Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - The Legacy of Armor

Yeah, there's a possibility of it. This is definitely more of a design thing. It's not a decision the character team would make. Possibly. I agree it's annoying, so that is a good reason to have it.

I went ahead and pre-gamed this question with some of the members of our design team. So I can tell you, if you've been following Star Citizen for any amount of time, one of the things you'll notice is that our key bindings change pretty drastically over development. Nobody's making any bones about that. We're still in the middle of development. We're still working out the keybinds. Something like keybinds for regular actions like that, like taking your helmet off when you get through airlocks and stuff, is definitely something that is being considered. We cannot tell you yes or no at this point. Just like with any other patch, the key bindings are reviewed with every single content patch. So the best I can offer for this is, it's an idea that I like. I think it's an idea that we all like. Let us know on Spectrum your support for it, but it's definitely something that's being considered.

I think that type of philosophy is the heart of Star Citizen, right? I think we've said it countless times, we don't want to make end-game armor. We don't want to make 'when you're level 53, you can get this armor.' I don't think that's a Star Citizen philosophy. What we want is there's always going to be a best kind of armor per situation. Because if we had the end-game armor, no matter what you do, from farming to exploring, you'd wear that end-game armor. But we don't want to do that. So the explorer suit, for example: the character team doesn't put stats on it. That's more gameplay and design. But for us, we were thinking, what type of shapes can we make so that it'll look like it can take hazardous environments and stuff like that? Maybe they have the little thing on their arm to have readings of the environment. Not saying that's going to be in there, but just visually.

On the design side, there are gas components on the helmet. So in the entities themselves, once we get it into implementation, there are all these components for gas, air, all that stuff. It is completely within the realm of possibility, and probably the plan, to implement those things. When you're on the surface, if you're on Hurston, it's like, oh, this probably shouldn't be this.

It's a very cautious thing. It's a slippery slope. You see this a lot in MMOs, and Todd Papy was talking about this the other day: you play an MMO today, and you get to level 60 or level 70 or level 80, whatever the level cap is, and then you start seeing everybody wearing the same armor. Every warlock wears the same armor, every rogue wears the same armor, and we don't want that. The work that you guys are doing is very good. And you don't want to see that get sidelined by min-maxing. All the work and all the effort you guys put in to make this living, breathing universe and to make the best game of Barbie dress-up ever in the world gets sidelined by somebody figuring out that this particular armor gives you the absolute best red-out, black-out protection, so that's all anybody's wearing. So to answer the question, it's a thing that we're constantly considering. It's a thing that we're constantly mulling over. It's not a thing that has a definitive answer just yet. It's been a topic of discussion in the community forever. It has been a topic of discussion internally as well. Luckily, right now, it's not something we need an answer for. So we can still afford to have that conversation. We can still afford to wait and see if we can discover an implementation of this that lets us have our cake and eat it too. Some minor benefits, but maybe not enough that you don't put on your super cool, this-is-my-signature look.

So the primary and secondary [colors] that you were planning would probably be a big part of that.

To me, the question sounds like someone's asking, hey, my organization is these three colors. Will we ever make something that lets them color their stuff in that direction? It's tough because, will we limit that by size of organization? Because we can't fill every request, right? There's only a certain amount of time to do that. I think we're going to have enough. We're doing quite a bit of material variance. So I think you'll be able to make the color scheme you want with pretty much any armor set or clothing set. At least get near what you are setting up for your own organization.

Yeah, I don't think we're going to give the option for... but this is theory here. I don't think that we're going to give players the option to choose specifically, like, hue number 246H mixed with Y. I don't think we're going to be that specific, but in the ATV that Shane brought up, you have 21 different color variants per asset. And so there will be a lot of options for the players to still customize to a certain extent. But I don't think we're going to hand you a paintbrush and be like, just do what you want. I think there's going to be a level of restriction on customization, but we'll still give you a plethora of hues to play with.

This is a good time to remind folks that we are talking about current thinking, current implementations and current plans. And again, folks who have been following the project since the beginning will tell you, this is game development. The only constant in game development is change. Even if this is what we're thinking today, it doesn't necessarily mean that we won't have a different idea about it six months from now or a year from now. Just keep that in mind when we're talking about that. It is an ongoing discussion, just like the stats thing, coloring your spacesuits, coloring your ships. It's a thing that has not been 100% set in stone, nailed down, we can do it or can't do it. It's not a thing you jump into lightly, because it's not a genie you can put back in the bottle. So we want to build out the world, see what we construct a bit more, see the universe that we make before we start making decisions about what you guys will be able to customize in that universe.

On that note though, the can versus will: we definitely can do most of these things, and we kind of have. I think where we start to limit ourselves is how does it affect the player or other features? Because we can do all these things, but then we cut into draw calls or memory or what we're sending over the network, and then we've got to start pulling back and be like, do I want to give a player a million colors or do I want to send ship data or something? Don't quote me on that.

But also, to add to the material variant thing, the way we do it is very unique to each armor set. The more racing-style undersuits and armor will have more bold color across more of the assets, whereas combat stuff might only have some slight accents. Whatever makes sense for that armor, for the manufacturing. A lot of games will have, okay, these two spots change, and it becomes very predictable where the color change is going to happen, and we're not doing that. We're keeping it very much so that each armor set has that uniqueness to it.

So legacy armors are pretty much older versions of the current armor that we have in the game. The armors that were made about three to four years ago did not respect any of the zones, and also the characters...

Or materials.

Pretty much everything about them wasn't set up. If you take a close look at those armors, they start to fall apart.

And also, wasn't the heavy almost as heavy as a Constellation in polycount at one point?

Yeah, they were not efficient. So really, those were put in not as a proper game-type asset, but as in, we're getting some art and we're giving it to the players for them to play around with, not like this is good for the game.

Because I remember when we tried our first FPS, for Star Marine, way, way back when, and there were a bunch of heavies in there, it wouldn't function.

Same thing with the old ships.

The polycount was just too crazy. If we remove just the visual aspect of it, just optimization-wise, a lot of our old armors were just a mess.

Also, they were draw-call heavy. Now we have the new layer shader that allows us to merge draw calls based on the material stack. They didn't have that at all; it was just draw calls everywhere.

And those were also made before Josh Herman, and also before I joined on as well. And I kind of mentioned in the ATV, a lot of the concept art was done by contract freelance concept artists. It was just all over the place. And so what we wanted to do was, since we have to optimize the old armors to the new, we were like, should we just use the old sculpts and do it again? And we're like, no, if we can make these assets look even better, why not give it that pass as well? And so we decided to update all the light, medium, heavy, marine, and outlaw.

The performance thing was what I really wanted to get to, so thank you so much, Gage, for hitting that. It's very analogous to the ship pipeline. I keep going back to the folks who have been following the project for a while. You've seen a tremendous evolution of our ships. The second iteration of the Freelancer series. Remember the Freelancer that had all the rivets? They're currently still in your hangars: the Freelancer MAX, the Freelancer MIS, and the Freelancer DUR, for instance. The Freelancer MAX has a resource footprint equal to the Idris.

A backstory on those. I might have said this before on RTV, I'm not sure. But some of those models, because they were really just there to get in for the player quickly, are literally the concept model.

Yeah, it's literally the concept model. They took the rivets from the concept model of the Freelancer, and instead of rebuilding it and baking it down, they just... no normals. So it's one of those things, this is game development. And game development is not just building a game, it is learning how to build a game. And when you're trying to build the biggest, baddest, most awesome game of all time, there's going to be a learning curve. That's what the development of our ship pipeline is, and it applies to the character pipeline as well, with the armors.

Light, medium, heavy, outlaw, and marines. So we've done six armor sets.

I actually mentioned the original RSI spacesuit. That would be the most legacy.

That we could bring back, yeah. Any plans to do that?

Currently, no. For right now, the legacies that we have done are where they're at. At least for a little bit.

We want to put a lot of focus on finishing S42 assets and PU-relevant assets before we go back and start remaking more. The legacies were a special case for the players.

I don't think we'll ever make a legacy armor of something. Or we might, maybe, I don't know, for story purposes, if there was an older race or an older human colony somewhere. But we would treat that as a new asset. For this one, the legacy armor was just like, the stuff we have in the game is so unoptimized, we need to get rid of it and we need to fix it. And so that's why we call it legacy.

It makes me think of those movies where the old RAF pilot shows up wearing the old-school bomber jacket and everybody else is wearing more modern stuff, and he's like, no, I'm still fine with the old stuff. That's the kind of thing. It would be a new asset. It would technically be a legacy model. Legacy is a development term as opposed to an in-fiction universe term.

Correct.

Although the marine armor is technically supposed to be older. If the current ones are Mark III, then these would be Mark I. I don't know the actual lore behind it, but...

Yeah, we do. So with the Legacy Outlaw Light, the chest armor carries a scarf with it. But that is part of the core. We could have undersuits that have the scarf, but it would get zone culled when you put armor on. So yes, we can do it, but not as its own thing. It still has to work. No specific scarf item, but there can be assets with scarves that have to fit within our system.

And capes? I'm asking for a friend.

I mean, we have the trench coat that people played with, so that's the same thing as a cape, basically, just without sleeves. We don't have any capes, but yeah, we can definitely do that.

I kind of have a question. Would we have the option to turn the capes or the scarves off from the core?

Oh, yeah, the zone hiding, pretty much. So there is an issue on the animation side of that hiding, because we use sim joints, a simulation setup, on those. So when we zone hide the cape, we have to do a cleanup and rebuild of the skeleton of those joints. So that's where the issue comes in with just hiding them on and off. So we'd be making pretty much two assets then. We could do a core that has one and one that doesn't, which isn't a big deal. It's really just one asset, and you turn it off on one on export.

I don't think we'll ever have direct player control on armor for scarves and capes, but for clothing, that's just wear it or don't, right?

It's basically, so I'm wearing this shirt and I'm wearing this jacket. Without the jacket on, you see all of the shirt. When you put the jacket on, everything that's not visually seen will actually be zone culled out. So it doesn't exist anymore. That way, when you're doing animations and stuff, you don't have the shirt poking through. It allows us to not have jackets be incredibly puffy to allow for that shirt geo to stick around.

Really, it's avoiding layers. Because you don't want layers of geo over each other. It just never works. Imagine the body, the shirt, the jacket, and all those plates of geo on top of each other. So with Corey's zones, we split it up, and then you can just start ripping them out based on markup.

Yeah, without zone culling, you'd have to line up the edges so perfectly that when it is deforming, everything is deforming exactly the same, and even then there's not really a guarantee.

Which we tried. Back in 2.6, we did do that.

Yeah, because we do have it. It's just that with the immense variation we have, it's not 100% functional. You can play with it enough that you'll notice it start to fall apart every now and then, which is why we're honing it, and we're still building out the whole design spec as we see more clothes need different specifications. But if you ever see a cape clip a gun, send it to Corey.

No, but I think it always will. Because I think the hardest thing about our game is EVA.

Zero-G sim.

Yeah, zero-G sim is just the beast. It's a nightmare for simulation. Anything that's simulated, right? Because I've seen some people on Twitch doing ICC missions, and it's out in space, and they're all flying around, and they'd be wearing the Sand Nomad. And that thing is just all over the weapons. It is kind of annoying, but I hope the backers will understand there will always be some sort of clipping. We can't simulate real life yet. We can't have things collide on every single part correctly. You'll have to forgive us, but there will be some things that will clip.

It's always a matter of give and take too, because there are things that you can do when you're the only player in the universe. You're playing a single-player game, everything is local on your machine, that's it. But when you're talking about a massively multiplayer environment, where now that simulation has to be sent to everyone else in the area...

I'll stop you there. So actually, simulation happens locally per machine. So it's not that the simulation would be sent. Just before we get the comments on it. Simulation wouldn't be sent to other machines. Basically, it tells other people's machines, oh, they're wearing this, and then it would sim locally on their machine.

So the same simulation would have to happen on every computer.

So it could be flapping right on one person's computer, and it could flap a little differently on another.

Because it's simulating just here. They get the movement of the character, and then the sim is calculated locally.

Position, network; the actual simulation, local.

But single player versus multiplayer is also relevant, because in a single-player game, let's say you're playing Arkham or something, that cape is designed specifically for that environment on that character, and you can put years of polish into an asset. Versus we now have all these characters running around, and it can alter draw calls per scene. It's not like you can completely hone in.

Yeah, so Watch Dogs is a really good example. The main character has really good cloth on him. But if you notice, okay, his jacket goes so far down his legs. Most other NPC character assets have a similar length, because they're reusing everything they develop for the main character everywhere they possibly can. If you're going to spend that much time to make it that good, you want to use it everywhere you can. For us, every asset is the hero asset. It's a balance to get.

And that brings up something interesting with zero-G too, because another reason it's such an issue is that in most games you have your set of animations, and you can test your sim against all those animations and make sure, okay, it may not be perfect, but it works within this animation set. I'm doing all these actions and it doesn't clip. But then you go into zero-G and it's like, I'm diagonal with one arm this way, going 10 miles an hour that way, and it's just upside down.

And I've seen a lot of games where they bake in certain animations for the cloth and stuff like that. So even though it looks like, oh, this has a sim on it, it's not really a sim, it's that animation. It's doing the same loop of that motion, which is cheaper to a certain extent. But it's always the same. And since that character or that asset will only be in a fixed number of levels and fights and will do a set range of actions, they can do that. And normally that number is a lot smaller than what our game has. So they can afford to do that.

I mean, Gage actually does have quite a bit of say, because the armor needs to function like an armor, because if you have a solid piece of metal here, then...

Oh, yeah, so Jeremiah, they'll send stuff over midway through the phase, so that when they're fully done I don't look at it and be like, I can't do that, dude. Go redo all this. Take that off.

Yes and no is the answer to that question. So technically, I would say, what Corey and Gage, Sean Tracy, and Josh tell me is to do whatever you want and just make it look good, and we'll figure it out.

Aesthetic first, really?

Aesthetic first. But I think, as a responsible concept artist, something that I personally do is try to take into consideration, for instance, the basic knowledge of zones and also just basic movement and animation. I try to think of it. But there have been times when I just was like, you know what, I just want to put this thing here. In case you'll be like, that's not going to work...

They'll make it work. And sometimes, yeah, if the look is important enough, we can always push. We can bend.

There are rules that can be bent, and there are other rules where we just have to say that's not going to happen.

But then the thing is, freedom creatively, yes, but if I was tasked to make, I don't know, a Xi'an armor, I'm not going to make a human burger-flipper costume. I would still have to communicate with design and with writers to get the correct lore.

So we can talk about the visuals of them. I'm not going to talk about it from the design side. Yeah, we can have backpacks. If you have a backpack on a shirt, it's technically a jacket, as far as the zones go. If it's a backpack on a jacket, it's just part of the jacket. Unless we do the super secret Torso 2, which allows us to break some rules. That's like the bending, but we try to avoid that. The special-casing stuff just gets muddy, so we try to avoid it.

Actually, I think with how you wanted to incorporate the pants accessory zone and the shirt accessory zones, you could have a backpack zone, which basically gives them free rein, and then when something goes over it, fine, it turns off.

Yeah, so you have a shirt and it comes with a backpack. When you put a jacket on, through zone culling, it's gone. So there's a lot of room to play with things. We just have to really think about the technical requirements to then do that thing, because it's rarely ever just straightforward. Well, we have A, B, and C, and then where can we start to...

I think a lot of people think, oh, it's just a backpack, just put it on. It's not that easy. Once we have a fixed pipeline, an actual working rule set for clothing and customization, we have to stick to that design philosophy. We can't just be like, I'm going to put a unicorn horn straight through his chest because screw it, why not? Or, in real life I can put on five jackets, right? But game-wise, unless we specifically design from the very beginning with the knowledge that someone's going to put on five jackets, then I guess we could come up with something. But that wasn't the intent when we first designed the whole game. Zones.

As an example, for clothing, we have a technical checklist to go through, and it's around 40 points. It's getting big. That's for an entire character to check, for PU assets: PU clothing and all that, not armor. And the reason for that is we're trying to maintain as high quality as possible, but we have some pretty extensive modularity, and more modularity takes away quality. So we're trying to fix that by doing some really, really in-depth technical stuff. So it's a lot to learn and it's really unwieldy to use, but the result is you don't end up with, all right, all my clothes are giant puffy things that don't look good, but sure, you can swap them around.

And you'll see a lot of games do that. Whenever you see games where you switch things, they're big. You're pretty much wearing Arctic wear. It's to fit.

Glows, particles, thrusters. There are all the attachments and stuff that Gage's team sets up for grenades and all that. I don't know why you couldn't also put effects emitters and stuff on. We kind of already do for the jetpack. From a technical standpoint, yes, we can do it. I don't think we're going to do it anytime soon, but...

They're talking about like a Tron armor. Like actual moving LEDs on a suit.

Yeah, that's pure character art. But if you want, oh, I applied the rotten meat effect to me, and now there are flies all around me, that would be a visual effects thing, and I don't see why we couldn't apply that. Halo did that. They have lightning you can apply, you can apply flies around your character.

I mean, Gage and I did a test.

Oh, the moving tattoo, yeah.

So we tried a lot of different things with lights actually going through the character. We also did some old drawings way back in the day of actual moving LEDs on top of a jacket.

And some of the clothing and armors you guys have made already do that. Really, what it does is just oscillate the UV space. So if you have some kind of varying texture and just have the UV move down or something, it'll animate for you. It is dope. Tron can be done.

It can be done. The slaver armor, I think, on the collar. So just imagine that, but done across an entire character.