Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Environments of Alpha 3.5

So when we're exploring these things early on, we take a lot of the lore into account. We see what is this thing? What parts of it can we do? What parts of it are going to require a little bit more research? And I think our main focus for 3.5 has really been taking the planet tech and trying to make a completely hard surface industrial buildings planet with it. So our main goal was really to try and get the planet tech to do something quite different that it hadn't done before. So with that in mind, absolutely we can R&D all kinds of different things that could work, with possible oceans and things like that. But our main focus is really trying to get this tech working in a way that would really benefit a whole city planet. And that required a lot of investigation into how we're going to scatter these things, what kinds of biomes can we do with this in mind? So the first early on stuff that I did, actually, I did some tests after CitizenCon 2017 on the industrial side of the planet. And I had all kinds of different really random geometry and buildings being scattered around. And it was like, okay, so we can definitely use it for these big industrial areas. So when we actually started tackling ArcCorp, it was like, okay, so I know that that's going to be one of the things we can do. So let's push that. Let's push the planet tech to do all these really cool big plates. And as you R&D, there's a lot of stuff that you go, it would be cool if I tried a little bit of this here and then a little bit of this here. But obviously, the more that you want to do, the bigger the schedule gets. And obviously, there's only so much time to do these kinds of things. So we try to focus down on what are the main areas of ArcCorp and what can we do with the planet tech for this release?

It was probably one of the most challenging things we've ever had to do, creating a whole planet covered in buildings. We did a lot of pre-production prototyping, tried different things with it. And we're using, Luan could speak to this more, but we're using the planet tech, which was built originally for organic stuff. And it's actually easier to do the organic stuff like the terrain and mountain ranges, because your eye doesn't pick out things that you'd notice when it's hard surface, when it's all solid blocks of buildings. And that was one of the biggest problems, trying to use the system that basically scattered rocks and other objects and try and do that with buildings, because the first thing we found was it looked very jarring, if that makes sense.

And another thing, trying to adapt that tech, was we knew we'd have to integrate with certain more bespoke areas of ArcCorp. So, for example, with Joel, I worked quite closely when he was doing the prototyping of the spaceport exterior. We worked closely on, okay, so what do these materials look like? What do we want out of these materials? So then he'd be like, oh, it'd be cool if we could do something like this. I'm like, yeah, actually, that could work on the industrial side of things. So it's about reaching out to the team and everybody that's working on ArcCorp and going, okay, how is my stuff going to integrate with yours? And how is all of this going to work together to create this focused tier zero version of ArcCorp, essentially?

Yeah, sure. Maybe not abandoned parts of the city. I don't think that makes much sense for ArcCorp. But definitely abandoned buildings and stuff like that work. We have the technology to do that with, say, underground facilities on other planets and moons. It would just be empowering the mission feature teams to be able to create these missions, and then there might be a small amount of content to be created to embed these into ArcCorp properly, but definitely we have the ability to do that and we'll probably look into something in the future about that. Shipwrecks as well, we've got derelicts on moons and other planets. So again, we have the foundations to do it and it'd be interesting to look into doing that for ArcCorp as well.

Yeah, I think whole abandoned cities is probably not within the lore of ArcCorp, as it's a corporate planet and it's kind of hard to imagine. Maybe if it's part of the lore, but I would definitely see abandoned buildings, things like that, like slum areas that could be explored.

Yes, it is very red. There's been some great jokes about the guys who own the shares in red paint being quadrillionaires. We had a billion and one things to think about when making ArcCorp, and definitely diversity, not just in color, but buildings, sizes, shapes, style. But we just wanted to keep it to a billion and one things, not a billion and two things. But it's actually something we've been actively working on now, not for 3.5, but for a patch release. So we're actually implementing more color variation as a base for diversity, but we've been working on some more building types, so we're putting those in, and more tile variation, so different areas of the city actually do look a bit more unique from other bits, and big kind of megastructures, not as big as the CBD of Hurston, but some more unique kind of areas, a bit more circular shapes going on there. So hopefully post-3.5 there'll be some more things to discover and more interesting things to look at. So we totally get the criticism that everything's red, but like I said, we had a million and one things to think about. So with that, we played it kind of safe, but we have been implementing some more diversity to Area 18 and the other cities.

I think for the larger greener areas, we definitely had some ideas and concepts. I know there was a question about rooftop gardens and penthouse kind of things. It's another cool thing that, one of our goals was we want to land on pretty much every building, at least every building that you can land on. So that's why we came up with, let's just make sure there's landing pads on all of the rooftops, and those are modular locations. So there's no reason why they always have to be landing pads. There could be a rooftop garden or a penthouse suite or something or a swimming pool, whatever. As long as it fits in with the lore and works in the location, we can swap out one of those rooftops for something maybe a little bit more interesting, a little bit more unique. So I definitely see the potential for rooftop gardens and more greenery there. I'll let Luan speak for the larger kind of parks and things like that.

When you do something like that, I've tried a couple of ideas out, and when you put something that interesting on the planet, how do you do it in a way that a player goes, okay, that's cool, that's a park there, and not in a way that the player goes, well, I'm going to go there? Because there's only so much resources that we can apply towards making something like that at high detail, in a way that holds up, in a way that there are reasons to go there. So it's definitely something we looked into and something that we can look into, but it's all a matter of trying to see where resources are and where we can spend it as smart as possible. You can definitely imagine, for the atmosphere of ArcCorp, there's probably some huge atmosphere processor somewhere, or a couple of them. Again, back in CitizenCon 2017, I tried a couple of things that didn't quite make it into the demo. There was this enormous structure, like three times the size of the Hurston CBD building, and they were arrayed in a way that it kind of looked like they could be atmosphere processors. But if you think about the resources that it would take to put something like that there, it's like, okay, we can spend some time and make that visual interest, area of interest, or we could go ahead and focus a little bit more on what these buildings look like, on the quality of these buildings near Area 18, the tiles and things like that. But it's certainly something that we can look into and it's something that I think is definitely very interesting. I'd love to see some of that stuff, some of these parks and little green areas and just different pockets of color, where you go, hmm, what could that be?

It's a hard thing to balance, because I understand the instinct, when you've built a 360-degree planet, to just go in and spend all your time making it as detailed and as capable as what would be the main world of something else, but we've got to make hundreds of worlds.

We would love to go deep into ArcCorp straight away, and if the game was just ArcCorp, we could make a whole game out of that, but it's more than that. It's lots of different planets to visit, so we've got to scale accordingly. Every location we look at, we obviously try to do more stuff than we probably eventually do. We've got tiers, and there are things that are must-haves, we need to have this kind of thing in, and then there are things that we can try and get in now, or if it doesn't, then we can go back and get it in at a later date. We're always trying to future plan our locations so there's stuff to continue with.

It was actually a bit of both, really. Obviously there was an obvious difference in the art style of the buildings. That was just an artistic decision. We wanted to make the buildings feel a little bit more realistic. We were happy with the demo, but some of the buildings got very noisy and very top heavy and very kind of oddly shaped. So we kind of wanted to simplify them back a little bit. Some of the new buildings we are going to be putting in that I spoke about before are kind of a little nod towards more of that style. But it was an artistic decision to simplify them a little bit. It actually helped us as well with performance, because we could put the detail where we wanted to. The old ones had detail all over the building. So we kind of picked our battles and made sure we put the polys where we wanted to put them. And there was a little bit of technical as well. With the demo, the sun was in a fixed position so we could show it off in the best light. When we actually started to look at this as a rotating planet, we wanted it to look the best at all possible levels. We're thinking about you're walking around in Area 18, the sun's moving around, you're flying around, you're on a transit system, you're in orbit. We're trying to get it to look the best in all situations. If you concentrate just on one level of detail, you could nail that and get it to look perfect, but then other levels of detail don't look so good. There's a real balancing act getting it to look right. The other thing was, in the demo we used much smaller tiles, so it's very grid-like. You could see the trenches do these zigzags. We wanted to enlarge the tiles, make them slightly more bespoke in the sense that you're not recognizing, it's kind of like very old school SimCity, where it's in small little things and you can recognize this is a city block and that's the next city block, and it's kind of weird looking. So we kind of expanded the size of the tiles, and that allows us to do a bit more hero stuff with that and some larger shapes. I understand art is always subjective. So I understand if people are like, oh, we kind of liked the old art style compared to the new, it's all subjective. But there's a bit of both really, both artistic and technical reasons.

Sure. We tried to use larger brushes to build these locations out. In past locations, it could get very granular, like a hallway would be made of a lot of small pieces, and that would work well for these interior locations. But when you're on ArcCorp, the level at which you see these locations can vary from up close to low atmosphere to very far away. So we had more view distances to consider when we're making these locations. So one of the approaches we used was to just combine a lot of these brushes into bigger brushes to reduce the draw calls, which is one of the main killers of frame rate, draw calls. And we could get away with a lot more aggressive LODs, because ArcCorp, it's a planet full of a city, so it looks very busy on its own, so we could get away with a lot more aggressive LODing, because at a distance the details just kind of blur together and you get just this big picture of a city. You're not really focusing on, oh, there's this one tree out in the middle of the open, and I can see on one LOD state it's got leaves and the next it doesn't. But because it's surrounded by a lot of noise, we can go a bit more hard on our LODs as well.

Well, you just said it yourself, every time we put a patch out, something improves. We're always testing things in-house. We're always looking at the planet tech and going, how can we improve this? How can we improve that? And we can definitely take the lessons we've learned from ArcCorp and pass it down to the next planet and the next moon and the next... It just comes down to really the things that we can learn from this release and applying it to the next. So we're always improving these things, and there's absolutely no reason why we couldn't look into something like that. The planet tech is evolving a lot, and a lot fast, because we need to be pushing out lots of planets. So it's all about learning these lessons with the way that we scatter objects, the way that we create different ecosystems, the way they blend together, the way they're colored. The way that the assets are colored, as a matter of fact, I tried some very organic style asset coloring in ArcCorp. So you could have areas of ArcCorp that were more driven by the global color. So you could have buildings that were more gray, buildings that were a little bit green, a little bit of this. But the problem is, because that tech was made for the organic stuff, it's not like you get a couple of nice panels that are green or a building specifically that's green. No, it's kind of just more like this blurry gradient that's just applied. But with that, we can look into how we can tint these assets and go into the next moon or planet, whatever, and be like, okay, so we can do it this way. Let's try and push the tech this way. By learning all those things, these moons will just inherently get better and better together as we go along. So yeah, it's definitely something we can look into.

Absolutely. So early on, when I was trying to figure out how some of these buildings would scatter, I looked into the way that they scattered the rocks, and I was in constant contact with DE, we always say DE, but it's Germany, the DE team, Frankfurt. I was in constant contact with Frankfurt about, okay, so how would you guys array these rocks in a way that it would almost look like an actual formation of things? So all of the exploration that they did there, I applied onto ArcCorp. So now there's no reason that we can't take, okay, so we know we have these enormous meshes, I'm talking one of those plates is anywhere between two to six kilometers. Now it's scattered in a way that it goes a little bit more random. So it's smaller, bigger, smaller, bigger, there's levels to them. But there's no reason we can't take that information from that R&D and apply it to, say, we want to start scattering some enormous rocks somewhere on a planet somehow, some enormous cliff faces, I don't know, any kind of thing like that. All of the exploration that I do here also involves there, and all the exploration that they do there will come back to us. And it's just like I said, everything just improves with time together. It's all these little pushes. You learn a little bit here, learn a little bit there. And that applies outside of planets as well. Like, are you doing R&D on how do we do materials for the spaceport? Well, okay, I can do that in the ArcCorp buildings. How are we going to do windows there? Well, I can do that in the ArcCorp buildings in the industrial areas. How are we going to do some of the VFX here? Well, the VFX is done this way. Let's push it in a way that can evolve into maybe a planet that brings both of these elements together. So it's all about this R&D process that's just constantly happening on all kinds of levels.

You could almost flip the question the other way around. Like I was saying earlier, it was how do we make a technological planet from an organic planet system? And just to add to what Luan said, with the rocks and scattering and things like that, with scattering small rocks, you don't need to see small rocks further away, so they would LOD out and disappear very quickly. But something we really had to push for was, as soon as you make those small rocks buildings, it's like, well, you can't have a building a mile away just popping in. So we had to push that view distance for miles and miles and miles out. So you've got the horizon and you're still seeing these buildings.

There was a time where I pushed it so far that for a week or so the editor was stalling, and people were trying to work in ArcCorp, and I was just there like, I'm sorry, I was just trying some stuff.

There will be a lot of LODs in the grand scheme of things. Generally, we have about five LODs per asset. If you calculated all the LODs, five LODs per building, it gets big, but at the same time, with the procedural tech and the planet tech, we just have to load this building once and then it's loaded there and it's loaded there, and we get a lot of reuse out of that one building. But it's definitely a good portion of the time doing these LODs and optimizing it. Obviously, if it's an interior space that you don't really see from far away, we don't have to do five LODs, because even on low spec you probably never see LOD 5 or LOD 4. But definitely the buildings, we went right up to the cusp so we could get the most draw range out of them.

And that goes back to the previous question as well, about how we changed the art style, and it's a bit of both. We just wanted to make it look like this, and a bit of performance. The way that our LOD system works, it's all about getting these very small polygons and averaging them out. And these buildings are pretty large. So one thing that we could take into consideration is, okay, LOD 0, which is the most detailed that you see, would still have polygons that are large enough so that you see LOD 0 for actually quite some time, like maybe a kilometer, I don't know, like 500 meters. Whereas if we had lots of little details, lots of antennas, little polygons, little things, little cables, that thing within two meters would just go pop.

For example, on the rooftops, so we've got the buildings and we've got these rooftops on them and you can walk around them. So there are higher density polys and draw calls than the side of the building, because you can fly past the side of the building, but you can't walk on it. So it had to be high detail, but we've got to make sure, because we've literally got thousands of rooftops in one city or a collection of cities, for example around Area 18. So basically with each LOD, you need to reduce the amount of polys and draw calls. So with the lowest LOD, LOD 5, you're looking for it to be the most simple object, like a box with one material, so one draw call. But even that, it still costs: if you've got thousands of these, it's still a thousand draw calls. So in addition to LODing, we made sure things that were small and couldn't be seen from a distance, not only were they LODed, but they just disappeared when you didn't need to see them. So the rooftop has tons of railings going around, and I calculated, just for one railing type, there was about 60,000 on ArcCorp or something like that.

If you look at the planet and you see what the stats are saying, you're looking at millions of objects sometimes.

It's insane. I think when we added ArcCorp in, we added over 100,000 entities into the PU, which was fun for the engineers. But with the railings and small things, the railings are very thin objects, and from a distance they get to like a pixel thin, and then you don't need to see them. So we set the view distances on those kind of objects very low. So if you're on one rooftop and you're looking over to another one, you're not going to see the railings anyway because they're really thin. So we don't draw them. We just turn them off. So it's those kind of tips and techniques that will help even further. Good LODs is one thing, but making sure we've got a system in place that doesn't even draw them is even better.

Just one more thing to add is something that we want to look more into is hierarchical LODs. Basically we will merge LODs together. So if you've got five buildings on a tile or a hundred buildings in a city or whatever, when you're up close to it, you're seeing the building at LOD 0, and the further you get away, each building LODs down, and then we will merge those buildings together as one mesh, which will then save more draw calls. So it's something that we want to get into more in the future.

So if you think about it this way: let's say that we have to design a map, a texture map, that tells the ecosystem there's more rocks here, less rocks here. And then within that system, you have something else that goes, okay, these rocks are scattered in this kind of way. You're actually talking about a lot of man hours actually making this content, when in reality what we want to do is make as much of that procedural as possible. So as we evolve this tech, like I said before, as we take these lessons that we learned and we make the tech better, this stuff is going to come back to the moons, and we're going to definitely start addressing some issues, or even introducing others, because you can never predict how these things are going to go. But it's really about how can we make this as expandable and scalable as possible. So right now, there's a few ways that we can scatter rocks, but we're definitely looking into how we can make that system more procedural and even more fun, both visually and gameplay-wise, for the player. It's definitely something we're looking into.

So right now what you're seeing, in the simplest of terms, is an industrial area and a populated area. Within this industrial area, I looked into it and I was like, okay, we can have a more plated area. We can have a more dense building area with more chimney stacks. So maybe that's something that the player can fly around. But as we develop these things, we try a few different things and we go, okay, maybe there's an area with some really large buildings, some atmosphere processors. Maybe there's an area with almost nothing. It's just flat. It's almost like a desert, but of machine-made objects. So again, it's a question of, okay, we have all these things we want to do. Let's pick what the best representation of ArcCorp at its base level is. And for us right now, that is these big plated industrial areas, some pockets of lots of pipes and chimneys, this more dense industrial situation that you've got going on there, and then some really low suburbs and then some more downtown-like suburbs. So as you look around Area 18, you can see some really flat suburbs, and then you can see some bits that raise up a bit, raise up and down. And that's our idea of biome diversity for ArcCorp: how can we take these different ecosystems and blend them in a hard surface kind of way. But it's just about focusing on what we want ArcCorp to be right now. There's no reason we can't look into other things.

To add to that, like I mentioned before, we're looking into some more unique superstructures and buildings. At the moment, for me anyway, it's more about giving more meaning to going to an area. Like, why would I want to fly to the industrial area? Because I think Luan did a really good job on that, but at the moment there's no reason to go there. So we want to give the Live designers and the mission designers the tools to be able to plonk an area down and go, okay, here's a cool mission to do. So again, we've got the really early instances of that with Pacheco's missions and some drop-off areas. But going forward, we want to have a bit more areas to go to, and we want to show off these superstructures, industrial areas, and give meaning to it. With the procedural tools that we're using to generate the interior of space stations and things like that, that's where we're kind of looking into working with Live Design to create interesting locations and reasons to go there.

Sure. I guess when we first started the spaceport on ArcCorp, we looked at what we did with Lorville, and one of the things we wanted to do was have a bigger read from further away. So there were clear sections for landings and clear sections for what size ship you are as well. So as you make your approach, you can start to adjust accordingly. That's twofold as well. Number one, that's just for a bit more visual clarity, that it's a lot more open, but also for performance as well. It aligned to what we're doing with the rest of the structures, like Luan was saying, where the old buildings and stuff like that were very dense, and they LOD out really quickly. So these larger structures obviously help with visual read from a distance, but they also played nice in optimization and just being able to be drawn from further away.

Yeah, with some of the new buildings, we've got an interesting building where the landing pad isn't on the roof, it's actually on the side of the building, which is quite cool. And coupled with that, I'll let Luan talk about this because he actually did this. It's a really cool circular donut building.

I spent some of the last week looking into maybe introducing some different buildings. Now, this isn't more of a tall building. We're talking more something that spreads out a bit, but I made this, what we call the donut building or the donut tile. And in my headcanon, it's ArcCorp's headquarters for Dunkin' Donuts. But as I developed that, which hopefully will be something that you see shortly after 3.5, I was thinking about, well, what is this kind of place? You can definitely see it from space. You see something circular over there. And what is the space used for? So first, I thought it might be some sort of stadium, or a concert hall actually crossed my mind. But I figured it's this sort of bustling center of commerce, maybe. And there's no reason why in the future we can't develop areas like this for Live Design to go, hey, let's add a shopping center there, or let's add a mission there. It's all about giving the Live designers a toolbox, or a place to play and invent missions and areas. So it's all about fleshing out the Stanton system and what we have now and creating these interesting places they can go to. So this donut building should be pretty cool. I like it. I hope everybody else likes it too.

It was something that we actually planned to do originally, and we had it white-boxed in when we had the whole city, but we wanted to focus on the other buildings, so we kind of put that on the back burner, like with some of the variants. And so we're going to add it in post-3.5. In a way it's a shame we didn't get that in, but in a way it's quite cool for guys to get an update and it's like, oh, there's some cool new structures in post-release, and you can see it evolving and updating.

Folks who have been following the project for a long time remember early ArcCorp concept art that had these circular buildings. Many people were lamenting the loss, so I'm glad to hear that they're coming back.

That was precisely the kind of stuff we looked at. I was like, oh, remember those old donut buildings? How can we bring it back?

I think it's a good breakup visually. From a distance it's really good to see some different shapes going on when you're flying around, definitely.

I really like that question actually. I see it as the same idea behind habs. We're getting the very early first instance of persistent habs now, so you can take an object and put it in your hab and it will stay in your own hab. Like a turtle. So I see these as the same kind of thing. So there's no reason why we couldn't do things like org-owned buildings with objects that the players can place, and they would stay there. So I'm not sure when we would be doing this, but it's definitely something we'd want to do, because we want it to be more, like with the habs, more customizable, and people to make it their own home and it not look like everyone else's. So you can go into someone's hab or you go into someone's building and it's like, oh, where'd you find that thing? Where'd you get that turtle from? So yeah, I think that's a really cool idea.

It's actually something Joel's working on right now.

Yeah, variants of the stations are definitely on the roadmap and something we're working towards. It'd be cool to get these space station dry docks around ArcCorp for, say, larger ships like the Hull series, so they don't have to go down into the atmosphere. They could land at these dry docks and ferry their goods there, and then smaller ships can take it down to the planet and vice versa. Definitely stations are getting looked at.

The idea is that every major landing zone, like Lorville, like Area 18, will have a cargo station or port station in orbit, so you'd be able to drop off big things. Like the Hull variants that have trouble flying in atmosphere would not need to go all the way down to do their runs. They could drop it off at a cargo station, and then someone else, or a part of the org, could do the rest of the journey and take that in.

It's a lot of fun. It's interesting because it's really challenging. As I said, ArcCorp is probably one of the most challenging things I've ever worked on, but that makes it fun, because you're not just doing paint by numbers. You're not just doing a routine thing where you know what you're doing and it's like, okay, I'm going to work, this is what I do every day. You come to work and you're like, okay, how are we going to solve this? How are we going to figure it out? Because when we started looking at ArcCorp, we were just like, okay, this is an interesting problem, how to cover a whole planet with buildings. So I diverted the question a bit, but for me, that's what makes it fun, the challenge of it. We're pushing boundaries, we're trying to do things that haven't been done before, and that's the reward and where the fun comes from for me.

I think the challenge pretty much hits the nail on the head, where it's the challenge of figuring out how the hell are we going to do a city planet? You sit down in the meeting room and your art director and your lead come to you and they're like, by the way, you're going to be doing the planet that's covered by cities, and you go, excuse me? That challenge is quite exhilarating. It's just such an insurmountable thing to figure out. And when you finally see it and players are playing it and having fun, then that's the reward. And that's what's really exciting for me.

Yeah, the scale of things is definitely challenging and can be daunting. But again, it's what excites me as an environment artist, just the sheer scale and how we're going to do it. Everything starts as a blank canvas, and it's like, take this blank canvas and populate an entire planet with city. So it's never a dull moment.