Star Citizen Podcast: Recent Episodes

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Today’s guests were Senior Animator, David Petty and Lighting Artist, Emre Switzer. Some of the animations used such as mopping for example are a way to ground the player and immerse them. While it is the future, having elements like that bring the player back down to earth so to say. NPCs will behave with one another as they would with a player and you’ll see NPCs behavior change based off who they are and where they are in the universe. More emotes are something they’d like, just depends on the design team and what they want. Emre Switzer was originally a contributer on the Star Citizen Subreddit until he saw the job posting for a Lighting Artist Initially he had experience in CryEngine, but not lighting other than being a photographer, so he spent 3 months learning as much as he could and got the job. Emre has worked on Arc Corp, Original Star Marine, Recently Grim Hex and soon to be released Star Marine. He’s also currently working on 3.0 landing sites such as Hurston and Microtech. Destructible lights are something they plan on doing, those things will come when item system 2.0 is in place and then they can overhaul the mechanics of such things.

*This was lifted and slightly edited, for use as a podcast, from the Star Citizen YouTube channel. Summary produced by INN

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*This was lifted and slightly edited, for use as a podcast, from the Star Citizen YouTube channel

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Today’s RTV featured Pascal Puller, Environmental Artist and Hannes Appell, Director of Cinematics for Squadron 42. Pascal talked about ecosystems blending. Naturally it works to an extent in the game, but requires artist intervention at certain points. They currently have concept artists drawing up what a biome should look like and what will be inside and then folks like Pascal will go in and make it happen. Long lasting environmental effects is something that’s being thought of. An example Pascal gave was if there was a forest being harvested, over time the density would decrease and the player would be able to see that and it would change the environment accordingly. Water as it stands doesn’t have much interaction for now. Down the road probably, but other than going in it, there won’t be much initially. Large cities being generated procedurally like Arc Corp is in prototype stage now for using large objects. Hannes talked about cinematics mostly during his time. Cinematic quality is the same ingame as it is in cut scene and their goal is to use CryEngine as much as possible and allow the player to still move, look around at times. There will be moments where the player won’t have that freedom for gameplay reasons like being briefed on a mission or story to make sure they hear it, but rarely you’ll encounter the dreaded cutscene button smash some other games have. Objects like crashed ships and other unique items won’t be procedurally generated, but rather hand placed by a developer who found a suitable spot and placed it there. They intend to automate it to an extent, but want players to feel like they’ve made a neat discovery because someone took the time to place it there. The quality of faces back during the Gary Oldman speech was around 60% of what it is now, they’ve come a long way and in some cases the accessories have to be updated because they were a lower quality  than the faces themselves.

*This was lifted and slightly edited, for use as a podcast, from the Star Citizen YouTube channel. Summary transcribed by INN

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Today’s Town Hall featured Sean Tracy, Forrest Stephan, and Eric Kieron Davis. During the CitizenCon demo Sean said they get the colour of the sky for free, he expanded on that by saying that now there’s an actual sun that sheds light and then from there to atmosphere conditions determine what you see: Cloudy, clear, etc. The Polaris is confirmed to have size 10 launchers, the PDF hadn’t been updated to reflect the change. When asked about procedural generation and more exotic geometry they said it’s absolutely possible. Currently they view the procedural tech as building the canvas for them and then allowing artists to go in put in some details and create some unique places on the planets that stand out. 90% procedural, 10% Artists, but the 10% is what makes it special. The state of the female avatar is that they’re currently working through the male clothing and fitting it for the female sculpt and the biggest thing is the animations. Sean said there’s about 6000 animations for the male, several which we either haven’t seen or aren’t in the PU yet, so it’s a lot of work to make her come to life. Sean also talked about how yeah they could simply make females the same height and boom, female avatars tomorrow, but females have different proportions and they didn’t want to take the easy way out. When asked if the size of the female avatar will give an advantage in combat because of her slightly smaller side, they said the gains would be minute and if needed be they have ways to balance it out without affecting the visual state. The amount of cores you have will benefit you in Star Citizen now and into the future. Speed is still king currently, but as their tech comes online and their parallelization becomes more efficient, having more cores will benefit you greatly than simply having the “Fastest” processor. The height of the atmosphere is not static, they can increase or decrease it. It’s currently at around 10,000 because of gameplay reasons and how long it would take if it was much higher, but they’re talking and figuring out gameplay ideas for thicker atmospheres.

*This was lifted and slightly edited, for use as a podcast, from the Star Citizen YouTube channel. Summary created by INN

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*This was lifted and slightly edited, for use as a podcast, from the Star Citizen YouTube channel.