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Calling All Devs ·
Published on this date.2018-11-19
· 5 Q&As

Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Solar System Scrutiny

Developers cover inherited momentum between ship and EVA grids, which they say should work and is a bug if not. They discuss restructuring the locations teams, building landing zones like Lorville, and the 3.3 telemetry page, which shows performance and hardware data.

Transmission log

Full answers

Do you plan to implement inherited momentum? For instance, when a player jumps off a ship in motion, they become static while that ship continues its journey through space.

TL;DRPhysics developers say momentum should already carry between ship and EVA grids, so if it isn't working it's a bug that testers should report through the Issue Council.

Todd PapyDesign Director

So I spoke to Mikhail and Chris Rain about this, our physics gurus. So they said that all the provisions are there, and if it's not working, then basically it's a bug. So it should inherit basically momentum between the two grids and it should work. He says like when you're going out and you're flying and then you go from EVA, that should work. If it's not, then it's a bug. So I expect the Evocati to basically call out any of those issues. And then obviously, I think when we start talking about QT and those things, it might be that we start seeing where things break down or the human that just jumped out just goes and slams into the planet.

Todd PapyDesign Director

So hopefully that answers their question. And then if they see anything, then send it on over to the community guys.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

The Issue Council. Use the Issue Council.

Todd PapyDesign Director

Yes, Issue Council.

Calling All Devs·
Published on this date.19 Nov 2018
PhysicsShips

What are you doing for Star Citizen now?

TL;DRLuke Davis is restructuring the locations teams into dedicated groups, such as one for the Lorville central business district, each with its own artists, designers and tech, to build locations more efficiently.

Luke DavisLocation Producer

So right now, my primary focus is basically to help restructure the locations teams and make sure that we have what it takes to build the universe that Chris and Erin and everyone is expecting us to have. And so, to elaborate a bit on that, typically we've worked as one big art team, one big design team. And we're trying to move away from that purely because of how much we work on at any one time on the game, and what we're trying to do is essentially pull the resources together, go, right, okay, you know what, we want a team to work on a landing zone, and then the next landing zone, and then the one after that, and then we want to do the same with planets, the same with space stations, and the same with missions, really. And we want to be able to go, right, landing zone, these are the artists you can pull from, these are the life designers, level designers, system designers, this is the tech you need, this is the UI you need for it, and basically pull them all in under one little group and call them the landing zone team. And they're the guys that basically move together and sprint together and basically work towards one common goal. So for example, right now, the biggest priority is doing the central business district for Lorville. So right now we have a team called... CBD, exactly. So all that right now is under a team called LZ1. So my primary focus has been essentially helping to set up the teams, helping drive the teams with my fellow producers, and of course the leads in charge of the individual areas. And yeah, that's pretty much it. I of course have Ben Parry, who's now more involved on the ship side, working alongside Mark Hong. So I still have the overview on basically all the content side. Right now it's about, right, we know how to make a ship. Ships are doing fairly well. How do we get locations out the door? How do we build the gold standards? How do we get a proper schedule for all that together? So I hop around where it's needed, Jared.

Calling All Devs·
Published on this date.19 Nov 2018

How fast do you think we'll be able to create a solar system once all the tools are in place for creating them?

TL;DRNo time is given for building a solar system; the team says it depends on the system's size and complexity, but new pipelines, reusable common elements and more hiring should make each one faster than the last.

Luke DavisLocation Producer

Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I think just understanding the backstory and why I'm on locations right now hopefully gives you a bit of insight and everyone a bit of insight as to why it's quite a difficult question to answer, because we've been trying to get these locations out on time with everything that's needed in it. And I think as a backer community and everyone, they can see when we brought Levski out, it was a bit bare bones. It was very nice to look at. It was great. There could be more to do there. And we know there is more out there in terms of gameplay that we have to offer. And I think the first proper gold standard landing zone that we're bringing out is Lorville. And that was quite a bit more complex in terms of how much goes into it. We're learning a lot. And I think we discovered that shift on the ships. If you remember the Gladius, we did the damage states. It looked very new and different to what we had done before. And we were like, right, we've got it. We know what a ship is now. And ships after that were like, right, yeah, we know how to schedule them. We can build a pipeline from it. And now we know, we can tell everyone when they're getting certain ships. And obviously we have our fun discussions of going, well, is it in white box? Is it in gray box? And really on the locations pipeline, because of how much the tech has changed. If you think about just the planet tech by itself, a few years ago, that wasn't even a thing. And now it's what we're centering a lot of it around. And we have our procedural tech group, rest stops and our outposts and underground facilities. And basically, we're trying to aim to go, right, Star Citizen at one point is going to have 100 systems. How do we get there without being in development for 100 years, right? We need to be able to scale up. So a lot of the past year or two really has been about what tech do we need? How do we prove a lot of this out? And I think we've seen that on the rest stop side of things where we showed it off and we've gone, here's a variation of it, here's what the procedural layout tool can do in terms of you go to a rest stop and the interior may not always be, the shop may not always be at the same place, or that particular rest stop may not have the same shop that you're going for. So we've actually learned a lot. And this year has been about, as I said, restructuring the teams and making sure that, right, you as a landing zone team, here's a pipeline. We've created a pipeline this year, and it's similar to what we have on the ship side. We know pre-production, we know white box, and there's many fun, colorful boxes that I'm sure you would love, Jared, to slot certain locations into. We make sure that we don't move into a certain thing until we've done the previous steps, so to speak, right? Like an obvious one being making sure there's a level design document before moving on to the next bit and making sure there's pre-approved concepts. Everyone's on the same page on what characters, mission givers and bartenders we're going to have, what are going to be in all the shops. It sounds a bit obvious when you think about it, but it's like you pull everything together and you make sure, right, as a company priority, you want to work on CBD, you want to work on Area18. What does it mean? Get it out there. And there's actually stuff to do and everything's being considered, right? I think one of the good examples being our landing zones at the moment, where we put a schedule in place for Lorville and we're like, ah, we have to consider this and this and this and this. And this year we went, right, you know what, we actually need to start making common elements. So common elements are things like hangars and habitation rooms or transit, and essentially it's areas that we can make once. And let's say we have a utilitarian space station and if we have the hangar, we can plug it into another utilitarian, like a landing zone for example, right? And anything that needs that hangar, we can reuse that. And if we wanted to make a high-tech version of it or a super modernism version of it, we could basically go and create that visual archetype for that, knowing we've done the design for it, we know the metrics, we know what goes into it, and now it's just simply skinning it from an art point of view. And basically all that is so we can speed up development later down the line. So when we move on to something like Terra, we can start creating the common elements for the area and then we go, right, we simply plug them into certain areas, and then everything that's unique to the area is still very unique. We've learnt a lot on that side. If you look at Area18 now, we didn't know previously that we wanted to have a transit system and a spaceport in Area18, right? But now we do, based on all the lessons we've learnt on Lorville and based on what Chris, Erin, Todd, and Tony, everyone is wanting to aim for as a vision for the game. And we're taking that into account now. Even just a year ago, that wasn't a thing for Area18. It wasn't a thing when Area18 was in the game initially. And now that we're reconsidering it, we're even learning things in terms of, right, to make it run really well, there's changes in layout. And we've learned a lot on how to optimize our landing zones as well to make sure that there's a much better frame rate on that front. So there's a lot. I know I'm going in a bit of detail there, but even something like a system, right? Consider you have a big system versus a small system, something like Pyro, which is less inhabited. It has a small planet base, versus something like Terra, which is a lot more populated. It has multiple landing zones, even just on one planet, right? It's a lot more complex than something that we've done before. And based on everything we're learning now, we can take that into account in the schedule. Even down to space stations, we know how to do a space station, we know how to do an outpost, we know how to do an underground facility, right? And now we can go, right, let's make a utilitarian version of an outpost, right? And then we can put it into the correct system. We can make a super modern version of a space station and then it'll go in the correct system. And you won't be left going into a nice, shiny, going into Terra seeing old style space stations. You would want to see what you've come to expect. And also, right now, to elaborate on the fact that we did split the resources in terms of being focused on specific teams, it's also about going, right, we actually want more teams so we can do more. We have one landing zone team, but two, and we want a third one. And then we can have multiple things in development at the same time. But a lot of that is depending on our current hiring rate. And we are having probably the biggest push towards hiring. We've done quite well this year. And obviously we're trying to make sure that Squadron have everything they need as well. So they finally have, we've given them what they need, and now we're going, right, let's hire everyone we need to basically make the game that we're envisioning on that front. And I think once we get into the motion, if you take an LZ1 team, for example, they have a backlog that they're working from. And once we get through their task list, we can build up the team velocity, so to speak. And then we know how quickly they get through one landing zone, one space station and whatnot as a team together, and not just let's make art. Oh, and then design jump on it. Oh, then tech art jump on it and tell us what we need to change. Oh, and then we go back to art. And I'd say now we're following a pipeline, and we're doing it properly.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

You used the word velocity, and the word I like to use is momentum. Momentum is so important in game development. We've now built our first one, and that took this long, however long this was. And the next one, hopefully, if we're doing everything right, will take this long because of what we learned from the last one. And the one after that will take this long, and the one after that will take this long. So I think the short version of how long do we think it'll take to create a solar system is, one, it depends on what the solar system is, because not all solar systems are created equal as far as their needs. But two, where it falls on that platform, because every time we do this, we're going to get faster, we're going to get better, and we're going to get more efficient at it. So how long? Less than the one before it. We feel safe with that?

Luke DavisLocation Producer

I think that's a very fair assessment to make, but at the same time, we're probably adding more in than, Area18 the very first time it went in the game compared to what Lorville is now, there's a lot more. But as you said, I wouldn't say that's necessarily more time because we actually know how to build it. We have a pipeline and we're doing them a lot quicker than we have ever done before. Even looking at the schedule and how much we have just of last year, if the community realized, oh, how much did we actually make last year compared to how much we're making this year, even on the ship side, we are getting a lot quicker, and you can definitely expect that into next year as well.

Calling All Devs·
Published on this date.19 Nov 2018

When 3.3 dropped, we introduced our brand new telemetry page, which Chris debuted at CitizenCon this year. I want to ask, quite simply, how does that work?

TL;DRThe telemetry page replaces fixed minimum and recommended specs with an interactive graph of collected performance and hardware data, letting players log in and compare their own machine's results against other players' CPUs and GPUs.

Keegan StandiferTelemetry / Data

So one of the most common questions that we get is about performance in our game and what it takes as far as hardware to run a game that's so demanding like Star Citizen. We used to generate minimum and recommended specifications as a guideline that we could distribute out to our players so they could generalize how they should build their machines or what kind of hardware they would need to run our game. Now, previously, this worked to an extent, but we wanted to refine this process and give the players more insight into this data. So we've taken some of the data that we collect when it comes to performance, like frames per second, as well as the hardware the players have, and we've summarized this in an interactive graph that players are able to view to see where certain performance falls in respect to things like your CPU and your GPU. Now, when you log into our website, you're able to look at your own summary of your performance and hardware that's generated from the data that you send during your gameplay session and then compare that against other players. So you can see exactly where your specific machine falls against those with very high range CPUs as well as the average. And the same thing goes for GPUs.

Calling All Devs·
Published on this date.19 Nov 2018
Networking & performance

Are you excited to finally get this [telemetry page] out into players' hands?

Keegan StandiferTelemetry / Data

Yeah, I definitely think our player base is very data oriented. They like seeing the numbers. They like knowing exactly how things perform in comparison to each other. They want to be able to make the best decisions and well-informed decisions about things like hardware. And I think this definitely falls in line with their ideas.

Calling All Devs·
Published on this date.19 Nov 2018
Networking & performance