The developers cover motion and performance capture for NPCs and Squadron 42 cinematics, plus Q&A on ship decals and decoration, repair bots, mini games, weapon convergence, hangar storage and stolen ships. Network programmers describe the universe cluster backend and CryNetwork.
Well, megapixels are important, how many megapixels, and frames per second, how fast it shoots. The higher the frame rate, the more accurate the data. The more megapixels, the more accurate the data.
All over the place. Everything's going to have mocap. Every NPC will be mocapped. Workers on your big cruise ships will be walking around repairing your ship or doing general maintenance. Stuff to make the environment feel more alive.
And what mocap means, for those who don't know, is the animation of the people walking around, right? Getting things moving.
Character animation.
TL;DRFor Squadron 42 they want full performance capture of face, body and audio together, so cinematics look better and animation doesn't suffer from disconnects between face and body.
Well, for Squadron 42, we want to do performance capture, where we capture the face, the body and audio.
And audio, so all three things. So the more the mocap studio can do, the better the cinematics are going to look; the movements, everything's going to match up. What you don't want to have happen is you're talking to an NPC in the game and your eyes are looking over here.
Also, when you don't capture the face and the body together, sometimes there's a disconnect in the animation. Things don't look quite right. But then you watch games like Uncharted, where it's full performance. Those cinematics are great.
Uncharted's done full performance. Red Dead Redemption's done some of this stuff. Some of the Grand Theft Auto stuff has done full performance capture. And it just makes a difference. You block it out like a play, right? Or like a movie.
Yeah, it's exactly like doing a movie.
TL;DRThe Austin team enjoyed the film, praising its nods to the original series and its direction, and valued the outing as team building; no specific ideas or inspiration for the game are mentioned.
Yeah, we did enjoy it. Team building moments like that where you get to go with all the guys and girls that work on Star Citizen help keep us as a family, since we put in long hours to make this game as good as it can be. We liked it a lot. Even though it wasn't a truly original story, it had a lot of nods. If you're a Trekkie, it had a lot of nods to the original, like, spoiler alert coming up, Chekov, go put on a red shirt, things like that. Or they had Tribbles in there. Or they juxtaposed Captain Kirk versus Spock as in who was fighting the bad guy. Usually it's Kirk with his shirt off fighting. This time it was Spock with his shirt on. We don't want to have to black box Spock, right? And also, I don't want to give too much away, but it was really, really well done. J.J. Abrams is a really, really talented director, and we enjoyed it immensely, and thank you very much for asking.
Heartsblade, that's a very, very good question, and it's one we're still trying to figure out. The problem with decals for us is if you have 100 or 200 ships on the screen at one time, we've got to track all those textures, and every system has to track all that, and the database and server has to track all that. So we're not sure we're going to have that room at the point. That's something that will be determined much later on. We would really like to do that, but whether we can do that or not just depends. It was such a cool video, though. We wanted to get it out there and let you know we are thinking about it and we appreciate the idea.
Yeah, man, the Idris Corvette already has two to three fighters in it. And I may spoiler alert Star Trek, but I'm not going to spoiler alert Star Citizen. There's some stuff coming up that I think you're going to like. Just wait for the future announcement.
Repair bots are the ones you're going to need to repair your ship. You're not going to physically get out and go ting, ting, ting on anything or do anything like that. So you'll have to hire NPCs to repair, or take it into a repair station, or you've got the repair bots that'll be running around repairing your ship.
TL;DRShip decoration is under consideration but depends on how much memory room there is for textures; it will be tested in alpha and beta, and might mean small decals or an approval process.
Decoration of your ship kind of goes along with the question earlier. It's going to depend on how much room we have to track textures and things like that in memory for us. Again, we are thinking of it. We love the suggestions. Please keep them coming. It is on our plate at some point to figure out. And you guys actually will be the ones helping us figure that out, because once we get to alpha and beta, those kinds of things will be the kind of things we'll be testing for in the dogfighting app and everything else. We'll be able to stress test things and see exactly how much room. It could be that we allow a very small decal, or it's got to go through an approval process, because we know there are some people out there that'd be a little pervy and might be sending things on those ships that nobody else wants to see.
We are not going to lead any squadrons or have an official development team squadron as far as we know. We might have one that is just us so that we're targets. But we don't want to exclude anybody else out there. We want to be an inclusive type deal. And for that reason, we'll probably just be more targets than anything else. But who knows? That may change. Maybe you'll convince us to join some squadron. And Lord knows, if you care about your squadron statistics, I'm not exactly in the Black Sheep Squadron. I'm more the guys that get shot down, if you know what I mean.
TL;DRYes, there will be mini games, though specifics aren't announced; racing, timing events, gambling and jousting are mentioned as things planned, and players will help test them and suggest ideas.
The answer to that is, yeah, we're going to have some mini games. What they are, we don't really want to announce. We know we're going to have some sort of racing and some sort of timing events, some sort of gambling, some sort of jousting. There's a lot of different things we're putting in there for just things to do in space or things to do in the universe. And again, those are some of the things you're going to have to help us test, and keep those ideas coming. Maybe you have some good ones that we can put in there. The universe is being created with you guys and you're creating the lore. So who's to say you can't come up with some stinking amazing mini games to put in there. So there'll be things to do. We want it to be as immersive as possible. And people always come up with fun stuff to do. So we want to support that.
Yeah, you're going to be able to adjust convergence. Now, for those of you who don't know what convergence is, let's take World War II, for example. If you have a P-51 Mustang or an Me 262, for those of you who are German fans, you have guns on the wings. And so the guns are aimed a little bit inward, and the bullets converge at a certain point in space ahead of them. And that's your optimal target range. So if you're trailing somebody and you want to shoot them, you want them to be in the optimal range, because otherwise maybe one bullet hits and one flies off. But if they're right in the convergence zone, both projectiles hit. And that works for lasers, missiles, any sort of target. So yes is the answer to that.
That is a solid maybe. We're actually in the process of designing that. We thought a little bit about eavesdropping and how things like that might work. We don't have a good solution, or one we really are comfortable with, at this moment because, again, a lot of the stuff is going to be created by the users themselves. And whether we want users eavesdropping on other users is still up in the air. We'll try to figure out how to create a system like that. That might be something that's going to be a Comm-Link post in the future that gets your thoughts and your ideas. But unless it's fun for everybody or really, really cool to implement, that's got a significant amount of troll possibility on it. So we'll see how that goes. But that's a solid maybe.
Well, you've seen the first hangar, the first iteration that holds a couple of ships. Now imagine you've got 59 ships like our boy Simon in Australia. Well, guess what? We're going to account for that. So look for that in the future. We will show some more hangar stuff in the future that shows much bigger, longer hangars. And you've got to have a way to get around in there, don't you? If you've got 60 ships, you've got to be able to get to them all. Not to say anything more than that.
The answer to a lot of those questions is yes, yes, yes, yes. You are going to be able to find or steal ships. You'll be able to try to hide them from the UEE. You'll be able to turn them in if you capture a stolen ship. All those things. There's good guys, there's bad guys. We want to support all of that. So yes to all of that.
A network programmer programs the multiplayer aspect of the game. When it comes to distributed physics and shooting guns and making sure they're all synced up across the network, those are the things I'm responsible for.
TL;DRThey're building the backend infrastructure for the universe cluster, including a universe manager and matchmaking that groups players and moves them between dedicated servers, aiming for seamless transitions.
Well, I'm a server programmer and a network programmer too, but we're creating the initial backend infrastructure for the universe cluster. And what that does is it coordinates all the dedicated servers, so that when you log in, you've got this sharder that's going to place you around the world and things like that.
Why don't you tell people what that is?
Well, basically, we've got a universe manager that keeps track of where everybody is in the universe. We've got business rules and matchmaking services that are going to group people together, shard them together, and direct them to go to different dedicated servers, so that you kind of have this experience with a group of people. But when it's decided that you need to move on, whether you left that space or you did something, it does a logical transition. It goes from one dedicated server to the next. And we're trying to do it in a seamless fashion so that it's transparent to the end user.
TL;DRHe isn't worried, since CryEngine's networking already works well out of the box and 16-player dogfights ran early on, though each new engine drop means re-checking that nothing broke.
Well, we're using a lot of great technology with CryEngine. CryNetwork is kind of like what I did at Sony, building up this client library that's going to handle client management and broadcast schedules and monitoring the bandwidth and stuff. We get that with CryNetwork, and it's pretty featureful. It's working out of the box. We had 16-player dogfights when I first came here, before I started working on the backend architecture. We were playing 16-player dogfights already, flying around, shooting missiles, coordinating. And we just got a new code drop, so I'm actually off the backend, making sure it's not broken. Every time we get a drop of the engine, we've got to go back and fix it again. So I've got this level called Epic Space Battle, and that's what I'm using for my playtest. It's like, it's failing to load, what changed? So just kind of going through the checklist.