Gadgetory

even for those of you who don't follow star citizen that closely the authoring tools shown at citizen Khan 2016 are pretty cool at least from a technology standpoint this is all plugged into CryEngine or what's now called star engine and it's done with what Sean Tracey was describing as planet ed or planet editor so we can see some of the procedural generation tool set in action from the citizen Khan demo which is what you're watching here if you missed the stream this is a good place to at least keep up with what's going on behind the scenes and learn a bit about game development from a lower level in terms of the engine technology and things like that so in this demo what is shown primarily is planet head we can see using basically paintbrushes almost in Photoshop style to paint biomes and things like that on the surface there's large object placement as well we see that towards sort of the middle end of the demo and then it's also used to showcase the flexibility of the engine built now called star engine on top of CryEngine we're sort of a more accurate and swamp like planet is used as the demonstration for more exotic biomes and territories and things like that as opposed to the traditional desert planet and ice planet and the earth like homestead demo so I will let you watch through this if you haven't followed star citizen at all I think it's pretty interesting just again from a development standpoint but we won't be commenting through the whole thing because it's pretty long so it's just here as a reference material if it's needed in the future we're hosting it on our own just for that reason so without further ado I'll let you get to the content hit links in the description below for follow-up coverage of citizen Khan 2016 I'll see you all next time alright so the next thing is that there's no research interview distance you saw this in the whole pull through in the initial demo well you'll see this here is Simon zooms around the editor again this is all happening real time we thought it best to show how we actually built this up for you guys so that you guys can have a little bit if they think we're going to be able to fill all this content up for you so one of the things we like to do is just kind of show the scale because the scale is really hard to wrap your mind around as even as I even as a designer it can be very charming when you go from just a centimeter level of precision all the way out to thousands and thousands of kilometers so he brought the character in there just give you an idea of what you're actually looking at because it would be easy to get sort of a god complex when you're looking at this kind of stuff all right so I think we're going to go find a little area here and do a little bit of work because one of the biggest and most powerful pieces of the tools and it's probably what we work on the hardest is that it's artist guided but it's procedurally generated so the artist can still have this really fine-tuned control over the areas that they want but we can do it on such a massive scale and they can even go in afterwards and sort of tweak up the object so you'll see he's actually just creating more landscape and we actually use an ecosystem system ecosystem technology to do this so I'm going to let time and paint a little bit of terrain here and this is pretty awesome this is what we get to do every day so it's really exciting to be able to work on this kind of technology and it's even better to be able to stand in front of you guys in front of this kind of technology because there's 360 other you know developers that are working on this stuff so going to say massive massive team effort all right so what he's actually doing taking down different ecosystems the ecosystem is kind of like a high-level visual representation of a classic level of a classic game level really so the ecosystem who finds things like to the general terrain shape so whether it's down the desert whether it's Mountain whether it's ocean it also defines some of the main feature terrains but things like erosion or valleys and trees and you can see as he paints around it changes all the ecosystem underneath all right so we find a nice little spot to build up on so while Simon looks for a little spot here just let you know the planets are made out of all these ecosystem tiles or chunks and it's made out of thousands of these chunks and we can modify them again on a really really macro scale so on a planetary scale or on a very very micro excited state so the first thing he likes to drop down is always a little bit of a lake or river so of course we've got the water support that we wanted to but we had to actually rewrite the whole ocean and water volume system in the CryEngine to be able to support again the spherical level terrain and as you can see the results are actually really really good it's no pressure on Simon at all so what he's placing it now is one of these object containers so again we thought it'd be cool if we really just kind of pulled the pulled the curtains and showed you how we how we make this stuff so an object container is how we actually classify a whole bunch of different objects so it might be lights in might be geometry might even be script there's many different things that an object container can contain and the whole point of object containers is really so that we have this powerful streaming system so that we can bring in an entire level worth of content and then bring it out and even better we can fly around levels of content which is what the capital ships are really doing so this is the tower we just saw in homestead we're going to set up a little location here we'll put a couple objects down and we'll do a little bit of its horn so you see how quickly the designer actually controls the procedural distribution of the trees grass groups of objects and this isn't restricted to vegetation right you can do this frogs continue this with grass you can do this with buildings me ? we'll get to that at some point I'm sure so one of the things I did promise my German counterparts is that we keep the tools off the screen because they really want to reveal this stuff they've done a ton of work on these teams so a lot of what you see we get to showcase you know the final results of this stuff but there is so much work that actually goes into being able to bring you that and a lot of those guys don't get enough credit so for the excited to be able to stand in front of this stuff for them so he's dressing up the scene a little babies trying to make a little bit nicer looking we've got a special little prop here that Simon seems to like your drop in you might recognize it so we're creating a little homeless crab think he lives under the tower yeah he's got family take a bigger one our time so that gives you a really good idea you know this took one maybe you know 56 minutes and we're able to build up just a little section now you know this isn't about to chip out to you guys looking exactly like this but again it shows I thought he was mad we would ship inside me too so again we need to be able to create this content super quickly but still have that artists input because if you don't have that artists name village eventually you end up with very generic looks and we can't give you these moments that we really are are excited to share with you so what do you think fun bit is up in a lot of game levels the thing is is that you're in a skybox like it what you're not what is so hard to wrap your head around is that that's not a skybox that's actual atmosphere scattering that's happening the sky is blue because the light scatters right so let's just kind of prove that to you those little sprites in the sky they're not really sprites those are other planets one of the other cool things anyways just about our editor in general you saw that while he's developing he can actually just jump in and start actually playing the game directly from it it's a super powerful tool you won't iterate too much on stuff if you have to shut down take five minutes to reload some other some other executable then you come back to your editor being able to just my newly change thing after thing after thing and jump in and try it again a jump in and try it again to jump in and try to gives you really polished content so there's one reason I'm standing here talking about it I was flying his actually is a very very good pilot I think we're about to showcase there's no pressure so that's not a sprite let's go this is kind of showing off a little more of the exotic ecosystem that we can do and we barely just scratch the surface on how far we could really take the the exotic bit things are sulfur legs this place probably just stinks I mean it's super hot the sunset though that you can see again with the atmosphere scattering we get this for free and not for free i mean somebody worked very very hard but in terms of actually running in the game when the Sun comes down on the horizon yeah we're going to give that span right now she lives in outsiders because welcome so you see they're doing a bit of money here like Simon's he's brave down we're all done there's no pressure but we really wanted to show you again like without having to big epidemic put around it we wanted to show you how we kind of you know level design jazz Simon called it earlier just something a little bit improv accomplices information with us so we're gonna go chase it down see where he went hey Bronk it's an imposition