Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and I'm joined once again by chris roberts hey guys how you doing and we have lots of content from PAX East PAX East 2013 2012 we have lots of star citizen content up and we were back again today you just come off of Gamescom is that right yep yeah no games chrome was a lot of fun I mean you know we had this event for 2,000 of the backers at a pretty big venue its of any they they usually have you know music acts and stuff in and we did we essentially previewed version 0.9 of arena commander which should drop next week and that you know has a whole bunch of upgrades all the hangars have been completely redesigned made much more modular and extensible in PBR they look great we have a couple of new game modes the biggest one is the race mode which is a whole new level and track so it's set in the murray cup which is a sort of fictional version of space racing think of it Formula One in around the universe we're gonna drop a couple of ships that you can fly additional ships you can fly so the m50 and the 350 are will be flyable with the new patch and we also had vandal swamp co-op so you and your friends can go against waves of vandal and there's a host of other like some flight model enhancements and changes you know more of the six degrees of freedom stuff that people have wanted we've doubled the speed of the ships a lot more sort of work on the sound system and effects the HUD the HUD itself will be easier to use and there will be sort of control mappings much more friendly control mapping stuff for people with all the you know various hotels or people atomize so it's a pretty big drop so we did that we also previewed multi cruise ship combat so we did a live demo of flying in a constellation getting attacked by some pirates you know there was three of us flying the ship a couple of us jumped out of the front seats got into the the turrets fought off the Pirates and sort of show the preview of kind of what it'll be like flying the bigger ships with your friends in the universe which i think is going to be one of the big cool things that you get to do in star citizen that you haven't been able to do another space games in the past and of course that's all at the same fidelity that you see right now an arena commander and we'll be doing later stuff so so that was kind of the the the game's con share was a lot of fun it was like 2,000 of the you know people that have helped make the game a reality and so it's really great to meet everybody and I had a lot of fun I mean you know fairly exhausting after the week of press interviews and doing all that and then the week after I was in the UK we were scouting some stages to shoot the performance capture for squadron 42 which is the single-player story inside the star citizen where you shooting the motion capture or what were you well we were scouting we're gonna shoot so we're just gonna so later this year we're gonna do a big shoot and beginning and next year we're doing a big shoot and it's gonna be for all the sort of cinematics and basic motion sets and it's Quadra 42 and also in star citizen and then I was spending time in the Manchester office which is our UK office and is about 60 our developers there now it's actually our biggest office of all our sort of officers working on star citizen so I came back here on Sunday few days back in the office and now I'm up here in PAX Prime back on the PR slave trade as they say that is four that is true just recently about ten million dollars ago because we measure time and millions of dollars now you you posted a stretch goal of procedural generation so first there are a lot of different ways to define procedural generation and insofar as the games industry it's used a lot as marketing tournament teased a lot as a technical term what is your what is CI G's definition of it well we're gonna we use it I'm now gonna use it as a tool for the universe building so you know I know a lot of people think that stutters and purely just everything's handcrafted and something like I don't know elite would be just all procedural but really or no man's lines or procedural but really you know the real truth is that you know all those games have combinations of handcrafted and procedural stuff in it some just have more procedural than handcrafted and some have more handcrafted the procedural so we you know or from the beginning had a plan to do a certain level of procedural stuff which would be say on the city like down on the blending environments we have four hundred and twenty something in our hundred systems and there's no way that we can actually have or you know do all those individual unique one so their idea is that like on sort of the more like a mining outpost or something like that where it's more sort of modular we sort of have these different architecture sets so the designers can put them together pretty simply from the modular sets and then something like an earth or terror in the universe which would have a lot more sort of unique pieces to the environment so that's sort of the simplest of the procedure all the stuff that we were talking about you know doing the R&D and it's sort of like the next stage of stuff which is sort of procedural generation of say the star the system environment like the asteroid feels and also creating the asteroids themselves and doing them in a muhfucka sole method so you can sort of mind them and and you know make different shapes inside them and all the rest of stuff and then the other level of procedural that we're looking at is you know the planets surfaces so not quite yet going down and exploring the whole surface like no man's sky style but even from space we have you know hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of planets and it's not conceivable for us to store unique textures for a mall so there'll be a combination of sort of procedural planet surface generation along with unique service generation for the more design planets like Earth or Terra and stuff like that and you know longer term we'll be doing research into procedural generation of like areas of terrain you can land on so one thing I really want to push is sort of like the exploration side of it so you can go down and you know land on a unexplored planet and sort of Explorer map out areas and maybe discover some alien ruins or is this planet site exploration on foot or is this flying over well this would be more sort of landing and doing on foot or on buggy exploration so yeah I mean the one thing I don't you know long-term would be amazing to do this generation of full planets you can fly over but you know that's that's more difficult to do at the fidelity we want so you can definitely do it like the way no man Sky's doing it but you know in the case of what we're doing you know like I think you'll want to feel like you land at this city and you know there's a whole ecosystem and it's trading and those towns and so that's the level of like world simulation that I've not seen anyone do yet and but you know I think that's what people would expect at the fidelity that you would have it started ISM so for us we sort of have to pick and choose our battles so you know we will use procedural to help flesh out areas and do a lot of the grunt work for designers but there'll always be a certain amount of oversight in terms of making sure that what was designed looks good and feels good and then a designer so like you know for instance the procedural stuff could like lay out the landscape and the design and come in and quickly tweak it to what he needs and lay a city down on it so it's sort of a tool that will help us generate a lot of content quickly as opposed to something that's a hundred percent automated which is sort of much more the no man's sky or perhaps Ely dangerous setup so sounds sounds pretty comprehensive sounds pretty ambitious what's the current status of the team how many how many people have you brought on for this well we have a lot of people I you know I think the last ten can I saw was about 271 people or so so it's a lot of now that's not not everyone's on staff that's a combination of contractors and people on staff so you know we have three in-house Studios one in in Santa Monica in basically Los Angeles one in Austin Texas and one in Manchester in the UK and then we have some developers also working on the game you know behavior who's in Montreal in Canada and then we have another developer in phonic in Denver Colorado that's working on the first person shooter side of the game and how about the procedural generation group how large is that team well we're doing some procedural generation we don't quite announced that yet but it's some people that have done a lot of some stuff the quite well-known in the industry and so that's a combination of some contractors and some in-house staff and in terms of the different types of procedural generation you can you could go pretty far with with generating things in a universe so are you looking at planets systems stars ships well not not ships not any of these yeah in terms of like the planets yes planets a certain amount of the stuff inside a system right now we're not procedurally doing the star systems although that would probably not be a too big of a leap we are you know we've got like a hundred design systems but longer-term we would probably want to use some level of the procedural system to help us build new systems fairly quickly because we'd like to create stuff for people to explore and it's really hard to handcraft everything quick enough to keep up with you know the how quickly I want consumes current content but really I we're kind of looking at procedural content to flesh out the world we've designed so it's not so much hey I don't know this universe is gonna look like you make it up for us it's much more like okay we know this universes will look like but in this system we need you to detail out you know the asteroid belt here and the nebula here or this planet here and the procedural generation will help with that or or lay out this you know this class to mining colony so it will help to sort of build that up pretty rapidly and then we'll go in and say yeah that's good or nope let's change that around or whatever and what sort of constraints are you putting in for generation that will a two-part question what sort of constraints are you putting in in general and for procedural generation when it comes to things like planets in terms of size well it's kind of hard to say because that's still early stages I mean one of the other big things we've got to do is now we're moving we're moving to 64-bit in the engine which is a huge change for CryEngine it's just a huge change for all game engines because most and we're all 32-bit but we need it for this sort of scale of distances we cover but also we sort of need special handling for planets because we need prop realistic scale for planets and 32 it doesn't really handle like a size of our planet compared to the size of a spaceship so that's all sort of tech that we're sort of in the middle of working on to have it you know be I wouldn't say hundred percent realistic but you know have a get much closer to what it would feel like properly within the limitations of like what we think would be like fun and everything because still even in the star system we'd probably won't have it be you know tens of millions of kilometres across just cuz it would take a lot of time to travel that distance and procedural generation going forward what's what's sort of the immediate milestone for right now you're just doing R&D if I if I'm following you correctly are you in yeah yeah we're definitely in R&D for it I mean the first milestone that we're using the procedural generation for is the asteroids so an you know creating asteroid fields also creating the asteroids themselves so we don't have to like build them artists don't after this item we get procedurally generated and we can have interesting asteroids and you'll also be able to mine them so you'll be able to you know main out chunks of them and stuff like that so that's what that's the very first level of sort of procedural voxel tech were working on and then like I said the next technics stage would be working on the planet like surface generation but Planet Service generation from space so what you would see it from your spaceship not necessarily being down on the surface walking around sounds pretty good so I think I think we've covered procedural generation pretty well you can hit links in the description below for more on this content and we're going to jump to another video on customization so stay tuned to the YouTube channel for that and thank you Chris you're welcome thank you guys