Gadgetory

everyone I'm Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and I'm joined by Julian Ray's fusions that lead VR producer working on Mars 2030 so we saw Mars 2030 yesterday or the day before in the keynote and can you sort of bring everyone up to date what is Mars 2030 before we dive into the details yeah March 2030 is basically a culmination of the latest in research that NASA has been working on for a mission to Mars we integrated it into unreal engine to create an experience for everybody to kind of become an astronaut and go on Mars and this is a more gameplay side question so we're talking about this pre interview where as many of the viewers know a lot of the VR experiences right now are cool for sort of a limited time and you sort of run out of things to do what I played very limited ly with the Mars 2030 demo seems more open world so what's what sort of dirt game design philosophy what are you planning to have for people to actually do in-game okay and I'll backtrack a little bit and add it something to that so the whole purpose is to make you feel like an astronaut you know so when you're when you're in that this experience you have the freedom of going and exploring Mars and going on different missions so in that process it having an open-world environment really just just doesn't confine you to this to this track where you have to go and explore and instead you're you you're traveling a few miles out and you discover these like a lava tube opening that takes you to different places and and we and in that I think there's there's a lot of excitement because not only is it an open world but the things that you find challenge the expectations of what you'd expect to find on Mars and and we really want to do that because when you when you play any any Mars or or when you see Mars all you see is the Red Planet but we want to go a step ahead of that and say okay well what else what are the highlights what were the compilation compilation of the best of Mars and so you get to see all those things in the experience very cool what about missions and things like that yeah so we're building out several different missions for our full release each one addresses a specific goal for NASA's reasoning to go to Mars one of them is to basically uncover Mars is history and and and look for the existence or past existence of life and then the other is ultimately to kind of the first baby step in in in establishing a human presence on the on the red plane or on other planets it's it's the first step into doing that and this graphically was comprised of I guess photogrammetry of sort of satellite flybys yeah we used a lot of data that NASA pointed us out to University of Arizona's high-rise data which they'd flown satellites over to Mars and and kind of captured the closest data to get them up the most realistic landscape as possible so that's an interesting point is realism since we obviously haven't personally been there how do you deal with things like color accuracy or physically making the object or the interactions with the rover how do you deal with that being as accurate as possible we we fact check almost everything I we and we have tons of reference imagery we're using the the real Martian colors with some of the Mars images that you see now that they add a little bit of blue to be able to distinguish different rocks that you see on Mars so but we want to be as true to life as possible and even though no one's ever been on Mars before we're aiming to put you on Mars as best as possible so that's all on Unreal Engine 4 right that's correct and is there anything special you're doing with Jensen brought up physics so physical simulation of the rover wheels did you talk to NASA about that or how did you figure that out no we actually got to drive the rover at Johnson Space Center and we got a feel for what it was and how it works and then some our developers put together a Nvidia physics system to be able to kind of map out each individual wheel and since the rover for purposes of never getting stuck anywhere because you don't want to get stuck on Mars basically it can rotate and it could also strafe so you have to integrate that and and there wasn't that previously and and we had to kind of put that all together very cool what about so you were talking about color accuracy using these different I guess looking at like a blue filter to bring out more detail on the rocks what about things like PBR and lighting what sort of advanced graphics technologies are you using well in terms of lighting we've been kind of deciding on whether we're gonna use dynamic or baked baked lighting it's just an issue with with with framerate and VR we want it we definitely want to push on on the visual output and so we've opted for one stationary light that basically illuminates the whole experience and and a lot of our environment artists have been working to kind of add PBR to all the models including the habitats we were working to get PBR there and just so so it comes to life and it really makes a difference when you when you start adding those those elements in right so in terms of development timelines things like that you guys look at the support the vibe and the rift you know when are you looking to launch yes at the moment we we want to be as device agnostic as possible and and let everybody enjoy and not not only have a vr version but a non-vegan as well so that anybody that just wants to be an astronaut can give it a shot how about release window we're aiming at October of this year very cool so for more information hit the link in the description below and we've got an article from the initial unveil of mars 2030 with steve wozniak I was pretty fun and then more information from today so check that out and as always patreon like the post roll video helped us out directly and I'll see you all next time