Published on this date.2017-04-21

· 6 Q&As

Happy Hour Gamedev w/ Sean Tracy & Eric Kieron Davis

Sean Tracy and Eric Kieron Davis discuss the planned space whale, whose technical setup resembles the shopkeeper (synced, AI-driven, animated, deforming), plus damage states and lighting. They also cover resource conflicts in the public schedule and its V1/V2/V3 tiers.

Eric Kieron Davis Sean Tracy

Transmission log

Full answers

You mentioned R&D, and that's important because there's nothing in Star Citizen now like that. Is there anything in Star Citizen [like a space whale]?

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

No, and that's why I put the R&D phase within there. There's nothing like it at all. The closest thing would be a shopkeeper, actually. In terms of the technical implementation, it's easily the closest. It's the shopkeeper. It's in the PU. It's seen in multiplayer. It's all synced. It does AI. It animates. And it deforms. So, I mean, it's very much the same. You heard it here: space whale shopkeeper. Pretty much the same.

Published on this date.21 Apr 2017

NPCs & AI Development process

Will the space whale have damage states?

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

Oh, we're going to get there, I think. We're going to have to talk about that because that's in the VFX side of it.

Eric Kieron DavisSenior Producer

And that's a question we should ask everybody else.

Published on this date.21 Apr 2017

Does lighting fall under VFX?

Eric Kieron DavisSenior Producer

Yes and no. I mean, it depends on where you work and what you define it by. But right now, technically, our lighting team works with the environment team.

Published on this date.21 Apr 2017

Would Vinny be able to find that [the image of the oversized space worm]?

TL;DRThe image lives on an internal Confluence bug page of visual bugs that new staff are pointed to; it can't be linked publicly, though they'd like to share it in a behind-the-scenes piece someday.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

Yeah.

Eric Kieron DavisSenior Producer

Well, it's on Confluence.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

Would Vinny be able to find it on Confluence? Just tell him it's on the bug page, the Things We've Seen page. By the way, I maintain a page within CIG. It's a very fun page, and any new staff that comes in, I point them at this one first, and it has the best visual bugs that we've had. And they are just awful and scary.

Eric Kieron DavisSenior Producer

And sometimes it's not just us, it's from you guys. It inspires us every day to keep working.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

No, and we can't give you a link to the page, obviously. It's on our internal Confluence. And to be fair, I'm not sure I'd ever want to share a lot of that stuff.

Eric Kieron DavisSenior Producer

Maybe in a behind-the-scenes one day in the future.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

Oh, totally. One of these ATVs or something once the game's all set.

Eric Kieron DavisSenior Producer

An un-art book.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

An un-art book. I want to make that book, but I want to get other companies in on it.

Published on this date.21 Apr 2017

Art & graphics Development process

What are the three fields that have red people [icons in the schedule]?

Eric Kieron DavisSenior Producer

Right now our character artist, because I have not leveled resources, is overbooked. This person is working at the same time on everything.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

On different tasks.

Eric Kieron DavisSenior Producer

On different tasks. So we're going to level that resource.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

So it's called a resource conflict.

Published on this date.21 Apr 2017

Development process Art & graphics

Is the V1, V2, V3 [on the public schedule] actually a tiering, rather than a whole version of the feature getting refactored?

TL;DRV1/V2/V3 is a tiering: a first implementation of the simplest features, not the end, with later steps planned so features can be pulled in or pushed out to build the schedule.

Eric Kieron DavisSenior Producer

Sean, our tech content director, thought of versioning like he should think of versioning. And for this, there's many ways to do it in project management: versioning, tiering, must-haves versus nice-to-haves. There's all kinds of words we use. But a tier one is like, this is the initial implementation that gets some of the very simplest stuff we want, but it's not the end. We're not done. And we're planning out the next two, three, four, five steps, so we understand what can come in. And then we can pull features in. We pull this one up, we push that one out. And that's what ultimately gives us a schedule. And what I wanted to put up here is what you guys saw that we have up on our schedule, and that's some of what got us to this point.

Sean TracyTechnical Director of Content

And each one of those features has a whole breakdown like we've just done.

Eric Kieron DavisSenior Producer

Each one of these parts is that thing we just did, at all different levels, because some of these are per discipline. So when you see one that's just networking, maybe it just has their interdependencies. It doesn't include everything. And then there's sprint planning or feature planning or goal teams, and they're going from start to finish across all teams. So this is trying to give you a semblance of here's our targets per discipline, per pipeline, of what we're trying to achieve this year. And we'll put them in when they make sense.

Published on this date.21 Apr 2017

Release schedule Development process