Wingman's Hangar ep048 . December 6, 2013

Yeah, so I actually took the engine for the 300i. It was a great model that our very talented artist Chris Smith put together for us, and took the original version that's in the engine now and then ported it over to the PBR stuff. Just a little disclaimer, this is an early look at it. And there's a lot of things in there that aren't actually finalized in there yet. So this is more of a look at how we can separate materials a little more realistically as to what it was before.

So the one on top is the PBR. And so this is the engine, and you can tell the difference. The one on the bottom looks a little gamey, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does. I mean, it does have all the detail and it looks good with all the scratches and everything, and that's one thing that we don't have in this version. And it has baked AO, which we also don't have in the PBR version. If you notice in the one that's the bottom right, it kind of all looks like metal, all the way across the board. If you look at the one on the top left, you obviously have your leather, it went with a dull anodized dark metal with some aluminum, then you got your little chrome rings. So again, this was another example of just how much detail that we actually put into the models, and I think that the PBR does a good job of actually demonstrating that. So here's another example. This was the chrome before. This is the chrome now.

Now, we're going to be doing this to not just the engines, but to the entire ships themselves, the hangars, to everything, right?

Everything.

Yeah, so that's kind of a hot topic right now. We are talking to 3Lateral about doing facial motion capture and doing really high resolution scanning. We've been looking at the quality of facial animation in Ryse and we want that to be our baseline for what we're going to see in the game. So we went to the people who did the best we've seen so far and we're talking to them about, we're getting ready to start some testing with them. I think we're looking at four heads right now and getting some really high resolution scans and testing out the conversation system.

So what they do is they take the scan of people's heads and then they create a mesh underneath and they basically skin the head on the mesh, and then they make sure that all the morph targets or morphs line up to when I'm speaking to you and it's going to look like that in game, right? And all the movements, eyebrows, eyes, everything.

Yeah, they shoot, they have this whole cloud of cameras that sit around an actor or a model's head. And they have them create all these different expressions, which is pretty hilarious to watch. And then they use that as the basis for animating. We'll shoot actual animation later and actors recording dialogue. They'll use that to create the animation.

So the cool thing for subscribers and pledgers and everybody out there is we're getting to use a lot of the things that they've actually pledged for. They got us a motion capture studio. We're using that with facial head cams to capture that.

With the facial rig capture system that we're doing with them that we're going to be using for this, that's something they also got for us in a stretch goal. And one of the nice things is that 3Lateral is actually customizing their rig to match the one we've got. So what we see in the test is going to look like what we're going to create. Again, high poly, extremely, lots of triangles.

So that's a really good question. It's hard to definitively say that now because we're still early in the development process and new hardware comes out every year. So generally, we've been aiming that the very high end of hardware now is kind of what we think the sort of mid-level will be by the time the game is fully finished. So that would have been a GTX 680 or now a 780 on the Nvidia side, or on the AMD side a 7970 or now the R9 290X. And you should be able to easily run the game in the highest of details in 1080p. If you want to move to 4K, you'll probably need the very high-end cards that will be available next year to run smoothly in 4K, or maybe current-day high-level to mid-high-level cards, but two of them in SLI. And the engine scales really well, so it will take whatever you can give it in whatever resolution you can give it, but you can also scale it down and it still looks pretty good. So if you don't have quite that high-end hardware, it'll still be a pretty good experience. So I hope that answers the question.

So the answer to that is we're 100% focused on Star Citizen here, and the way that Star Citizen is being created is, once it's released, that won't be the end of Star Citizen. We're actually planning to be releasing content on a very regular schedule. We're actually hoping to almost be weekly if we possibly can. So we'll be constantly updating the Persistent Universe, adding new features, locations, ships, characters over hopefully years and years and years. I mean, obviously that relies on people playing the game and it still being a viable enterprise, but EVE Online is still going 10 years later, so we would love to be in that same position. And then we'll also do some additional story segments, very much like Squadron 42. So Squadron 42 won't be the only single player experience we do. We will be doing additional experiences like that, that people will be able to play inside the Star Citizen universe. So the answer is, yes, we are going to do a lot of stuff in Star Citizen, but we don't really have any plans for non-Star Citizen stuff, because we sort of view Star Citizen as a... It's not a short-term commitment, it's a very long-term thing, and hopefully you guys will all be playing and enjoying it many years to come.

So yes, the answer is yes, radar shadow will definitely be present in the game. We have all different kinds of radar signatures you can have, whether it's sort of a heat signature, electromagnetic signature, reflective signature. And we're also thinking of different ways that you as a player could shield yourself from someone else detecting you. So there will be an aspect of being able to play sort of a stealth angle. Maybe you can shield yourself behind an asteroid, or maybe you can shut down a bunch of systems so your signature is really small. Or you could coat your ship in a certain kind of armor that would give you a much lower reflective signature. So we'll definitely have radar shadow be part of that. And we're hoping and think it's actually going to add a lot of fun to the gameplay and nuance, because there's just a lot of different options for people to take things in space, and that's kind of part of the thing that we're pretty excited about with what we're doing with Star Citizen.

Okay, so the answer on that is in the very first iterations of dogfighting, there will be mostly just an arena-style shoot-up, head-to-head, or flying in some AI, maybe two teams, red and blue would be sort of the standard teams, although we think we may switch that up to be a bit more fun than red versus blue. And then maybe later on we'll do some scenarios. But the idea of the dogfighting test isn't really to deliver a fully fledged game like you would normally expect. This is really for us to test the back-end infrastructure for multiplayer, the balancing of the ships, seeing if the flight model and everything is fun. So it will be an iterative process. So the early parts of any of the modules are obviously going to be a lot rougher than the final polished version is, but it's all in the effort of making the game as good as possible. So I guess bear with us on those.

So that's a pretty good question. Generally in the past in Wing Commander, it's been pretty much a pitch and yaw setup. But I'm playing around with the idea that we have g-forces on pilots in our dogfighting part. And obviously in that case, just as a human being, you can take greater gravity in the vertical than you can eyes out, eyes in, or in the lateral G's. So that's why a modern pilot will roll and then pitch if he wants to. I mean, he could do his rudder and do this, but he'll do that because he can actually do it quicker. So that would probably affect whether it would be pitch and yaw or pitch and roll. Right now the default is pitch and yaw with a roll on the rudder pedals, but that may actually change to be more accurate to a real plane, which would probably be pitch and roll on the joystick and then yaw on the rudder pedals.

Okay, so the PvP slider is an input to the game's matchmaking system to give it a hint of who it should be matching you with. So what happens is when you fly around in space, you're in your world view, your universe view, and the server up there is basically looking at where you are and is looking at everyone else and all their different machines, and basically seeing where everyone else in the galaxy is. And if it feels like, oh, there's someone close to you or there's an AI that's close to you, it basically would tell your local client, okay, this person's close to you, and that person would be streamed into your instance, or that AI would be streamed into your instance. And so the PvP slider is essentially an extra variable for the matchmaking criteria. So the matchmaking criteria is on a whole bunch of things. So it's on things like ping, which is, obviously we don't want to be putting people together where there's a huge latency. It's on who's your friends, who's your enemies, who's your people of interest. Also, it would have some level of skill rating in there. So we'll kind of track, are you a new player or are you a super experienced one? And based on that, in most of the areas, because some areas there won't be any, it'll be whoever's there versus whether it's PvP or not. But if you basically said, hey, you know what, I would prefer to have more PvE than PvP, it would give a preference to the AI flying around rather than a real player. So if there's an AI pirate and there's a real player pirate, it would drop the AI pirate into your instance to fight if you were more towards PvE than PvP. You definitely would get other players streaming into your space that wouldn't be hostile, say maybe a friend of yours or something, so you could definitely get a co-op kind of feeling. That's going to be an ongoing process, but the whole idea with it is you should be able to fly around the game, and if you wanted that more sort of Privateer, Freelancer experience, that's kind of what will happen to you. Mostly you'll see AI, and then if there's other players, they'll be probably friendly players. Or if you're in certain areas of space where it's no holds barred, then it definitely could be an unfriendly player. But you'll sort of know that those are the dangerous areas. So if you're a new player and you don't really want to be dealing with... I would like to say one other thing: you definitely can have NPCs that are tougher than any player could ever be, since it's a computer that runs it. It knows exactly where you are and it could calculate the correct firing solution much better than a player could ever do. So I think it is a bit of a misnomer to think that NPCs aren't necessarily as tough as real players. In some cases NPCs could be tougher than real players. But essentially the slider just allows you to affect the kind of people that stream into your space as you're traveling across the galaxy. And hopefully that'll mean that if you want to play the more Privateer-style game and just by yourself, you can have that experience. If you want to play with your friends and sort of co-op against other AI, that can happen. But also, if you want to mix it up with other players, that will also happen too. And we'll have some other stuff. I mean, I know that there's always a question where people are always worried, well, is that an exploit, and can you change it dynamically? And we're not going to let you change that dynamically while you're flying around. So it's kind of a setting that you have as you fly around. And like I said, there are some areas that are no holds barred, and those areas will also have some really cool stuff in them. I'm hoping at some point, like, you get brave enough and you get good enough, you would go to these areas to, I don't know, get this one particular kind of weapon that you can't get elsewhere, or salvage an alien wreck. But you have to take some risk to get there. So it's a sort of risk-reward basis. So I hope I answered the question on the PvP slider.

I would say that if the Oculus Rift works correctly, we shouldn't have to do that, and we would not be redesigning ships or cockpits or anything for one peripheral that we're going to work with, even if it's a peripheral that everyone's excited about, and we're excited about it. It's sitting right on my desk right now. I will say that we're pretty in sync with the Oculus folks. We have the HD prototypes in Austin and here in LA. And obviously the new stuff coming out, we sort of get to see it at a very early stage. I would say that our current setup is going to work really well with it. We're focused on making that VR aspect of the game work, having the stereoscopic 3D work really well. I don't think we'll need to redesign our assets, we probably wouldn't. We're pretty confident it's going to work well with the way everything is shaping up as it is.

Okay, so the idea with the dogfighting module is that you'll start in the hangar, and in the hangar you'll be able to load up the holotable, and then you'll basically use that to decide what your loadout is on your ships, what ammunition you've got, etc. And then you get into the cockpit of your ship and you fire it up, and then the outside of the cockpit sort of, I don't know, turns into the holodeck, and now you're in space and then you fight there. But while you're flying in the dogfight module, actually out in space, you can't reload your missiles or anything like that. But between battles, you'll be back in your hangar and then you can adjust your loadout. And that's kind of the fiction. It's sort of the fiction as you climb into the cockpit and it goes into simulation mode. But that allows us to leverage the stuff that we already have in the hangar, because the whole point of this is to build on game systems. So we don't want to do custom stuff just for a module, we want to do it the way we do in the final game.

Good question. I mean, from our standpoint, I think we want to give you Squadron 42, or at least part of it, before the Persistent Universe is finished, so to speak. And we're kind of toying around with how we can do this with Squadron 42 in a way that sort of falls into the methodology we're using, our sort of development methodology, because I think giving you the whole Squadron 42 as just an alpha may not work as well, because it's a story, so it needs to be fairly polished as far as that goes. So one of our thoughts is to take Squadron 42 and sort of release it episodically. So before the game is fully finished, you play the first X number of missions that are nice and well done and polished, and then the next X number of missions a month later, and so on until you've worked your way through Squadron 42, which would lead you up to the sort of beta of the Persistent Universe. So that's currently our thinking. It's still in process right now. But we'll see. But when the game is finished properly, obviously Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe, Star Citizen, would all be sort of in as part of the package.