Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

What are XForms?

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

I don't know. You tell me. You guys keep giving us them.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

Basically, on an animated piece of geometry, every bone has a position stored on it. If you haven't oriented it correctly, that position is stored in the file and it can skew things. A helper point in the wrong way, so when something attaches to it, it's in the wrong orientation, or it might offset when it goes to its LODs, so something just flies out into space when it goes into the LODs, stuff like that basically. And it stacks on nested objects, so you can have a big corridor section that's made of like 50 child objects, and there's an XForm issue somewhere. It'll kind of compound everything beneath that. If it transforms it one meter off for the first child, then the next one's two meters off, three meters. So you just get this weird cascading event horizon. And it looks fine in the Max file. When you hit export, it goes in engine, and it's like, oh.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

But you can't just look at the entity and go, oh, well, this is the parent of it all, so that's why it's wrong, because the entire thing breaks, so you've got to painstakingly go through bit by bit and potentially fix them all, because there's no way to see if it actually fixed it in Max, because it doesn't show in Max.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

I think the biggest challenge, for me at least, is just the scope of a ship as a whole, right? It's so many different moving parts, so many different bits and bobs. They're just very complicated, and because of their complexity, you have to be very attentive and you have to make sure that you don't miss any details. And it's very easy to break stuff sometimes. And then it's a case of everyone getting their heads together and being like, okay, why is this broken? And you need someone from design to look at it, and then someone else will look at it and they'll be like, I don't know. You have to track down what the issue is. They're very complicated. I'd say that's it.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

I've got an answer that is sort of unique probably to the programmers' experience of these ships. Most of the ships probably don't come directly through my hands, because the tools that we've made for the design and art teams work, and the ship is created, and it's all fine. From my perspective, it's all good. And then there are some ships that have special, unique functionality. And these are the ones that come through my plate, because the artists and designers will come to me and be like, this thing that we want to do with the ship does not work because there's no tech to do it or the tech doesn't support this. And those are the ships that are difficult to deal with. The turret starts on top and then it rotates around to the bottom: the Scorpius is an example of this. The animating section on the Hull C is another great example of this. A very difficult thing to deal with, the edge cases from that. Another thing is the thruster folding on the Redeemer. Those folding thrusters, they have special case code to deal with those. All of those weird edge cases of the things that make the ships unique and special.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

There's a lot of challenge just because of the size of the team and the global nature of it. I manage a lot of people, so anyone that's done management of more than 20 people knows the pain of just keeping everything a well-oiled machine. And I think vehicle pillar-wise, if we include vehicle feature, the artists and designers in the US, tech artists and the VFX and audio, it knocks on to like 80 to 90 people, trying to get everyone all working together on maybe six or seven vehicles simultaneously in various stages, just getting that all harmoniously working and being able to tell the people at the top, yep, 12 months from now, this is what's going to come out, and hit those dates. And that's where the planning poker has helped a lot. The previous version was just, we give the t-shirt sizes of small, medium, large, extra large, and we just book those in. And the teams would always do their best to hit those dates. Sometimes they slipped, sometimes they were ahead. But yeah, that management side of it is a difficulty, but that's part of the role. But related to the actual ships themselves, for me, we have a lot of ships in the game, and it's every time we bring a new one in, getting a real believable justification for it. Because it's the first question you always ask me when we do the filming: why? Why this ship? And we don't want to just make them because they're cool looking ships. They need to have a role and purpose and not tread on another one's role, and all just work together nicely.