Star Citizen Live Gamedev: First Aid Made

Exactly. One of the reasons I came up with the idea originally was because whenever I do a playtest and I go and buy weapons, I always get annoyed that I have to buy a weapon and I have to scroll down and find the exact mag for the gun that I want and stuff. One of the versions we want to do is a weapons case that comes with some attachments in it, some magazines and stuff. Like a full service kit.

Exactly. Just give me, you know, we call it a first aid kit. That's legitimately what we're looking at. Like a whole kit, you would just get this item and you would have everything that you need to go out for.

Yeah, because in real life, you wouldn't go and buy each bandage individually from the shop and go to the counter and buy one bandage at a time, you'd buy a full kit with everything you needed to get started. So that's kind of the idea that started this stuff. But its applications, there's a lot. So this one in particular will be a medical one, but there's loads of things that it could be used for.

Yeah, for sure. I know the core fundamentals of 3D, so learning Blender isn't as hard as it would have been if it was the first program I ever learnt, but the operations you do in them are a lot different. We have this in 3ds Max, which is called the stack, and basically it lets us put different modifiers on. Blender has a stack as well, but I don't think it's quite as versatile. The other cool thing about Blender as well is that it's free. So, say for example, I wanted to make something that I wanted to sell online, I think I could do it in Blender and you wouldn't have to pay the prices that you have to pay for 3ds Max. That being said, there's a lot of functionality that we use that comes with 3ds Max for production, which is why concept artists will work in Blender to create things, because they're not going directly into the game, they're kind of just being used to show us what we can do.

The last show of these that we just did had Alberto Pedronio on and he spent the entire hour working in Blender. Generally, we have a magnificent tools team here who spent a good portion of the earlier years of the project creating an entire suite of tools that allow this program to connect to that program, connect to that program. And then when our friends at Montreal came on board, they took it even a step further with Mighty Bridge, which was a whole internal suite of tools, again, designed to make that bridge between a whole bunch of our different softwares and our StarEngine. If you watched the show two weeks ago, you saw how blazingly fast Alberto Pedronio was in Blender. This is a human being who merged with Blender at some point in his young existence. And everybody I talked to afterwards, even internally, we're just watching like, how does he know all the commands that fast? He knows them all. But there are people like that with 3ds Max and there are people like that with Substance Designer and stuff like that. So we try whenever possible to provide the tools and the pipelines necessary so that our artists can work in whatever software they're most efficient and most effective in. It can't always be accommodated, like you're learning Blender right now, but we do try where we can.

To be fair, I prefer 3ds Max, I'm faster in 3ds Max. Blender, I still have the training wheels on, I'm still googling every time I do an operation to work out where everything lives, because obviously once you've learned it in Max, you know where it lives in Max, but elsewhere it becomes an issue.

Believe it or not, A-Robs, one of the big jokes that I have internally is that before my time here is done, I'm going to do every single department that ever contributes to the making of a video game. And one of the last ones probably being HR. But we actually recently did one of these shows just a few weeks ago, maybe seven, eight weeks ago, maybe 10, with one of the members of our talent acquisition team. And we talked about what they look for in hiring applicants and all the kind of prerequisites and stuff. So we actually did do a version of that show. You can check it out in the Star Citizen Live playlist up on our YouTube channel. I don't remember what we called it, but it was probably something whimsical.

If you're looking to get into art, like I said, Blender is a really good place to start, completely free. You don't need to go and pay for any of it. And you can learn all the skills that we use every day at work. As long as you've got a good foundation in that and some good work to display, then yeah, you're in. I don't even think you need a uni course or anything anymore. Obviously it helps to have that time to learn, but...

I would say it's not one of those things where... going to college and getting a degree is helpful if you learn and you grow from the experience. But there are plenty of people I've known in my life, I'm almost 50 years old at this point, I've met plenty of people who have a degree and it was very clear it was purchased. They did what they had to do to get through the schooling and get their degree, but it's not a true signifier of their experience and what they know and what they can do. One of the things I think happens a lot in the games industry is you can test. You can give them projects and say, hey, go and do up this or show me a version of this and show me your process, so we can evaluate those things. So the paper degree is less useful. The knowledge you can get from it is valuable. But if you have the knowledge and you got the knowledge some other way, we don't discriminate. I don't know a lot of game studios that do.

It's the final result that matters, and putting in the effort to get there. It's a very fun job, so definitely it's worth the effort.

It's always tough. If we're being honest about that, like I said, I'm on year nine now. I'm closing in on that decade of doing two shows every single week for most of that. For a while in 2015, it was five shows every week. We think we just passed 1,500 videos that I've been the primary creative force for just for Star Citizen, just on the YouTube channel. There's a reason no other game company does weekly behind-the-scenes docu-series like ISC, and why the shows that they do weekly, the livestreams or whatever, are usually just them playing the game or something like that. That's what they can accomplish weekly. We strive to do more than that and we always have. So it's always a struggle, especially when you're showing work in progress. Everything we do is work in progress. What Lewis here is doing is the very earliest part of work in progress. Every artist would prefer that we wait until it was done before we show it to you. Every single artist would be like, no, no, no, I want it to be perfect, I want it to be done, which is what you get in virtually any other gaming project. We chose not to do that, though. So it's always a bit of a struggle to encourage folks, to enlist folks, to show their work before it's done. And then to juggle that mixture: okay, so your work is always going to be work in progress. How work in progress? Can we do it five weeks before it's gonna be ready or can we do it eight weeks before it's gonna be ready? Okay, you showed it 10 weeks before it was ready last quarter, so this quarter on the new stuff, I'm gonna give you two weeks, and the person who got two weeks last quarter, they're gonna have to show their stuff a bit earlier, like eight weeks. So there's always a very interesting negotiation process between the thing being ready, the people being available, and it having a visual component. So that always exists, never goes away. It's why I look like this. I'm only 23 years old. But does it become more difficult in quarter three? Yes, it does. But we've always risen to the challenge every other year. And like I said on ISC two weeks ago, the challenge can be an opportunity when you approach it the right way. It can be an opportunity to tell stories and to do things that we might otherwise not have thought to do. So I truly believe that adversity is the mother of creation. And some of the more interesting and weird things that I'm most proud of generally come out in quarter three, and it's born out of the biggest struggle of the year.

How long anything takes in video games is incredibly subjective. We're not telling any tales out of school there. Not only does the complexity of the item itself factor in, but the relative importance of it. If it's what we call a hero asset versus just something that's going to be seen in the background, that'll mean the fidelity has to be higher. It means there are probably more review gates involved. The point at which you say, yeah, that's it, is probably easier to get to on a background item than it is on a big hero asset. This applies to anything from characters to props to flora and fauna and spaceships and everything like that. We used to talk to Paul Jones about this quite a bit, about how long this process took. And it's always a question of how soon you zero in on the idea. Because I always like to say this is game development, not game construction. You don't always just know what the thing you're making is when you start. A lot of it is about exploring a process and looking for a feeling. And as David can attest, David's my producer, even when making videos, I will sometimes be very, very prescriptive. I want this and do it like this and put this here and put this there and then let me see it like this. And then the editors will go out and they'll do it and come back, and I go, oh, that's terrible, don't do any of that, do something new. Even after doing this for almost a decade, I don't know if it's going to work until I see it. And that applies to just about anything, especially during the concept phase. It's one of the reasons the concept phase exists, because the idea is that you've answered most of those questions during the concept phase. But as is often the case, you discover things when you get to 3D art. You discover that, oh, we didn't look at the back, or the metric for this was wrong, and stuff like that. We're looking at the concept on the screen right now.

Yeah, I don't know how the hinge works. That's something that hasn't been answered for me, so that's something I'd have to think about a bit more. Working from a concept is really nice because it becomes more about problem solving to create forms as opposed to problem solving to create functionality and the entire object. You've got a starting point, which is really, really cool. You can see these are latches. There's a handle that you can carry it with. It's got branding on it. You can tell it's a medical crate from the branding, maybe the colours, obviously the text. Whereas if I came on this livestream and I didn't have a concept, I probably would spend most of the hour just spinning.

Concept's great for a lot of reasons, but I think chief amongst them all is somebody else goes through a certain amount of hell instead of you. Even when Alberto was doing his two weeks ago, two of them had very striking silhouettes. One of them was pretty much kind of what you expected. And one of them was a disgusting homunculus that he should still feel shame about. And he knows which one that was.

I watched it and I was very jealous how fast he works. He's an absolute machine.

But see, regardless of how fast he is, a concept artist is still attempting to hit something that's in the mind of multiple art directors. Whether it's Elwyn in Austin, or it's Ben Curtis here, or it's our new person in Montreal whose name is escaping me right now, or CR, or John Crew, or maybe Ian's got a real strong opinion on this one because it plays into a gameplay that he's... So you're trying to synthesize all these ideas. Even as fast as you can be or as fast as he can be, it always comes down to how soon you get to that consensus, that you realize that thing that somebody has in their head, or sometimes help them realize that thing in their head was wrong, and go, oh, I thought that would look much better.

Absolutely. The idea for these is that, yes, they can be everything from mission rewards or mission goals. You need to deliver X number of medical supplies to this outpost on such and such. It would be pretty silly to be carrying individual med guns, just dropping off a pile of med guns and a pile of the goo vials and stuff. So yeah, crates like these can be the objects of missions. They can also be a shorthand for purchasing in game. If you know you want to stack a couple of these in different cities, in different ships, why not just utilize some of the cargo grid as storage in case you have a ship that's got a rather small internal storage. Basically, the uses of these are plenty. They also can be used, as most props are, to simply decorate locations. When you go into the med center or any place where you expect to see these things, these things can be on shelves and decorating around. Or you get to a scene where some kind of trauma triage is happening, the NPCs would have these open with the guns removed and stuff like this. So like all props, they can be used to dress and decorate a scene. They can be used in shopping to speed up that whole pipeline. And they can be used for the mission system as both deliverables and retrievals. Possibly even rewards, I suppose.

Yeah, so I can show you now it's not just a mesh. This one is something I've been developing for a little while. So the animation is obviously super, super basic right now because it is just me bashing it out in one hour on a stream. But this is its most basic form, right? You've got a box, you can pick it up, you can carry it. It's actually quite big. So the metric obviously hasn't been decided on for these yet. We're still testing it and stuff. But we'd adjust the grips. We'd probably make it a bit smaller. But then you can take it on your ship. You can open it. Opens up and then you've got your stuff inside. I can't even pick them up for some reason. Oh, I know why. Basically we have physics proxies on these, and the collision for this box at the moment is currently blocking my ability to get an accurate hit onto the items. So all I need to do is take the top of this, I'll lower it down temporarily and I'll make a more accurate one later. And that's what controls stuff like when you're getting shot at and there's a gap somewhere that you're trying to shoot through, but then the bullets just keep bouncing off the gap because the physics proxy isn't accurate. So we've got our med gun and then we can stow it away again. Same with, you've got two refills, and we can customize these. When missions gets hold of these, I'm sure they'll create, maybe a mission like Siege of Orison, maybe they have a staging area with lots of different items in crates and maybe you can have a support person running supplies back and forth, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

You have to watch out for loose components like this. I've told this story a few times, so I apologize if somebody's been watching me for nine years now and you've heard it before, but there was a time back in 2014, this was still in the Arena Commander days, people were flying a Hornet in Arena Commander and it would just randomly explode. Even in Free Flight, with nobody else shooting, in a completely open map with nothing to collide with, just randomly as it flew, it would explode. And all bug finding and fixing is based on reproduction, how often you can repro it. And they just couldn't repro it. It seemingly happened at random. Some people would fly their ship for an hour and a half and it would be fine. And some people would fly for 15 minutes and the ship would explode. And what it ultimately ended up being was that on the original flight suit, the white and red one where everybody was bald, there was a flashlight that dangled on the belt. The flashlight was physicalized. And depending on how you flew, how many G-forces you did, that flashlight would dink against the side of the Hornet for one point of damage, dink, one point of damage, dink, one point of damage, just rolling around inside the Hornet until eventually it exploded the Hornet. So that took forever to figure out. So whenever I see loose things in a box like that, that's what I always think about. You're going to need to find some way to secure those in the box.

Yeah, luckily I think with item ports we're safe with that kind of thing. This is why I'm developing this, because before that we could just physicalise everything in the box but it would be an absolute nightmare, you wouldn't be able to do anything. I think we had a problem fairly recently with something to do with the chessboard. When a ship was blown up, the chessboard inside the Mercury Star Runner... obviously now cargo kind of scatters, right? When the ship is, I think it's when it's soft-dead, all the cargo comes off the cargo grid and it kind of scatters. That includes the chess pieces on the chessboard. So whenever that chessboard was there, all the pieces of that chessboard would have to break off and it was causing some performance problems. We were trying to work out what it was.

It's always the tiniest little things. There was a version of the Freelancer, the second version of the Freelancer. Freelancer has been made three times, so remade twice. The first time it was remade, that version had 100, 200, I don't have the exact number, little rivets all around the exterior. And it was built by an outsourcer at the time because the company was so small and early. And the outsourcer took the rivet from the concept mesh and just Control-C, Control-V and put it into the in-game model. So the person did not make the rivet at a production scale. He took it from the concept. And concepts are terribly non-performant. And this individual screw had as many polys as the entire ship. So by the time the ship was done, the ship had a resource footprint bigger than the Idris. The Freelancer. And so then, during the old hangar module, people would have six, seven, eight, nine, ten of these things spawn in their hangar, and their hangars would just crash and be really, really slow. It was all because of a stupid little rivet.

We had something similar about a year ago. We have a cinder block in the game somewhere, I think it's an environment asset, and it was the highest poly mesh ever. A cinder block is a square, right? But I swear it was around 50, 60k. It was mental. And we put it in our backlog to basically work on it at some point, and I think it was Joe that did it, he went and fixed it. We crowned him as a hero that day for fixing the cinder block. But yeah, there's lots of stuff like that. You'd think it would be the big stuff, but more often than not it's the smaller bits and pieces.

Yeah. I mean, we're at 1,200, 1,300 people in five studios around the world, and maybe not all of us, but most of us are here because of our shared love of sci-fi video games. So there's the chats that go on. Actually just today, I was trying to schedule a D&D game for one of the groups, and they're like, no, Starfield comes out that day, I can't do D&D that week. And I was just like, alright, understandable. We've been on record before. We don't see it as competition. We see it as the rising tide raises all ships. Every space game out there just brings more people into the genre. And you play that game and finish that game and then go looking for the next space game. So the more the merrier in that regard. And there are plenty of people here that I know are excited for just about every game you see out there. I was just talking to somebody who's major into that ship breaker... Hardspace. I love that game. There's a sequel for Deliver Us Mars that's coming. I can't remember what it's called right now, I'm really bad with names, but I want to play that sequel.

Yeah, you gotta love sci-fi. Especially when you don't have a concept. A lot of the time, the concept team doesn't have time to do, for example, just a trash bin. We'd probably design it ourselves. So just having an eye on the kind of stuff out there really helps, especially with the design language.