Around the Verse: Outposts and Environmental Storytelling Written Friday 18th of August 2017 at 08:52am by Sunjammer, Nehkara and As per usual, anything said during the show is subject to change by CIG and may not always be accurate at the time of posting. Also any mistakes you see that I may have missed, please let me know so I can correct them. Enjoy the show!

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)

Burndown 80 issues remain outstanding as of Thursday (this was shown on screen as most up-to-date number). There were 88 issues on Tuesday when AtV was recorded.

3.0 will be the first time ‘real’ persistence will be in the game - leveraging a lot of technology development done over the past couple of years.

Difficulty getting some performance capture in as different actors perform the same action slightly differently - in this case interacting with a countertop.

Subsumption will allow NPCs to pay attention to you and interact. Working to get facial animations synchronized with Subsumption.

Difficulties with using the same feather blending technique for Eckhart that they use for all other AI as the experience with Eckhart is meant to be more cinematic.

Working to get item highlighting in shops to actually highlight the whole item - not omitting things like magazines, scopes, or other attachments.

Issues with doors fleeing the ships they belong to.

Work being done to fix longstanding issues they weren’t sure how to fix until now.

CopyBuild 3, the basis for the Delta Patcher, has been launched internally. Degree of success of that launch is unknown.

Work on Quantum Drive as frequently ships were colliding due to exiting QD in the same place. Also, ships were randomly exiting Quantum Drive inside the system’s star.

3.0 branch has been split off of the main development branch. Surface Outpost - Part Two Environment team talk about branding, integration and detailing of planetary outposts

It’s process of layering the dressing and then building up an authentic atmosphere

With their tools finding a location is more natural/organic than in a traditional game: just have a little scout around

A believable outpost should indicate how long it's been there, the type of climate and the type of people that live there

Several levels of integration: The outpost has a blend map that picks up texture information from the planet's surface The walls have blend maps that show the sand, ice, etc. build up over time Projected decals can show streaks running down walls or dirt buildup on roofs

There are differences between the different corporations, or brands, that own the outposts The interior and props will reflect the corporate values The colours, logos and graphics are part of a procedural system driven by DataForge

Outposts are not static: they will be constantly evolving on a spinning planet orbiting a sun

Using prefabs to build outposts means fixing an issue on the prefab fixes the issue on all instances in game

Currently the process is very complex but tools programmers/tect artists are working to automate most of the process

Outro There will be no episode of Around the 'Verse next week (August 24) due to Gamescom.

Full Transcript

Intro With Sandi Gardiner (VP of Marketing), Forrest Stephan (CG Supervisor). Timestamped Link.

Sandi Gardiner(SG): Hello and welcome to another episode of Around the ‘Verse, our weekly look at Star Citizen’s ongoing development. I’m Sandi Gardiner…

Forrest Stephan (FS): And I’m Forrest Stephan. Happy to be here with you Sandi.

SG: It’s good to have you here too Forrest. Today we take an in-depth look at the detail that goes into the surface outposts you’ll be exploring in 3.0 - from adding specific branding to adjusting the amount of wear and tear from the weather - creating these outposts is far more complex than you might think.

FS: But first, last week on Burndown we showed you some of the bugs and blockers currently affecting the 3.0 release. This included an issue where players would spawn the wrong way in Port Olisar and immediately fall through the station’s geometry.

SG: Uh oh. To see what issues have been found and fixed since then, let’s take a look at this week’s Burndown.

Burndown With Eric Kieron Davis (Senior Producer). Timestamped Link.

Eric Kieron Davis (EKD): Welcome to Burndown, our weekly show dedicated to reviewing progress on issues blocking the release of Star Citizen Alpha 3.0. In our week-ending report at robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report last Friday, we were at 83 total issues which were identified as 12 Blockers, 43 Criticals, 23 Highs, 5 Moderates, and no Trivials with 32 new must-fix issues created. So, let’s see how this week is progressing.

Ashram Kain (AK): The 3.0 release is the first time that we’re going to offer players real persistence. It also means that we’re finally really leveraging a lot of technology that we’ve been building towards for a long time. It means we have to be prepared to a lot of interesting bug fixing that it’s hard to track down. It’s hard to identify where these are coming from.

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Unidentified Speaker (UK - Live Release Meeting 08.11.17): In order to get an idea of how things are up to in the 3.0 branch specifically, Austin have sent an e-mail to QA leads earlier today but if you guys can do a 3.0 Smoke Test today then we can have the results of that over the weekend.

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Robert Gaither (RG): A thing that’s been really getting to me this week and the last couple of weeks really has been getting the shopkeeper in order - the shopkeeper animations particularly. We have these awesome shoots with a couple of different actors that we’re attempting to get in - behind the counter. So right now, the counters are where the characters are doing all of this and we have a bunch of different counters and a bunch of different characters doing different things at them, so I am going in and I put it in and I put in all the stuff onto one counter and then they all use it a different way - not like I expected. Like, right now we’re having a place to deliver a box when you need to and I got it all and I got it working and I was so happy and then I played it and I realized that the guy is leaning right where the box is going to be delivered and I so I walk up and just like stuff it in his face. It’s something that you think you have figured out and then you see it in and you realize, ‘Oh, I didn’t have this figured out. I really should have probably thought about this harder beforehand.’

David Peng (DP): Coordinating with UK and the design team over here to go through and just get the animations in, get the face team to have this synced so this is all now 1:1 so she’s actually playing face animations and then getting all of that to work in subsumption so that if you go in as a player, now not only will she be able to do this but she’ll be able to intelligently turn and look and be like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’. I mean this, right here, this is the result of thousands of hours of… and you know, it’s not one person - there’s 70, 80, 100 people that were involved in trying to get this so that it all clicks.

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Ricky Jutley (RJ) (UK - Leads Meeting 08.14.17): I think that right now we need to ensure that we run by today and I think that we need to keep the momentum on the European time zone so that we can turn around and go, ‘We’re totally done here,’ and that way when the US time zone get in they have the momentum to switch over. Worst case by tomorrow morning we have to be in a position where you walk in tomorrow morning and you’re like…

Unidentified Speaker: Let’s really try to aim end of UK day today.

RJ: Yes, that would be ideal. That would be the best estimate.

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Andre Beccu: I am working on usables. Those are objects that NPCs use in the game.

So, the frustrating thing about this is that quite a few of those things used to work before but are now broken again. So, in this video for example, we have an NPC who grabs a cup and for some reason it jitters in his hands and then he puts it down and pushes himself out of the booth with this cup. So, after a lot of research we found out that this is because the cup actually has collision and the table also has collision and during this interaction they are not supposed to collide with each other because they are both part of the same process - namely drinking in this case - but for some reason they do. So, the NPC puts it down, pushes himself out of the booth which then messes up everything that follows including heavily clipping through the booth.

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Unidentified Speaker (Meeting): To be precise, though, we haven’t entirely figured out if it’s really an animation issue so the investigation still needs to happen.

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Robert Reininger (RR): Mission givers - there’s really a lot of challenges because we’ve got a very cinematic experience that we’re trying to use with the same feather blending tech for everything else and so we’ve got some challenges that the other wild lines and stuff don’t really have to deal with and so Eckhart will finish lines in different positions - he’ll lean forward to talk to the player a little more discreetly and he’ll finish his line there whereas a lot of the other wild lines can say their lines from any position, whether they’re wiping a counter or standing at a counter just leaning on it or leaning up against a wall they can all say hello, goodbye, whatever. But Eckhart’s - you really want to feel that emotion that he’s trying to convey and so reusing the same tech has been challenging in that sense.

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Unidentified Speaker (UK - Live Release Meeting 08.11.17): And the other thing that we were able to do is look at getting the fix on the Eckhart issues that we’ve been seeing - that was a combination of the design and the AI team on their sprints and making sure that he’s still actually present. He was missing from the bar at that point and that got fixed as well so I’ve just pasted that one over which is cool.

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Spencer Johnson (SJ): So what I’m working on right now is item highlighting in shops. We’ve been updating the way you interact with the shop items to have a smooth shopping experience to use our existing interaction system instead of our AR data. So, if you take a look here when you look at a weapon on the rack or a shirt or whatever it’ll highlight that weapon so you know you can buy it but if you pay extra close attention you’ll see things like the magazine or sometimes the scope or other bits of the gun are not being highlighted and that’s because things we have attached to these shop items will not get the highlighting - just the main item. So, I’m going through and making it check all of the attached items so everything gets highlighted so you don’t get weird situations like this.

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Unknown Speaker 1 (US1) (UK - QA Standup 08.11.17): So how did the shopping kiosk stuff - was that…

Unknown Speaker 2 (US2): It didn’t go particularly well. I mean, we saw pretty much everything because the thing about shopping kiosks is they’re all pretty much the same across the board so once you’ve seen Olisar, you’ve seen everything. So, we did get through everything but unfortunately most of the things don’t work and the UI is not fully established so the primary focus of it is just - where is the UI? Similar to where it was last time.

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Vince Sinatra (VS): So what we’re currently having some problems with right now is doors across a bunch of different ships - particularly the Caterpillar as well as the Constellation. As you see the Constellation - the doors seem to be fleeing. They don’t want to stay inside the Constellation at the moment so we’ve been chasing down exactly why they are fleeing the nest and leaving everything within the Constellation in kind of a rough state because of that. Some people don’t understand exactly how complicated our doors are - they’re not just a simple open and close because they also do things like hold the environment in and the atmosphere for your ship as well as represent certain areas of the physics grid.

Calix Reneau (CR): We are consolidating all of our door tech to all be variants of the same system. One of the things that I’m doing is that there has been some mismatch in - at least reported, I haven’t found it yet - some mismatch in the actual assets being used, possibly as a result of that switch. So, I am going through and cleaning that stuff up now. Making sure everything uses the same naming conventions. Everything uses the same effects or sounds as they’re supposed to or hooked those into the proper bones because all of our doors that bring something in with a loadout will have the same expectations of what those attach points are going to be now.

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Ben Curtis (BC): We have had some interesting bugs I guess. I think because when the project first stated, a lot of this stuff was kind of more of a pipedream and we didn’t necessarily have the tech to do it. Now we’ve got the tech to do it, you realize that it doesn’t really matter if something’s a centimeter off or it doesn’t really matter if something is not quite right, it’s now really really important. It’s been really good, kind of therapeutic for us to go back and go, ‘Actually, you know what? We’ve looked at this and it’s not quite right but we know how we need to fix this now,’ and I think it’s been a good chance for us to be much stricter with our processes, much stricter with our naming conventions, and our metrics.

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Christopher Eckersley (CE): In QA we’ve been amongst the first wave of guinea pigs for the rollout of CopyBuild 3 internally. It’s really benefitted us in QA and it will benefit everyone else too. I’ve got on my screen CopyBuild 3 which is our internal patcher tool and right now I’m just going to be incrementing a 3.0 build to the next version. So, as it goes through it’s picking up on what data we do already have from our previous run and it skips over anything it doesn’t need to do and just does the downloads it does. So, previously on that last run which went a little bit wrong, our loose files took a while and already here we have an updated 3.0 build.

Martin Senior (MS): The CopyBuild 3 application itself is really just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve got many people working on lots of different moving parts to get this to actually work from the build guys over in Austin through to engineering in Frankfurt who have actually done up the patcher that CopyBuild 3 is based upon. So really, this week has been about tying up all of the loose ends. Had a few issues, sort of last minute, realizing that we couldn’t launch because we needed some changes made to the build system. However, that all got resolved and we launched - hopefully successfully - today.

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Michael Dillon (MD): So, Quantum Drive involved two major things - getting the ship across the system wherever we’re going at fractions of the speed of light and ensuring they got there safely. We’ve been getting the ships there no problem. Getting there safely has been the issue. If two people want to jump to the same point, there were chances of them colliding. Asteroids getting in the way. Stuff like that. So, our biggest issue now has been dealing with the potential collisions along the way and preventing that. So, detecting at a tenth or two tenths the speed of light, ‘Am I about to hit something?’ and stopping soon enough. We have had several issues where people would jump to the same point and arrive on top of each other and just explode. The big one we had for a while is people would jump to a planet or whatever and end up inside the star in the center and you would just see a glowing circle and be like, ‘What’s going on?’ Look around, ‘Oh, I am now the star of the system.’

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EKD: Now, we’re still knocking more out than coming in and at the time we’re filming this, we resolved 54 with 46 being added to our must-fix list and we’re currently sitting at 88 issues blocking this first release. While across all of our internal branches we’ve checked in over 2052 updates this week alone. The next time our public schedule gets updated, you can see even more progress as we work to keep you as up-to-date as we are internally.

Also, we’ve officially moved our development team over to the 3.0 branch which is another great milestone for us to further triage issues coming in and get us ever-closer to our first release to non-CIG testers. Our optimizations and polish are making for better testing, allowing us to move quicker into regression and bug identification. So, come back next week to see the progress we’re making here on Burndown.

Back to Studio With Sandi Gardiner (VP of Marketing), Forrest Stephan (CG Supervisor). Timestamped Link.

SG: Just a reminder that there won’t be an AtV next week while we’re at Gamescom. In the meantime, you can check out the production schedule on our website to track the progress of 3.0.

FS: And speaking of 3.0, one of the features that we’ve showcased in the upcoming release is the ability to visit a variety of surface outposts. Scattered across Crusader’s moons, these outposts will be places for you to explore, do missions, and cross paths with other players.

SG: Now, let’s take a look at the team responsible for making these outposts interesting and connected to the surrounding environment.

Surface Outpost - Part Two With Ian Leyland (Environment Art Director), Adam Sanders (Environment Artist), Eddie Hilditch (Senior Lead Environment Artist), Nicholas Etheridge (Lead Environment Artist). Timestamped Link.

Ian Leyland (IL): So, the last update we kind of showed you what the outpost archetype is, the main shape language, how it’s out on the surface, whereas now we’re going to go a little bit deeper into the branding and the integration and the detailing that we’re going to put into the interiors.

Adam Sanders (AS): So, we’re given a brief and it will be quite light in terms of narrative and they’ll say something like, ‘Oh, Rayari is a high tech, hydroponic lab that grows cutting edge bioengineered plants and they’re used in medicine.’ So, then they’ll also say what the feel will be - it’ll be like clean, organized, scientific, nice place to work - and I just convey that in a visual method.

So this isn’t just a process that can just be done in an instance: it’s a progressive thing. So I’ll do a first iteration and that will probably just involve maybe putting down a selection of props and then pass that onto my Lead and Art Director and they will review it and they will say “Okay, maybe the feel here isn’t quite what we need. We need something maybe a little more sterile or something a little more cleaner.” Say for example something like the “drugs farm” we need something a bit more sinister looking.

So it’s process of layering the dressing and then building up an authentic atmosphere. So we go from that initial point and we’ll get to the end where we’re kind of happy with it and we feel like when you walk in then the player goes “Wow, this looks cool!”

IL: Traditionally what’d you do is concept out your “vista shot” and then describe where the location is. Whereas now with the tools we have it’s actually more natural - more organic - to just have a little scout around. That way you get natural “happy accidents”. So for example you might find a location where there’s a nice ridge line and then there’s maybe a gas giant just peeking over the horizon. And then that’s when we start saying “This will be a good location.”

You also get that second element of believability of where rather than just putting down an arbitrary location it’s “Would people actually build there?” But this way we can almost validate the location: is it believable? Would people build there? And then that’s when we can start establishing our compositions.

Eddie Hilditch (EH): I’ve found a lot of times where I’ve decided on a place for an outpost, I’ve dropped the tag point down. And then I fly maybe a mile to the left and and think “Oh, this is a much better place to put that outpost.” Delete the old one. Move my tag point - drop it down there - and it’s the process of 30 seconds. So it’s very quick to iterate on.

I do basically fly around a moon and think “Oh, this is much better. Oh! The gas giant hanging in the sky just here really looks good. So let’s put an outpost here.” And I tend to move things around quite a lot.

IL: So secondly about integration and believability it comes to the surfacing, the weathering. So when you see an outpost you can … should see an indication about how long it’s been in that landscape, the type of climate that’s been happening there, and, thirdly the type of people that live in this location. So these three factors go a long way for describing the visual style of this location. So if one of these elements is slightly off then it will break that immersive element so it’s something we always pay attention to.

Nicholas Etheridge (NE): Then we integrate these outposts onto the planet and, basically, that just means how it fits in - if it’s a sandy planet you want the outpost to have some of that to help to embed it and it doesn’t look like it’s floating on this planet and it’s nothing to do with the environment. Obviously it’s an environment and it will take some of that on.

And we had several levels of how we integrate our outposts onto a planet’s surface.

We’ve got the outpost itself - the exterior walls and the ramps and the stairs - they have a blend map which takes on some of the textures information from the outpost. Some of that’s done procedurally by the base of the outpost that actually uses a bit of tech to blend the planet’s surface into the the texture of the stilts and the ramps.

And then we have the actual walls having their own blend maps. So if it’s a sandy one it will blend - sand will come in the gaps and the crevices. And then the icy one it does - the same sort of thing - ice will build up like frost. If it’s in a jungle environment or more … lifelike biome then you might get moss or vines or something like that. So that’s the sort of blending we do on there.

And they we do the decals themselves. So that’s projected decals of similar things but we can do a bit more localised build up. So streaks of … coming down the outpost and build up on the roof of the outpost - if there’s been a sandstorm then, that’s blown over the top, then we can show that. We can actually control the amount of build up itself - using the blend maps - we can see how new this outpost is. Is it quite recent? It might only have patches of dirt around. Or has this outpost been on there for many, many years? Maybe it’s abandoned? It’s got stuff coming inside as well and it’s covered - you imagine an Arctic base that’s been there for many years - it would be covered in frost and ice. You only get those hints of what the underlying wall might be.

IL: So on the interiors we’ve been defining what these spaces actually are. So rather than just having these generic volumes we’ve been defining what the archetypes are. So you know if you are going into an engineering space or a medical or habitation: things like that.

Secondly it’s about the brand. The “who owns this place?” So we usually get a good brief from the Lore team and that’s our starting point.

AS: There are different corporations that we have for the outposts. So, for example, we have Rayari Corporation and Shubin Interstellar Corporation. There’s slight differences between these two. So the Ryari Corporation is probably a better place to work - it’s more pleasurable for the employees and they focus more on agriculture. Shubin on the other hand is maybe slightly more oppressive - it’s not as probably as pleasant a place to work.

NE: In order to do the branding of outposts we first get the information from the writers: the lore and the narrative. So what these outposts are, what company owns them, if they’re a company or independent, and what’s the general theme and narrative of that company and how it looks and how it’s dressed and things like.

For example if it’s Shubin it will be very corporate - really big corporation - it’s kind of sterile. They don’t necessarily treat their workers badly but they’re “just their worker” and there’s not a lot of character there. Something like Rayari, it’s still corporate but it’s just a little more considered like a nicer place to work. So you should see that in the way it’s dressed and even the layout and things like that. And then you’ve got the more “run down” corporations, like ArcCorp, that feel more dirty, they really don’t treat their workers very well. And then you have the independant companies, so they would be as dirty necessarily but they wouldn’t be as tidy as a corporation, and have a bit more character because they are like a home from home. Someone saved up a bit of money, managed to buy a mining machine, and started their own little independant. So there’d be more character it might be a bit messer but they’d be living there as well. That’s interesting too.

That lore and stuff which should be shown in the dressing so you should be able to see what kind of company it is just by that. But then we’ve obviously got the actual branding: the logos and the colour scheme. So we go about that by, instead of doing all this stuff bespokely with materials, we feed in our colours - like our primary, secondary, tertiary colours and any logo colours - and the graphical stuff as well into DataForge (which is just a library of data really) and then that feed back into the materials. So we don’t manually make lots of different materials with different colours we just put in RGB values and then those colours get fed in. So whoever owns this mining station if it’s Shubin then it will tie into that colour scheme and take that. It’s a nicer way than having to manually do everything.

And then we’ve got the logos themselves. We have an atlas of logos, and idents, and lines, and fonts, and things like that. And then they get fed in as well. So if Shubin owns this then it takes this whole set of materials. And then if Rayari owns it then it takes that set of materials. And if it’s independant maybe it doesn’t even have a logo.

And we try not to just plaster logos everywhere: we want to be a bit more subtle. You’d obviously see some but it depends on the corporation. You don’t want to see Rayari, Rayari, Rayari, everywhere you look so some corridors might have a certain coloured line that helps you link that to the company. And there might be some - not necessarily logos - but just symbols and things dotted around. Again just reinforcing that brand.

So that’s how that’s done and it’s great that it’s all procedural so we can just drop one down and say “So this is this one. This is ArcCorp.” It automatically - I mean there’s a lot of setup - but it will take the colour scheme and the logos from that.

EH: It becomes an incredibly complex job when you have to consider so much about the way the surface of the planet works and these environments aren’t just a static level that is going to look the same every time you go back to it: it will be in a constantly evolving spinning planet that eventually is going to be orbiting the sun in a way that makes sense. It’s a lot to think about so you have to consider things like vistas and lighting are going to change.

And you can’t, as an environment artist, you can’t a perfect place to put an outpost and know that it’s always going to look like that. So we have to make sure we’re working environments that look good in many different scenarios because as the moon rotates it’s going to go from day to night so we have to make sure it looks good at night and day but it’s the same outpost so there’s a lot of systems talking to one another there. And it’s a complex task.

If we think about the eventual purpose of making this entire process at least semi-automated. We can’t maintain individual outposts so we could make an outpost by hand and export it to a level. That’s an easy job. But if you think about having to a thousand outposts by hand and exporting each one of those to the level that’s a thousand outposts we have to maintain.

If we go back down the chain to that initial geometry prefab if there’s something breaks in an outpost over here then all we have to fix is one prefab over here. Whereas if something broke in an outpost that was custom we wouldn’t be able to fix it across all the other outposts at the same time. It would only ever be fixed in that custom outpost.

So in a procedural system you’re only ever dealing with pieces but you fix one of those pieces you’ve fixed all the pieces in every instance of that outpost that is around. So it may be complex now, in terms of initial setup, but once the pipeline tools come in it should be a lot easier to maintain than if we were making a thousand custom outposts. So, yeah, that’s the reason really.

It is initial complexity and initial beating your head against the wall of trying to figure out the system. But once that system is in place - once the tools are in place - the end result is quick and easy to get. And it also is a lot easier to maintain.

AS: So in terms of how I use the editor, I’ll be give a set of brushes - probably from props guys - and I’ll also get request for other props - because when I construct the scenes it’ll probably go off to my Art Director and he’ll say “Look something more on the ceiling” and so lately I’ve been making a lot of ceiling pieces.

And these could be, for example, in the labs they needed something more technical looking. So what I’ve done, I’ve create more ceiling vents, positions for lights particularly so I work quite heavily with our lighting artist. And he’ll say “Oh, I need some sort of degree angles in order to put more lights on it. To make it illuminate areas of the room which, if it was just a flat ceiling, would be quite difficult to do. So giving him these options he can do his job more effectively.

We work with prefabs as well. And these are usually pre-constructed brushes use … these can have things like lights in, sound effects and stuff like that. So when I put them down they’re kind of already to go and gives a more immediate look as to what we require.

EH: So because we’ve got all these systems talking to one another we have a lot of complexity in the way these things are build. And just as an example the outposts at the moment, in a traditional game you would probably put all your geometry together, light it in an editor, and export that level and it would go into the game. Quite a two-step process. For the outposts we start with a geometry, we put those into a geometry prefab, a collection of geometry prefabs goes into a building piece prefab, those building pieces then go into a final building e.g. an outpost, those outposts go into a object container that get’s put into an outpost cluster preset, that preset gets spawned on the moon, the moon - with its presets - gets put into another object container, that object container goes into the solar system and the solar system gets exported to the game.

So there’s a multi-link chain of stuff that we have to maintain and manage. And all this is reliant on naming conventions and file structures. So we’re working really hard at the moment, basically the tech artist who wrote it, Alex - who you’ve already talked to - tried it himself and - this is the system he wrote - he couldn’t manage it: it was too complicated. So we are working very hard at the moment to take that middle section out complete and automate it so the artist will only ever be involved in with that initial start and all the way through to that preset creation and putting that presets onto the moons. All the middle bit with the multiple prefabs and presets and object containers is all going away and should be completely automated because asking an artists to maintain that level of complexity - while at the same time being creative - is an impossible request.

So our tools guys and our tech artists are working very hard to make that as streamlined as possible but it’s becoming more and more complex as we go along. It relies on us building a ruleset and a set of automation that makes completely invisible to an artist and an end user because otherwise people are going to go insane.

IL: What we are looking to do is is have the idea of … you have quite a vast landscape and the player locates one of these outposts they should start thinking about how long’s it been there, who owns it, and things like that. And what we’re looking to do is layer that narrative from the outside to the inside. So all the way down to how the food is arranged on the interior. Across from the outside to the interior space the player should start getting those notes of the narrative all the way through. And I think in contrast to these barren landscapes to these pockets of quite intense detail, it’s quite a nice contrast.

So now we’re getting a really good idea of how it feels for the player to explore and traverse around these locations. So we’ll continue to polish, continue to refine, and just get that experience to a very high standard.

So we’re looking forward to the next release. And then getting it out to the public and get people exploring.

Outro With Sandi Gardiner (VP of Marketing), Forrest Stephan (CG Supervisor). Timestamped Link.

SG: As you saw, these surface outposts are our next step forward in environmental storytelling.

FS: That’s right, there’ll be narrative clues about who owns the outpost, how long it’s been there, and who has lived inside. Be sure to keep an eye out for those details when paying them a visit.

SG: And that’s it for today’s show! Thanks to our subscribers for supporting all of our shows. August issue of Jump Point will be released tomorrow, so be sure to check it out.

FS: And finally, a big thank you to all of our backers. Your continued support of this project is what makes it all possible. Be sure to tune in to Twitch on Friday the 25th at 7 PM UTC to catch our Gamescom presentation.

SG: And until then, we will see you…

Both: AROUND THE ‘VERSE!

Sunjammer Contributor For whatever reason, this author doesn't have a bio yet. Maybe they're a mystery. Maybe they're an ALIEN. Maybe they're about to get a paddlin' for not filling one out. Who knows, it's a myyyyyyystery! Nehkara Founder Writer and inhabitant of the Star Citizen subreddit.

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