Gadgetory

in this second part of our interview with chris Roberts from cloud imperium games we talk about the upcoming demo for alpha 3 point 0 that will be shown at citizen Khan on october nine we also talked with Chris about some of the challenges faced in refactoring the engine talking about lighting tech visual effects hands-on with the environments and worlds and things like that before getting to that content this is brought to you by antec and their new MIT X cubed case as designed by razor which has an aluminum shell is an MIT X form factor and uses acrylic glass on both sides now as for the content you'll want to check back on Friday as well for our first part of the interview with Sean Tracy the technical director at cloud imperium games but let's get to the content so v2 for procedural generation where's the the plans unveil is that citizen khan yeah yeah so we're going to show so Susan calm we're actually we're going to show a exactly it's not a world that will be in V in 30 because it's a we decided because I 30 worlds are very specific as you know one's a gas giant which you can't go down onto ones are sort of polluted sort of Overmind world and another one's essentially a sort of snow ice planet like Hoth or something and then our corpse want just covered with buildings so we wanted to show one that had a bit more of a variety like oceans and forests and deserts and mountains just you could see the variety of kind of biomes and so that's what we're we're calling homestead demo in all the hopes that's not appropriate for what it's turned into but it's got some pretty fun stuff in it Sean sitting over here is a sort of you know working pretty hard on it with a bunch of the pretty town filled so that's sort of showing up sort of the potential of the v2 planet and the son of the cool stuff and potentially some of the sort of play action that you can happen in 30 and then we're doing a taking one of the missions that's in squadron 42 and we're sort of showing how that would you know feel like from getting your briefing to getting to your ship to taking after flying on the mission the combination of sort of like flying and running around FPS stuff so that's and so those are the two things were going to show we're basically show sort of you know full focus this is what v2 planets can do for you and then this is what squadron 42 is going to feel like and play like and this is sort of the experience of a mission in squadron pointer sure so squadron 42 is I'm not going to put any release question yeah thing that we had active and we voted I don't know whether data but so it's been demo'd basically as there's a big news at City yeah so this is it this is the first time we will show more complete gameplay I mean we showed last year at citizen Khan kind of an example of the walking around talking character stuff but it's very early character Tech has come on like a I mean we're going to release a 10 for the Chairman Thomas on the character stuff and if you look at that and you look at the quality the characters compared to what was last year its name day I mean I truly feel that our character stuff that we're showing is you know best in class at the moment so but we're going to sort of show you know a more complete like this is actually kind of like here you are you wake up on the ship you go get your briefing you do your mission this is what like one sort of sequence of events or what we call chapters in the in the game would feel and look like with the character tag does anything specifically you can talk about that that's improved that you are particularly well you can ask sure more more questions about that but I mean there's a lot of things that have mean the issue when we did the merit or was that we'd only just managed to get some of the stuff in there was a bunch of stuff that was broken in the shaders whether the skin or the eye shade or the hair shada the lighting was completely borked we were missing like the so in the Senate speech which you know was the best-looking one at one where you saw the blend maps and the wrinkle maps the diffuse map the tangents Adam were wrong and the actual skinning of him was incorrect it was the linear skins that have a quaternion skin so he looked a bit chipmunky and was wrong although we thought it looked pretty good at the time and then the might and the stuff that was live in the game wasn't firing like the a bunch of the things like the wrinkle maps of blend shapes the and like I said the lighting and everything was kind of broken in it so the characters now or leave some balance because not only if we just and there were also royal some raw deliveries of the head first stage that they didn't have any additional sort of time spent on making them look good so we have a process where we scan the actors but we scan the actors they don't have any makeup on because you don't want to have makeup on for the process of the photogrammetry that you build a head with and so we didn't really have any time to to work on those when we did the merit all this time you know so we've every actor gets a pass he gets you know essentially made up like you would like a makeup artist would you know make an actor look good for shooting you know we've you know we've made a lot of improvements to essentially how the whole rig and the engine works and so the goal is that as you're moving around and you're talking to people you're you will be seeing what you've traditionally seen as cinematic pre-rendered cinematic quality live in the end really these characters and that is the goal I think with citizen Khan we will show something that's a lot closer to that it will still get much better than what will show at citizen Khan as we continue to work and iterate on it because there's a lot of stuff that you dial in at the very end like with the eyes and the hair and the skin you know so I hair work still has a lot of stuff to like like we wouldn't be able to have your hair look at rest it does right now in the engine right now but we will we well I mean that's all sort of shader in terms of how the translucency and the cards work and everything so we've we've made some fixes but we haven't had a lot of chance the graphics departments been very busy they want long list of stuff and some of the list of stuffs been very fundamental so like you know a massive change we did which people may not think about is that you know if you see I think every every 3d engine I know moves the Sun like so basically the Sun moves right well the Sun doesn't really move in our solar system stays in the middle we move around ray so it was a massive change in the engine where the Sun is fixed in place and so it depends on where you are relative to the Sun is where the lighting is it's not the sun's moving you move and that's actually a fairly fundamental base like rendering and shading change so that was an example of something that we had to do because of what we're doing our star systems and so night and day cycles on planet for us will not be because the sun's moving it will be because our planet is rotating on its axis and you know we'll also be able to rotate the planets around the Sun really something I've thought about from the perspective of playing a game where like because you're not normally traveling around multiple planets obviously not a fixed small map so that seems like a pretty big technical challenge no it's big that's why that's why we say would like a lot of the you know a lot of the fundamental of the rendering and the trading and how he approaches is completely being refactored from the way it used to be in CryEngine because we moved to you know 64-bit which was a big deal for the precision you know which we moved to last year which sort of two was enabled what we could do 20 and but there's a lot of other things like I was saying you know moving the Sun to be actually an actual fixed entity they you know Cass it's like correctly as opposed to being some some confusion is kind of a special little case in a shader or the rendering pipeline but they're all being built so because our approaches we're doing this at a sort of galactic scale basically and so we can't some of the cheats you would use in other cases it's the same reason for the first and third person unification some of the cheats that you would use in games that would be more of limited like travel or scope we it's if we could probably short-term get away from but we create all sorts of headaches for us so generally we always go okay how would this work properly how systemically should this function it's like was mentioning with the cloud simulation and the weather simulation you know we could create a visual effects house could create a flow map for clouds and it would look pretty cool and everything but then you'd have to be creating flow maps for every single planet you do and it won't fall out of it whereas this way if they create the planet and the biomes control you know okay this is a higher this is a cold area and the simulation just simulates the kind of wind and the weather patterns which will generate the cloud pans then you just don't have to do anything so it takes more work to do that up front but longer-term it allows for a greater sort of range of gameplay and fidelity and also less work needed down the road so generally our approach has been really investing the time and the upfront stuff because of the long-term payoff mostly because we know that 30 and beyond I mean we're building you know we're not building something that we're going to release and you're going to play in two weeks right you're going to hopefully going to play this game for years and years and years and so we're thinking okay well what do we do this is at least a ten year you know our hope anyway is to be around for ten years after we released in the same way the you know Eva's being or World of Warcraft is being or whatever and to do that that's one of the reasons why we're trying to engineer a right which does mean that it takes us longer to get to the sort of initial stage where we said I would have a game ready for you we do obviously like people play it as we're building it but I think it's the right approach to build something for the long term again as large as star citizen the just a programming impact alone of a band-aid fix down the line is when I say so I will say that in almost every case you know a lot of like you know we get our vote you know we get the releases like 24 or 25 out and in an ordinate amount of time is spent fixing and patching systems that essentially generate bugs because they were just sort of patched and hacked at a certain way to work for a certain case so a lot of you know and in some ways it takes us longer to QA and get through things than we would like because there's been sort of a lot of short-term thinking in earlier iterations in the air because you know they're like well we're just making a game for this it's just a first-person shooter and and so there's shortcuts through and then most and it's not just cry and most engines do this and so invariably in all these cases we say well it's just not going to scale to what we need and we've got to adapt and change things around for that so we so we we have been you know because we've had the support which is great so I think you have one of those supporting us is it's allowed us to sort of go in and do things right so to speak which is all foundational for a long-running robust game that will have a lot of emergent gameplay because that's that for me super super important me I really love this idea and I can already see it and what people do right now and 25 but seeing you know the community go up and just do things that we weren't even thinking about because the system allows it and so our thinking is always about how can we create a system for people rather than specifically kind of control exactly what they want to do and say let them operate inside the set of rules in the system and make it work so for more information that this wasn't enough information it citizen can be the place to look next if you give every one day it's true yeah well say Susan comments October night so it's on sunday will be held here in Los Angeles I think there'll be more information on our website I believe we're going to go start at midday as I right Jared 3pm midday in Hawaii is we're going to start 3 p.m. in LA and yeah it should be fun I mean we know we every year we do this event which is essentially a celebration of when we first announced the project and you know the amazing community we have and the support they've given us and we not just seeing in this amazing office we've got three other you know big I mean this is actually not the bigger studio the UK should be owes much bigger than this one it's about 185 people now I think so it's about three times bigger than this one but where we've been enabled by this amazing community that support us to do it and we're just building the best like the game that I don't think I would ever be able to build anywhere else I don't think any publisher be crazy enough to invest this kind of time and money into it you know probably venture capitalist all the rest wouldn't have the patience to do it but it's allowing us to build something long term and and so that is pretty awesome and so we sort of Susan consoles celebrating how that started celebrating the community for helping us yeah stop and continued on the journal CT is your quote from one of our first interview is building the best damn space yeah ever yeah well yeah I say I sort of not have a best down space in anywhere because it's best done everything so far as we've we especially with the way the procedural planets of you know it's moved it moved on we were unable to do that variable and support which allowed us to sort of open up the Frankfurt office and and higher up some people that are incredibly talented and then their work went better than we thought it was going to work and so that's sort of that's kind of the iterates iterative way that starters and worked for we're like okay now this so now because I wasn't thinking we'll be able to do what we're going to be able to do now but I can view the additional play possibilities that comes with it and what players can do by themselves is you know it's really really exciting because you sort of opened up a much bigger palette of things that you can do just because you have planetary locations you can do things on go recover things rescue people create your own little place whatever you want to do whereas before we're more limited to space and then landing areas that were you know just a certain area so it's from a game from a game designer in standpoints on making games it's super super super exciting because it just means the world is going to feel bigger and more alive and anyway so citizen Khan is where we celebrate have one enable used to do that we tend to show kind of the you know the next step of stuff that we're working on and yeah it's a fun event so links in the description below for more information on that will post a link to the robert space industries website so you can figure out when that is live stream stuff like that and as always patreon link in the personal video if you want to help side directly subscribe for more content because we have additional interviews from this meeting and i'll see you all next time alright thank you all guys thank you very much and anyone that support its doesn't mrs.