Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus Donna and I am joined by chris Roberts once again and we are talking about some of the community questions that you all submitted so today we're going through a couple reddit post and some posts from our own users that look at things like the x12 and mantle and the back end and that a couple of specific gameplay elements with the technical stuff we spoke previously last year at PAX East about the server back-end and a couple of how you're dealing with nodes and things like that to handle latency how is that coming along whether your plans are keeping clients in sync well we're looking out and I mean that's actually one of the big reasons why we sort of push back the dogfighting module and it's one of the big reasons why it's not going to be out right after pax is because we want to get the system right and beyond the proper services that the actual game is going to be on so it's a fairly complicated system for thing that we're trying to build to handle as many users and so it has lots of different levels so you know like a on a on a simplistic level because each most of the service levels have multiple servers handling different aspects of it you know there's going to be sort of three levels one the universe level which is if you think of the universe server which is actually gonna be a cluster of service but let's just say the University of it it holds all basically all the players and what they have and then sort of general status you know likes dislikes and general location and then the next level down is what we call the system servers which is basically a server that sort of handling the system star system part so star system part would basically be in charge of all the players that will be in that star system and matchmaking them when they sort of cross each other's paths and when there's player crosses each other's path to get handed off to the local instant server and that's where any sort of you know like flying around combat all that kind of stuff first-person combat whatever would all be resolved on an instant server so sort of goes universe the system to instance and it sort of hands it off and so a lot of handshaking handing off and tracking which is kind of even though we don't have star systems of all the rest of stuff we're using a bunch of those servers in the back end of the dogfight it sounds like a lot of that is custom outside that's all I mean all the back all the back end there's nothing to do with grey yeah so the back end is all completely new on our side on the CryEngine side there's some low-level network transmission stuff that's actually fine so we use that but basically the whole server in terms of all the structure I talked about is completely new and custom and it's thinking with technical aspects for a second you worked with AMD a while ago it I wanted their own Vale events was that at Montreal no no no was in Hawaii that's right so Montreal was it it was an nvidia event so sorry Andy so that was for the Hawaii garden update and they were pushing mantle pretty heavily at the time you said you were planning to use it and now we've got a lot of dx12 talk going on especially with gtc and GDC right behind us what's how is CID working too well we're gonna sit we're gonna support both of them you know mantle and the x12 I mean you know we supported mantle because like we're a big believer in like getting rid of all the blow in the operating system and just getting straight to the metal one of the big one of the big problems and PC development is you have sort of windows sitting between you and your hardware and it's a big resource blow and it gets in the way and especially sort of on the game side and the today's game world where everyone's on multi-core CPUs you know dx11 it's not particularly well set up for handling multitasking or being very efficient in that case so mantle one of the things mantle did was allow you to do that so draw calls are a big problem on on pc games in terms of every you know the reason why i like a concert like an xbox one or ps4 can match say some pcs with much you know much less powerful hardware is because they don't have all these operating systems so they could do yeah they can do you know so like you know they can do 10,000 plus draw calls a frame whereas on a pc you start to get bottlenecked cpu wise by three four thousand dress even though the pc could have a much more powerful GPU singh in it so so mantle and now dx12 i mean i'm quite happy because i think a lot of people supported mantle and that sort of forced the hand microsoft to you know kind of like do something with directx so I that's kind of my whole goal was like I hate this we need this sort of stuff so I'm supporting it and you can sort of see what's happening everyone's like oh we better get on this bandwagon or else we'll get left behind but it's just gonna make for better games and so that means that you can have more draw calls per frame and a higher frame rate which means more detailed scenery characters environments objects there are yeah we need it for star citizen because you know our ships are incredibly detailed the characters are incredibly deal to us their environment seem incredibly detailed so we're going beyond what you know people call next-gen in terms of face count you know if I could share polygon count on a on character models some of the smaller ships well it sort of a character models are probably ninety to a hundred thousand like something like the Hornets probably about three hundred and thousand or so you know something like the constellations a million and a half so it's bit I mean it's big so I mean obviously that's not that's the full hi Polly know you know not not lodd version that's what you get up close as all those fares but it's a lot to move around but we've we focus on high poly much more so than having detail and textures because you know our big design challenges that we got to go from sort of first-person all the way up to you know kill me too plus long ships and so we need everything to hold up so I you could still be in that sort of first-person mode go up that massive ship and you don't have huge pixels in front of you so we need the details so we tend to move towards geometry / texture detail like a lot of times like standard thing in games that you do panels and stuff that all be baked into the texture with normal maps and so we don't really do that like most of them especially the bigger ships you take a look at and even on the fighters a lot of the panels are actually modeled in geometry and what that means is like first time well yeah more depth and it looks better more realistic but also like I can show you on you know I run on a 4k monitor in my office but I could get you on a 4k and I can zoom right in and say to the Hornet and it holds up coming real close on a 4k and you couldn't do that are the old way when everything was baked into textures because then you start to get to texture resolution right but we sort of focus more on the textures being sort of general materials and then occasionally put detailing with textures but you know we're sort of because we move to physically based rendering sort of we're more sort of geometry detail you know even like nuts and bolts will get get model I think in the dog biting unveiled you showed a first pass of PBR yeah yeah well the sort of Hornets or basically all the ships the environments are all PBR the hangar is sort of a quick PBR pass but it has not been done properly in one I showed but it makes a massive difference I mean just the way that the surfaces react to the light I mean it just feels more tangible more real moving to gameplay topics in the real world we have some of our own electronic worker and more fair how is that a thought in star citizen how's it being handled well we're going to do that so like definitely on the bigger ships there's going to be a whole design post that we're going to release in the near future they'll come from the foundry 42 folks because they're they're taking over there basically focusing on the big ship cap ship combat because that's a part of squadron 42 and then their work will also be part of the persistent universe there's a whole set of games in terms of running the big ships requiring multiple people at different stations communication so yeah you can have all levels like so you'll have a sort of electronic warfare you know station for you know an officer that does that you know combat air patrol kind of commander engineering helm so it's gonna be a whole bunch and there's a lot of stuff that you can do during like battles and combats in the bigger ship so in some ways the big ship combat is almost like another game so we're going to have the the fighters stuff that you sort of will see in the V one of the dogfighting but the big big sort of combat capital ship stuff will be a lot of fun too so I'm kind of looking forward to later on where we sort of have all that up and working and hopefully teams of people will be like one running on the big ship and then like people running on fighters and it would be cool we'll see my next question was going to be about how you are planning to be multi crew combat interesting and that sort of covers some of that oh yeah there you go no it's gonna be pretty awesome I mean we're already looking over it's an extension we've because we sort of went out of our way we spent a lot of time building systems so even the fighters or run with systems like there's no you know like basically like the radar its own plug-in system weapons controls and plugin system the weapons are all their own plugin systems we have like batteries that plug-in power plants to plug in shield generators that plug in the lights that you see on the vehicle you see on the Hornet they're actually all self-aware items too so anyone like the Hornet itself i think flies around with about 60 different items plugged into it so most of the functionality of all the spaceships comes with the items right so whether firing a gun the computers to do it your avionics the intelligent flight control they're all items to plug in so what that means and they're all they all plug into a system that they share their data via pipe so we have the basic types one is a power pipe one is a fuel pipe one is a data or CPU pipe and one is a heat pipe and they sort of plug into the system now the out printed and yeah yeah so so like you plug a power plant in right and so it feeds the power plant pi PI but you plug a weapon in it draws energy like a laser draws energy from the power or a light draws energy for the power plant right so why it's just like a magical name IPC building and then what happens is say if the part of your ship that had the power plant gets blown off there'll be no power going into the pipe all the weapons and lights will go dark because so there's no it's not like code in there that says oh if this happens then do this it's basically they just you know they have their own real set which is like okay operate I need this much power to operate if I have between this motion this which power on the operate it so much efficiency below this I can't operate that's pretty much about how most the items are set up so it sort of just all falls out of the system as parts blower for whatever it will affect your dynamic so you know and you know the intelligent flight control system obviously if you know some of your blast some of your thrusters are blown off in combat then you won't be able to correct your attitude of flight as well so it's a really nice sort of system based approach so it's not really custom code at all and then that extends really well to the big ships because they use the same thing it's just that now on one of those aspects you just have like a whole station that's dedicated to tweaking and controlling and and so there'll be extra things like on a big ship you'll be able to sort of redirect power when say you know the left side of your ships being destroyed you can redirect power away from the power lines that went there to the power lines on the right side of the ship can make sure power gets the tourists in the back that kind of thing and that'll be part of the sort of gameplay done through aui I guess in the ship command well eat so there's different this no notice so you have to there's all different stations you can sit down in control and they'll be some level of running around and having the patch things or plug in a new fuse or though that kind of stuff so it should be some pretty cool gameplay thoughts on espionage well we you know we I think we talked to the organization's we're going to have some level of support for people to do some level of spying yeah just cuz it's fun yeah like all those stories you hear about all the eve stuff haha yeah so so with figuring out population count in general for for the game as a whole that is the plan sort of two I guess there's a data server everyone to next to it for the persistent universe yes and then you're still just dropping players in and out based on PVE PvP settings well yeah I mean basically everyone runs on all the universe of the system server and then basically the settings in terms of like who your friends are your enemies are who your personal interest is what your ping is whether you want to be doing pvp or PVE those are all criteria that go into the matchmaking that happens at the system server level that hands you after the different instance servers and so it basically just matches up people so basically it's just sort of in the background dynamic matching where it's just watching where you are and saying who's close to you and do they qualify like someone's close to you but you know the pings really bad for instance you know you're in America and they're in Australia or something then it's likely not to put you together unless you said oh I always want to play with my friend and this is my friend and then it will put you together but your experience may not be so great so that's kind of what happened so a lot of what's happening in the background is you're just getting you know as you fly around in space from your point of view other people or other NPCs are just sort of streaming into your local area and in terms of up any patches or other modules I should say that are coming up what should players be looking forward to and where should they be going back to check for more details well Robert space industries com is the place to go we will be releasing the dogfight module pretty soon which will also agreed a little bit of an upgrade for the hangar module and then going forward there'll be some variations of that and hopefully we're going to be teasing the first person shooter side of the game later this year and more detail on that below we've already got a video of our first person shooting the elements once again thank you for all the work time you opened check all the links check Robert space industries com and we will see you all thank you guys for your time