Gadgetory

we recently visited cloud Imperium games offices in Santa Monica California to talk with Chris Roberts about procedural generation for planets version 2.0 and we also talked about expectations for alpha 3.0 coming out soon and featuring demos at citizencon we talked to Shawn Tracy as well as interviews will be uploaded separately and before getting to that content this is brought to you by an tech with their new cube case designed by Razer a mini ITX solution that uses an aluminum outer shell and acrylic windows for the side panels well actually I mean so I mean we all walk on through yo we got a couple things work out but we're working on it squadron 42 obviously and we're going to show a little bit of that at citizencon we have two six which is gonna have star marine which is the sort of FPS game mode with all bunch of improvements for the you know the gameplay when you really PS so we just showed this video about the kind of vision stabilization tech we put in which is essentially mimicking what the human eye or the brain does when you're moving around and if you actually you know like that camera it attaches your head around your lettuce camera does this and that's not the way you perceive it when you run around right and it's important because we unify the characters so we don't have a separate animation we don't have a separate mesh or skeleton for when you're in first person from third person so every pretty much every first-person shooter out there has a separate animation and specific like body positions for the first you know so you can see your hands in front of you and if you actually pulled out a third-person view it would look really weird or bits of the body we're missing so I think you can actually go online at people there's sort of glitches where you go in crisis too and sort of see the character stretching and moving around or in a bunch of other other places like counter-strike and stuff with battlefield yeah battlefield there so pretty much everyone does I think I'm kind of does the same thing we do there's a lot but the biggest issue for us is to sort of have the they all feel really he's sort of smooth but because like usually what happens the night Call of Duty you have all these beautiful animations when you're interacting with stuff but it's all from first-person and it's all in single-player and if you play the multiplayer the animation sets much more limited and that's the Tres true also and they did crisis for multiplayer for the reasons that there's a disparity between what you see in first-person view when you're faking it and what really happening and for us we don't so we don't cheat at all so like where our gun points is where we're shooting right that's another big difference almost every FPS point is wherever the sensor your screen is is where your way where your shoot and your gun and everything else is just sort of actually sort of move generally in that direction and the bullets do not fire straight from the muzzle of your gun and you can in other games whether I've seen videos for that but definitely you know like if we went to a third-person view when you were watching first person and say the crisis stuff you could be pointing this way in there the bullets would go that way to the center of the screen so none of those fake so like when we actually aim you a when you go down the sights character actually does all this everything so it's all 100% accurate and one of the reasons is so that when you're running around and you're doing stuff with your friends what you see them do is actually what they're doing and that's really important I think that's kind of and we're probably doing that to a level I don't think anyone else has done that and I think it's good and that that's more important for star citizen that is for squadron 42 the squadron 42 single-player game so we could have faked it but since we're trying to have one system that works for everything we spent a lot of extra time to try to get this work and it's there's a reason why a lot of people haven't done it is because it does take a lot of work so we're quite happy and proud with where is we showed it on this video just this past week that got a fair amount of pickup and it's very cool so that will be one big thing that's going to be in star marine as well as you know you know that a weapon handling feeling you know other things like grenades and and dedicated game modes plus we're doing a lot of work on arena commander itself to make that sort of it hasn't really had a lot of love and attention since we sort of focused on 2.0 which was the large world and so we've gone back we've changed the flight handling and the marbling and you know balancing things to be more sort of up-close dogfighting so we're just about ready to actually roll out two we have a very small test group we call the bucket e bucket I whatever how do you pronounce a charity evoke RT they got you across it evoke RT anyway so the evocati they're like our first wave of community testers and so they test up very early like it basically they're really like a QA department but we've been balancing and testing some of the flight changes and model changes it certainly and we roll out to them and hopefully the the dogfighting is going to be sort of more up close and have a bit more of the original sort of Wing Commander spirits our sort of speeds had kind of gotten faster and faster over time which meant there was a lot of sliding and overshooting and so we've rebalanced things and also changed some stuff in the flight model so that's so those are gonna be pretty so two six is actually going to be gameplay wise pretty big because you know they'll the FPS section will be there as a gamer mode you can play plus you know it will have a lot of additions to make it more fluid the gun handling better all the rest stuff and the arena commando side of stuff will have had a lot of attention to make that better and make it more robust and the matchmaking of the lobby and the UI and all that so so we're sort of focusing to try and make the experience of just jumping in and dogfighting or jumping in and running running and gunning to be fun and that's what 2/6 is and so that will be released sometime after the citizen car which is this October 9th and then long term what we're working towards is what we just what we sort of showed it games con which was sort of the preview of 3 0 & 3 0 is probably the first time you can say that when you get out there and you fly around you know it will be it will feel like a full game or a complete game because you'll be able to go between locations buy and sell stuff you know and money do all the sort of things you normally would do and say something like a privateer or a freelancer and so that's the sort of first step to persisting universe getting fully fleshed out me there's a lot more to be done right so there's a lot of like locations world systems additional professions because we're going to start with just cargo sort of hauling you're buying selling training mercenary bounty hunter piracy which is sort of that they're kind of the core professions and most sort of space games right so you're either taking stuff for me to be you're either protecting someone taking stuff for me to be you're trying to rob someone taking stuff from A to B oh you're going after someone that's robbed someone going to edit right so those are kind of what all those professions work with and then you know longer term there's a lot of sort of secondary professions whether it's sort of rescue and recovery or you know going out and refueling people they're out of fuel or mining or Salvage so those are sort of professions that will be coming along sort of after we get the first but out and you know we're concentrating four-30 to try and have one star system roughed in so it's not going to be done fully polished but at least a major location should be there or mostly there which would include a whole bunch of not just the landing locations of which I think we have five major ones there but also a whole network of space stations and satellites and refueling stations and all the rest that you would stop off in your in your sort of travels around the star system because for us the star system itself has like among a lot greater density of like action you know interest it's not just you sort of stop and there's one space station that you go and trade in and you leave and get another star system for us just this star system shouldn't be something that a player can spend a whole bunch of time going back and forth and and you know now with the new sort of planetary tech that we've done you can many if you see a planet as long as it's not the Sun which would probably burn you you can you know land on it and go around and adventure around so so there's gonna be a whole bunch of stuff for three zeros so it's a huge huge huge task so we are in the process of you know doing a whole bunch of stuff towards that along the way we're going to show a preview of the next stage of the planetary tech that we have which will be at citizencon so we're going to what we call planet procedural planets v2 which is a which is a lot more artist authored and driven so it uses so it uses procedural techniques the same way that world machine as someone does but it's very artists driven which is also kind of the same way world machine is and so we we use these techniques to allow artists to build a world out at scale but they're determining where the contents are they're determining where the forests are where the mountains are where the desert planes are and it's pretty cool how's that determined in the engine when an artist is this manually going in and picking locations for different yeah yeah well that's what happens so we built there's a bunch of biomes that are built so the arts are sort of creates these different biomes whether it's a by a you know a Mountain biome or a desert biome or forest biome or a woodland or whatever you need having the biomes and then there's an overall sort of map for the planet and there's both a height map and a distribution map and the height maps sort of determining the general height of the terrain now the biomes themselves also are additional to that they so the shapes of the mountains is sort of a combination of the overall height map and by ohm data and then the distribution map is determining like where the say trees of the vegetation is and and that's kind of how they sort of build it so it's almost like imagine you start with just a sphere and you know ultimately I mean right now I don't think we paint our height map on the sphere although I think we may be able to now we can now right so originally we just did on a texture map but I the ultimate idea is you have the sphere here and what we call planet ad and you basically just sculpted so you can push or pull it like you would in a sculpting program for the height map and then you would paint on top for the distribution map like Oh his desert is forest area or whatever and then based on that and the biomes you've created it creates the the world is sort of so you're like sort of painting on a great scale so and then on top of that besides just that general distribution mapping the height map you can go in and specifically paint areas and you can paint areas with no brushes that you can go you know all the way from you know a few meters in size all the way to hundreds of kilometres inside and then you specify what's going to be in your brush you so I'm going to paint this with some trees or rocks whatever and you can paint on a basically a planetary scale and so that allows the artist to totally craft their environment and they can they can also place specific art so they can create like you know I don't know it's a mineshaft or ruins or something and they can basically carve out an area in the planet and place that in it so it's very much built as a tool to allow them to build this at scale so I guess if you think of the sort of tools they had for CryEngine on a much smaller scale for you know building the the maps they had imagined that but on a planetary scale sure and that's an S and that's what we've been working on and v1 was that we showed at Gamescom was a much earlier more rudimentary version the new version that we're going to show is I think gonna be pretty impressive especially considering it's on a planetary global scale and we are doing some like crazy stuff so not sure if it will although I suspect it may do but now we're doing planetary clouds and the planetary clouds themselves are going to be similar simulated by a full weather simulation so we're not doing a flow map anymore we've sort of decided that a flow map wasn't going to be tenable for artists to maintain that in terms of textures and everything so what would happen is the biomes themselves would specifically and they and and the artists building can get errors and say yeah this is a you know this is a high area this is a cold area or whatever and then based on that it will it will drive and create the the weather ecosystem and clouds so if you time-lapse the planet you should see weather systems and everything's free yes we said we talked about procedural generation really early in the process maybe a year ago and they think back then one of the key points you're driving is that it's not randomly seed generate a bunch of stuff there's actually artists and on hands-on with the planets so is that true for I guess on a grander scale for all the planets in the game is this everyone's got their hands on a planet at some level or yeah yeah no Sara means Indy so so there will be artist and designer involvement in every single planet or moon that will be in the game now of course we'll have set up some you know we'll set up a whole palette of biomes and an artist should be able to crank out a moon or even a base planet in a day or two days themselves which relatively considering the fact they're doing you know like in the case of a world 16 million kilometer square kilometres a 16 billion it's quite a minute or it's a lot and after what what memory yeah very very big compared to what you'd normally do in a map which is you something like four by four kilometres or something it's pretty impressive but yeah the tools are all built up so they can build these things at scale but it's but it is authored so you know but we will like four moons you know there's means it will kind of like look the same and we'll have like a moon set of various biomes and you know you could probably you know an artist could probably crank out you know five moons or six moons in a week for you because once you've got your building blocks something's been quicker but everything yeah there isn't going to be a matter where we hit a magic number and it's like poof it comes up we are we are designing it the game is very design which means that as we build out the universe you know it's not a matter of us just turning something on we actually have to create those so one over you know the long term you know sort of schedule challenges as is building out the universe that we've you know we you know in all the stretch cars I think we got up to 100 star systems I think we actually have about 110 now we're not going to have all all of them done for the day we say it's released early on to kind of dumb but we're gonna try to get you know a good chunk of them through so the creation of all those planets with you know the additional interest because it's not just about a planet it's about the planet you know with its local you know ecosystem in terms of life so you know the way our plans to have you know whatever animals or creatures down there but also you know not just the major landing locations but you know other smaller locations and those in fact a this week's around the verse there's a little piece where the the German studio is talking about some of the model are building sets they're using four satellites and using for a little you know habitats right so the idea would be that we would have these sets and then you could you could say well you know this kind of area the planet you know maybe there's some some you know farmers or settlers and it would also you could either hand play some of these pretty quickly like BAM here's a little farm or you can have a set of it and you could just sort of determine that from the distribution map there would be X percent chance of having some of these old homesteads and so because that's all important to make the these worlds sort of feel rich and detailed and not just for the empty of life the authoring tools that the artists are working with you've got it's different biomes at the top level you were saying manually plays specific objects or Bruins things like that anything else in there for the actual toolset well well I mean the world of music so in the biome itself by the way the band itself isn't just say some of the art the biome multiple you will have like all the rules for like whether there's like creatures in that biome and some of the logic and interest that would happen with it and then the system is it's taking it takes some of that not all of it so that's the that's kind of like some of the magic of how the biomes get a pride it doesn't take literally the whole bio verbatim it's that's like a blueprint that it takes some of it and blends it with other elements that it's close to and there's various rules for how it gets done so that way it doesn't all feel like it's carbon copy the other biomes but the biomes ultimately will contain much more data than just you know here's the rocks here's the trees here's the you know here's what the mountain looks like it may will contain the rules for wildlife and all the rest of stuff is that all dying CryEngine or this is a separate tool and I told them it's all done in you know we don't call it crazy that's correct we call it storage yes it's quite it's quite detached now for what the base CryEngine is so yeah we do it in in the editor so we there's a whole section the other two called planet head that you open up and that allows you to specify and build the biomes and everything and then in the actual editor view you can do whatever you want and then you can improve zoom right down to ground level it's pretty pretty awesome what so I guess when talking about procedural generation the tour challenge that would be faced I would think is a concern of having too much copy paste like you were just talking about so the rules that are in there does this is this the system or the computer kind of looks at what's surrounding the area performs all calculations I guess based on more rules yeah yeah well so basically what happens is the the the you know the biomes depending on which biomes next to the other by oh there's blending rules that happen and there's blending on multiple levels to centers so there's sort of different levels of detail and they all get blended and then if you had say two or three versions of the forest biome then it would also be picking between those and elements in them as its as its distributing the stuff right so I mean the concept is that you should not really be able to look in the area and feel like there's a repeated time and they've you know on the Neo v2 stuff it's it's pretty pretty impressive that I mean if you pull out the repeated stuff is kind of the same repeated stuff you see in real life so if you actually look at Earth from certain levels you can actually do it in you know Google Earth if you want but you pull out to a certain level you can sort of see it looks you know the mountain ranges and stuff like there could be there could be tile so but we we've spent a lot of I you know not quite sure how many is it four or five blends I don't know the texture we blend a lot of so we blend it different like scales of texture so when you come down because our big challenge is you can see this planet from orbit and you folks fly above it from 20,000 feet or you can be walking you know amongst a forest and all of it needs to hold up to our sort of Texel density so when you come down we need to have the detail in the ground and the rocks and the trees all match up to what you're used to when you're sitting in a ship going around say a constellation or you're on the space station and stuff and so that involves having sort of different sets of textures that are also pub mapped and various different items that get distributed and have different LEDs that match all the way from sort of being there on the ground in first person all the way to you know in orbit this is a bit all version 2.0 procedural generation yeah I mean some of some of the blending some of that texture stuff was and what we shown at Gamescom I mean you could see in the games can you can see it from this is UK you came down and then you can see up close that the ground texture had decent detail the difference with 2.0 is a you saw some popping in in the games come demo when you're coming in in v2 you see almost no popping it blends really well and there's just a lot more variety and so the planets have a lot more feeling of a sort of what you would consider a real planet or more offered as opposed to that sort of procedural feel that you get on a lot of planets so links in the description below for more information on that we'll 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 from the post well video if you wanna helps out directly subscribe to 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 supported stuffs it thank you for supporting us