Developers answer fan questions on offline ships in hangars versus open space, afterburners, NPC crew contracts, comm hailing and stealth options. A new technical hire describes his MechWarrior Living Legends mod and Crytek background, and a character facial-topology demo covers edge loops.
Yeah, let me go to our texture. I try to match it up as best I can. There's only so much you can do with low poly characters and limited joints and stuff.
Obviously there are differences. Physiology of a female is she has very thin arms, where his arms are a little bit beefier, and there's a little bit of playing around with that.
Well, all men are a little stocky there, is that what you're saying?
Yeah, but it's generally the same, looking at joint deformation, how the tendons and muscles are pulling. Another thing that we shot is, a lot of people are talking about the topology on her face, and this is our facial test. And as I scrub through here, you can see all the deformation in her skin and her neck and her muscles and veins and tendons pulling as she goes through all of her facial expressions. Scared, happy, worried, disgusted. If I just hit play, you can just kind of see how everything moves.
Okay, so what we have is we have edge loops. So what we have here is we have edge loops that come around to kind of follow the muscle that goes around the mouth, and it helps expand things like eyes, mouths. Then we have edge flow, which runs...
So these are like tracking points.
Yeah, well, it's like flow of geometry. If we don't have the flow right, when you start animating the character, it will actually break the geometry. So we follow basic muscle structure for the most part, and it helps pull the stretch and whatnot.
Yeah, buddy, if you park your ship out in the middle of space or somewhere in public, yeah, it's absolutely fair game for anybody. Now, if it's in your hangar, of course, it's always safe, because it's always safe in the hangar.
I'll tell you what's going on. The programmers are programming, the designers are designing, and the artists are artisting. So everybody's working. But the thing is, we all get together and work on the larger global picture overall and make sure there are no blocking points in any specific discipline. So yes, the dev team is working hard, and everybody's doing their own thing. And it works really well across all different locations. So of course, we're doing great.
Yeah, of course you're going to be able to purchase afterburners. Now, whether they'll be just on the main engines or they'll be on the side hardpoints, that's still TBD. We want people to be able to fight, but we don't necessarily want somebody to be jerking around the screen everywhere. So it's going to be a game balance issue. It's going to be the way we play it. But you can bet your bippy that some engines will have afterburners and some will not.
Let's just say it is safe to assume that Squadron 42 is not the last epic journey that you can take in the Star Citizen universe.
Hooking up is not encouraged, blowing up is. At least with ships blowing up, you know what I mean?
The way it's going to work with your NPC things, or the way we think it's going to work, we're still designing the thing early, is that you'll create a contract with other Star Citizens, and the contract will dictate the terms as to how that pay is going to work, as to whether they stay with you a while, when they get paid, what they get paid, what they have to do, and things of that nature. It'll have to be filed with the local government, where they enforce it. If somebody breaks that contract, then it creates bounties on them or creates other issues, so to speak. And yeah, man, if they're helping you out and they get killed, you betcha, death is part of the game. Permadeath can happen.
Yeah, evil is as evil does. So, of course, insurance is like Satan.
Yeah, the comm system is going to work a lot like the Wing Commanders or Privateers did. There'll be some hailing. You can hail somebody if you're not using VoIP and talk to them and give them commands or ask for permission to land, things like that. So it's going to be what you're probably familiar with from other Wing Commander, Privateer-style games.
No, a pocket destroyer is just a smaller version of a destroyer that'll be in the military that you'll be able to fight against. So no secret there, just a type of military craft.
Sneaking around, doing some stuff like that, it's all part of war. Anything you think you can do in war, diversion, sneaking around, combat, things like that, yes, we will absolutely allow some of that stuff going on in there. What it's going to be, well, you're just going to have to wait to play to see.
I probably came in through a non-orthodox method. It was mainly through the modding community. My brother and I actually started up MechWarrior Living Legends probably back in 2005. A lot of our skill set was actually all self-taught, so we were very proficient in everything that we were doing, from 3D modeling to level design to scripting to asset creation.
I got connected with Cloud Imperium actually when I was still working on Ryse at the time, and we were introduced to the Squadron 42 tech demo. Saw the video of that and I was thoroughly impressed, and I was really excited to get in contact with Chris in order to try to come over here and see if I can actually come and help you guys.
It was Wing Commander 3 that I actually played a little bit of, but not as extensively as Freelancer. And when I later found out that it was also Chris Roberts that started Freelancer, the whole idea of the Freelancer universe and a similar style of what Star Citizen is going to branch out to be, I was just like, awesome, I want to be a part of this. And this was something that I couldn't pass up.
Well, I was actually at Crytek for about four years. I moved over from Edmonton, Alberta. I came in from the modding community, actually, so it was kind of an unorthodox way of getting into the gaming industry.
You got to Crytek through the modding community?
Yes, exactly.
TL;DRThe speaker describes MechWarrior Living Legends, a CryEngine mod he and his brother started, with self-taught assets and modular mech weapons, which won a Mod of the Year award and helped sell Crysis copies.
It was 2009 ModDB's Mod of the Year, actually. It was called MechWarrior Living Legends. Both my brother and I actually started this mod probably way back in 2005, when we originally started looking at other game engines like the Battlefield 2142 engine, Quake Wars. We were just like, none of these engines really have the kick that we really wanted. And then we actually got a hold of the CryEngine. And then we said, wow, dude, there's so much for us to actually use with this engine. So all of our work that we did previous to that, it was all Max assets that we actually started putting into the engine. And it was all self-taught. We taught ourselves how to do the character animations, the vehicle sections. I designed a whole system for modular weapons for all the mechs. And as you know, the BattleTech universe is a very rich universe that has tons of potential for a wide variety of weapon sets that you can use with that. So we went hog wild with this and we said, you know what, there hasn't really been another MechWarrior title since MechWarrior 4, which was seven or eight years ago. So we said we want to bring back, since everything's going to consoles now, we felt very betrayed as PC gamers, and we said, we need to make something that's really rich and comes back to more of the simulation style. So we put together a whole multiplayer setup with mechs inside of it. And then we released this over to the community and we said, hey, what do you guys think? Come join us in Crysis. And still to this day, arguably, we probably helped sell more than half of the copies just because of MechWarrior for Crysis, actually.
They loved it. We got in contact with a few guys over there at Crytek. My brother first got hired on as a technical writer and then he actually moved over to the SDK team. I was working at BioWare at the time as QA, but then they said they actually wanted to pull me over as well, so I got pulled over as a designer onto another project, which eventually led me over to Crysis 2, and then a little bit of Crysis 3, and then later on to the Ryse project as well.
Daily basis, what I'm doing is, well, I'm coming down to Austin to come help you guys out with everything to do with the technicals. What I'm doing with you guys is helping you guys with all parts of the engine, since I've touched basically everything that we had, from characters to weapons to the vehicle system, which I totally, totally love, since you guys are already doing this whole modular weapon setup.
I'm looking at talking with Chris to actually base myself in California right now, but I don't know. Austin seems very, very beautiful. It's very, very tempting.
TL;DRChris is assembling a strike team of engine experts, including someone from Crytek, moving between Austin and Montreal to help with engine implementation of dogfighting, vehicles and weapons.
So what Chris was telling me about how this is actually all going to be set up: it's also Paul Reindl from Crytek as well that's also come on board with us. Chris is putting together a strike team that's actually going to be moving around from Austin as well to Montreal to really help out with the parts of the game that really, really need help in terms of the engine implementation. So everywhere from the dogfighting setup to the vehicles to any of the weapons that also need a little bit of help. We'll be there with the best minds that the industry has to offer, with CryEngine expertise following suit. So having Chris at the helm, being able to direct us where we need to help you guys out. I already met tons of you guys down here in Austin. You guys are great guys to work with, and I can't wait to continue helping you guys out more.