCon, Adam did a presentation on Rough and Ready, who had taken over the Pyro space stations. So in a way, all the branding was done to represent Rough and Ready, their look. So there's definitely a which gang will be in here, or who will be in here, and then the branding to reflect that.
Beyond just the branding, the narrative stuff: in about three weeks on ISC, you'll see we're going to introduce you to a whole bunch of the planetside locations that you're going to encounter in the Pyro system. And you'll see immediately that the farms, the scrapyards, the trading posts that are operated by the Citizens for Prosperity are pretty differently dressed than the same type of locations that are owned by the Headhunters gang, for instance. One clearly is more interested in putting forward a good first impression to people, or the best first impression that a harsh place like Pyro will allow them. And the others are just like, nah, we're not interested at all. And then two weeks after that, five weeks from now, you start seeing the Xenothreat locations, the places where they live. They're definitely built to be a little more intimidating. It's like they want just the sight of their place to be fearful. So the answer to that question is yes. Certain narrative elements do come into play. Again, it depends on what's available. There's not always a narrative element available, but when it is available, yes.
It's three weeks until the first surface-side episode, and then it's five weeks until the second surface-side episode. We're trying to space them out.
ISC's never fully dedicated to anything. We're going to take a break. There's an episode around the top 16 or the top eight of Ship Showdown where we take a week and we're going to talk to Gavin Rothery, concept artist extraordinaire, who's visually designed more vehicles for Star Citizen than any other. We're going to take a little break that week and talk to him. But for the most part, the next one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight episodes are all dedicated to 4.0 content, with that one little break in between to support the Ship Showdown.
I'm going to do you one better, Apollo. You should check out one of the last presentations at last year's CitizenCon, where we introduced the upcoming player base building stuff. There's a big chunk of that presentation dedicated to the start of letting players add permanent locations to the 'verse. So I don't think we would do it in a way where we would let you create a thing and submit it to us and we would put it in. We're just going to give you the tools to start building places of your own. And you should check out last year's CitizenCon. I'm not telling you anything new. There's no leak or information here. I'm telling you something that came out in October last year. Check it out. That's how we're going to do it.
TL;DRAlpha 4.0 will come out when it's ready; the team is targeting a release earlier than the end of the year and working hard toward it, but that is a target, not a promise.
When it's ready. The answer to all when questions is when it's ready. Anything else is unfair. Last week, we had the 500th episode of ISC, and I said in the outro hosting that we were targeting 4.0 for something earlier than the end of the year. We are. We are all working towards a release that is sooner than the last week of December, which is, I think, what a lot of people are saying. Now, is that the same as me saying it's going to be? No, it's not. I don't know when it's going to be. The answer to when it's going to come out is always the same: when we think it's ready. But there's this thing that happens where people ask us when, and then we share: we're targeting, we're attempting, we're all working towards getting it out at this time. And then it doesn't happen at that time, and there's invariably somebody that's like, oh, CIG promised. And I'm like, that's not the definition of a promise. We told you what we were trying to do, and that's us being honest, and that's what we're honestly trying to do. Sometimes we just don't make it, because that's how game development is. So we do try to be responsible with how many times and how many places we share that information, because if you just keep saying we're trying for this, we're trying for this, and then they don't happen... There are plenty of people who preferred that I didn't say anything at all, because they get their hopes up and then it doesn't make it. So it's a catch-22. If we never say what we're trying to do, then people say, you're not sharing anything, you're not telling us what you're trying to do, you're not telling us what's going on. And then if I tell you what we're trying to do and then we don't make it, then people go, I wish he hadn't told us. I'm on year 10 of this, so I'm not super fazed by it anymore. But I'm pretty responsible with it. At the end of last year, I gave a list of things we were targeting for the first six months, and those things all came out in the first six months. And when I came back the first show of this year, I said the first six months of the year again, and those things were out in the first six months. So I try to be pretty responsible with my estimates. But yeah, we are targeting. We are trying. Everybody here is working very hard to get 4.0 out sooner rather than later. The work for 3.24 does not block the work for 4.0. They're in different streams. So we're trying real hard to get it out. We want it out. I comment on the show a lot that we have all the same conversations the backers do. We have all the same feelings the backers do. We just had them 12 weeks earlier. We all want this stuff out because we want to move to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So what I said last week still holds true. We are targeting a release earlier than the end of this year, and we're all working very hard to make that happen.
TL;DRCIG doesn't keep updating old design documents because it focuses on the upcoming releases, since designs change with people and technology, and it revisits older designs when it's time to work on them.
Well, that's what we did last week with Intro to Jump Points. We literally just went over the entire design from start to finish of the current design, after years of saying it might be this or it might be this. Why we're not constantly going back and updating the old stuff: we work on the stuff that goes out soon. We work on the stuff that's right in front of us. It's in order to get 3.24 out, in order to get 4.0 out, in order to get 4.1 after that. Those are where our focuses are, because they have to be. Those are our immediate tasks. They take up all the brain space. They take up all the effort. We work on that stuff. If you remember, the folks who were here watching the old days of Wingman's Hangar and stuff like that: Wingman's Hangar was a great show, but if we're being completely honest, a lot of things were said in that show that don't apply to Star Citizen today. The problem with projecting out too far is that people change. Ideas change. Technology changes. You discover you can do something new that you couldn't do when you had that original design, and so then your design changes. You discover that you can't do something that you originally wanted to do, and so your design changes. New people come in with brand new ideas. Nobody wants to hire into any game studio when you're full of ideas, you're full of experiences, you're full of knowledge, and come into this environment like, oh well, every decision has been made. Every decision was made in 2013 and there's nothing for you to contribute. There's nothing for you to add to the project. You're like, oh well, why am I going to be here? I'm just going to go somewhere else. So a lot of new people who join the project have new ideas, new thoughts, and we like to synthesize all that information and use it. One of my favorite things about CIG, and I've said this before, is that we're never afraid of the better idea. When the better idea comes along, the only thing that matters is: do we believe it to be a better idea? If we believe it to be a better idea, we go with that. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes we try a thing and it's not the better idea. It's like, we all thought it was the better idea; now we know it's not; let's look for another better idea. That's game development and not game construction. But that's the reason why there's not a whole lot of time... I don't want to speak for every single game studio in the world, but you'll find this at quite a lot. I've been in this industry since we launched World of Warcraft at Blizzard back in 2004. You'll find this in a lot of places: you tend to spend your energy on the things that are right in front of you. This release, next release, and the release after that, because there's too much that can change in my world, in your world, in our world, in the technological world. That means that whatever plan you make for three years from now is likely not going to be in place three years from now, because there's just too many other variables that change it. So that's the, I was going to say short answer. It's short for me. That's the Jared answer for why there's not a lot of time spent constantly updating old design docs of stuff that we're not going to be working on in the next three to six to nine months. So when it comes time to work on those things, then we revisit the design docs and we make the decisions and the updates with the people that we have, with the technology that we have, with the process that we have. And we find that that's a much more effective manner, and it reduces a whole lot of wasted time and a whole lot of wasted and unfortunate heartbreak, because we haven't filled your heads with a bunch of stuff that we're not certain we can do, which is what we used to do way back in the day. We're just more responsible with it now, is the short answer.
So we export things inside of object containers, which is essentially a group that other things can then interpret. So essentially the pivot point is... you have a pivot on a mesh, it's the same principle. So it's where you're going to rotate or transform from.