CitizenCon 2017

[VoA]

See Links below .....

CitizenCon 2017 stream has started - enjoy everyone! 

CitizenCon 2017 Intro

^^^ Very impressive intro - LOVE IT!!!

Sabre Raven CitizenCon Model!

CitizenCon 2017 : short (update)

Relay's Notes from CitizenCon 2017

Spoiler

Notes from CitizenCon 2017Written Friday 27th of October 2017 at 06:58am by Nehkara

CitizenCon 2017 is finally here!  Check here for Relay's notes on the epic event.

Saber Raven to be released Flight Ready in 3.0

Intel Optane claims it comes with "exclusive digital spaceship" the Saber Raven.

Disco Lando is talking about what’s coming up during the day

No Sean Tracey during the tech talk - he’s working on a secret presentation for later

There are some TEST balls being thrown around

They’ll be designing FPS weapons on the floor with live input from convention goers, and the weapon will make it into the game

There are AI demonstrations going on, showing how they program subsumption

Brian Chambers just appeared

Everything’s being pushed back an hour

The graphics panel will have 118 slides.

There are tech demos on the floor showing how the planet editor works, showing the tools and how planets are made.

The Stanton panel later will go through visuals of the moons and how they develop the tech alongside while they create the moons.

Panels will now all be in UK time, as everything’s been pushed back an hour.

We’re seeing a video of a box. And a ship being shot. Caterpillar just got blown up by a Connie, looks beautiful.

Box if falling down to a planet.

The box is on stage. And now so is Chris!

Intel have sponsored CitizenCon this year, allowing them to do things at a larger scale.

CIG are in bed with Intel confirmed.

David from Intel’s coming out to talk about the optane a bit.

They’re launching the new hardware today at CitizenCon. SSC uses Intel Optane - very low latency, like an SSD, but very good performance.

Intel gave CIG many of the SSD’s for them to develop on.

Devs get faster compile times with the Optane cards, they’ve changed some of the IO setup to rely on the new tech.

The Sabre Raven was designed by Nathan Dearsley, there’s a video of it now.

Unclear currently whether the Raven is exclusive only to purchases of the SSD or not. Hopefully not.

Fastest dedicated dogfighter. Twin EMP’s, laser cannons, etc. Punches above its weight. Exclusively with the Intel Optane 900p.

Intel has given away 150 of the drives at CitCon.

Panel 1 - Empire on the Move

Brian Chambers is now on the stage.

Look IK is used to have an NPC look at the player or a target.

Morrow still being worked on  

They’ve got different types of look IK. One where it’s off, one where it’s always on. When he’s constantly looking at the camera, it looks kinda strange.

They broke up look IK into three parts - 0 IK being off, and 100 being on. They did it manually at first, but they’ve changed that and it’s now done more automated.

One of the devs used his spare time to create a look IK toolkit to automate the process.

The toolkit helps them blend the two IK types into a third more awesome IK type.

Evo Herzog is going to talk about how to teach characters to walk on stairs.

Stairs cause problems as they’re just a straight plane. Legs clip / float.

Used to be characters couldn’t go over boxes; anything higher than 20 cm would be a motion blocker.

One way to solve the problem would be to create more animations. But there are too many situations and you can’t consider all of them, so they tried to find a procedural system.

In the Lumberyard SDK there’s a system called ground alignment, which fixes the slope / stairs problems.

The system takes a flat animation and transforms it on the fly.

The feet react hugely well in this system. Looks excellent.

Not the entire foot has to align with the ground either - character can stand with just his toes on the ground.

Ivo wrote the first version of this in 2006, but it only works with slopes. THey need a different feature to work with debris and stairs.

The new tech they’ve got for moving over small objects is insane. I have no other words for it. It looks absolutely amazing.

Actual stairs. There are actual stairs. And the characters walk on them. Actually walk on them. This is insane.

Using Raycasting to generate the procedural walking animations was not fast enough and caused strain on the system

Using a system called rayscanning there’s a small box around the character that scans for nearby obstacles that the character may need to traverse

The scanning area is very small but expands when running to predict what the character will traverse next, rayscanning is up to 20 times faster than previous method used

To tackle planet terrain navigation for characters they added physics to the tessellated objects, which would normally be very intensive to solve that, they added the code to the rayscanning box so it’s a very small area that’s been made physical at once

Amazing shots of footprints in soft materials with dust rising from them.

What they’ve been showing is a small example of the animation challenges they’re taking on. Normally every section of a game has run through rigorous testing. In Star Citizen, it’s not as simple, because of the procedural planets. There are situations where it’s possible - and what they’ll be showing throughout the day today - is you could be on a mountain on a planet that no-one else has been on before. No QA guy has seen it, up in some corner of the world, and you’re in a gun fight for your life. The animation system has to hold up.

People want mining, logistics, exploring, etc… Everything needs to stay believable. The characters and the systems need to hook together.

Brian Chambers is back - there won’t be any QA after this panel.

The next panel will be tech with a focus on graphics. Back in a few minutes.

Panel 2 - Tech and graphics panel

Due to technical limitations they can’t bake the entire lighting needed on an entire planet at once, so they are going to go in depth on the systems they use to render a scene

It is unfortunately not possible to transcribe all the detail going into how they process each frame. Watch the video. They go over dozens of different layers, explaining how each frame is processed to create the graphics of Star Citizen.

Computers are magic.

They’ve started to add anti aliasing in the form of TSAA and MSAA

Things in 3.0: Things already in 3.0 - P4K system, server performance improvements, planetary rotation, render to texture, temporal supersampling, improved screen space directional occlusion, filmic tone mapping curve, first of new material shaders.

 

P4K system increases the time for in-office patchine. They can now patch in seconds.

Patches from 3.0 and on will also take less time to download because of the P4K system

Server performance improvements - getting significant improvements to jittering and network bugs.

 

Near term graphics roadmap: improved hair, terrain occlusion, gameplay driven material shaders, gas clouds, new shield effects, DoF…

Color processing improvements, depth of field improvements, new motion blur, and support for complex shading models

Frankfurt team is taking the lead on pushing CPU parallelism / multithreading.

Batch Updater - used to update batches of the same objects distributed over multiple CPU cores. allows for easy parallelization of game code.

Mid/long term goals - object container streaming, improved planet effects, improved space effects, dynamic global illumination, batching of physics / render threads, vulkan backend support.

 

 

Brian Chambers now comes on

There’ll be some Q&A here

Q: As far as tech goes, and what you’re involved in, what’s the most unique challenge for SC?

A: Scale. Compared to everything I’ve worked on previously, there’s physical scale, solar systems and planets, dealing with all that and having effects work on rotating planets. Normally you have a small level where you can assume stuff. You can’t make assumptions when you have a complete sandbox open universe. Same with the gameplay scale - you can’t assume anything is fixed. Everything is dynamic and emergent. It stops us being able to assume anything so we have to be much more creative.

Q: Possible thanks to render to texture to have internal bridge like in Star Trek, for the Polaris / secondary bridge?

A: Technically yes, it’s possible, but framerate is an issue. If you want everything in there, you’ll halve your framerate. They won’t apply certain post effects, they won’t apply AA to holographs, there’s lots of scope for doing things. Depth camera, heat camera, those are easier. Doing the full rendering pipeline would be very intensive. Question of performance.

Short break, 10 minutes, next up will be Xi’An history

And that’s it for the graphics presentation!

A: Goes back to the same answer for the last question. Yes, they can. Depends on the cost / room though.

Q: Most games use fake mirrors, is it possible to do real mirrors?

A: Multicore is the key. It’s where everyone’s going. I7’s and i9’s have plenty of bandwidth, and we’re doing our best to fill those. Going wide is the way. In terms of a particular model, no particular model is best.

Q: Lots of strain on the CPU - would you recommend more threads? 8 - 12 threads?

A: We’d have to run it and test what the performance is. Generally the ice we’re giving to designers if it’s a constraint on the scenario we can do it. If we’re in a room and there’re no windows, I can get a view of somewhere else fine, cause that room only takes up a small amount of the frame. But if you’re in an open environment and you want to look at another environment, that we can’t do.

Q: Render to Texture question - doing some sort of VR cockpit would be too much of a strain; what’s the extent of it? On the explorer armour there’s a camera looking thing on the shoulder; sending an away team and having their point of view displayed in a cockpit? Reasonable?

A: They do papers, but we don’t take it directly from them. We do lots internally, the optics stuff was all in house. We take it from whoever does it best. Other stuff like area light implementation we took research from that that’s been done by other games studios. There’s no one source, it’s quite open in game development, it’s quite open.

Q: Do you do research and development yourselves or do you take it from AMD and NVIDIA?

A: There’s lots of research online that we tend to look at - SIGGRAPH or GDC presentations. With performance, we have contacts with AMD and NVIDIA. Opaque lighting shader, that’s one shader, very hard to get to run fast and balance across architectures, so we work closely with them to hit the performance goals with those.

Q: PBR uses lots of resources - do you communicate with NVIDIA & AMD to further develop PBR tech?

Panel 3 - Xi’An History, Culture and Physiology

Designing the Xi’An - Xi’An are not a predator. They need to have lips for the language. They’re good at tech (anti-grav) and they have a long lifespan.

All Xi’An must serve the Emperor, and join houses.

Xi’An society is ruled by the emperor, but dominated by family houses.

Last week they had the question of “How do Xi’An sleep?” Might not see in-game, but it’s an interesting question. Where they came from, what society is like, do they lie down? Do they stand? Creates a living breathing species.

Xi’An eat carrion, like spicy food. They weren’t the top of the food chain for a long time, so they were cautious and scavenger eaters.

They created 30,000 years of history for the Xi’An. They have a homeworld - RyiX’yan. They’re not the top of the food chain, and they don’t live there anymore.

Who are the Xi’An?

There’s a concept of verticality with many Xi’An ships. First popped up with the Xi’An Scout ship.

Xi’An are ‘patient diplomats who are slow to anger, but who can carry a grudge for a long time due to their centuries-long lifespan.

Once they put that info out to art and design teams, they could work in an abstract way and come up with things from there. The Kr’Thak are TBD.

They used terms to develop them. Banu are the Traders. Tevarin are the Ronin. Vanduul are the Warriors. Xi’An are the Diplomats. Shows what each represents on the surface.

They started with very rough shapes and refined it, detailed as they worked their way in. That was the approach they took. Once you establish the basic tone and character you can forget, because you’re keeping in mind who they are as a culture. Dave could forget which Xi”An house controlled the second dynasty, because as long as he rembered who they were, he could keep developing.

Who are the Xi’An? Seems like a silly approach, but it can give a lot of answers. When Chris and Dave were first talking about the framework that would become SC, they had the Vanduul, Xi’An, Banu, and Tevarin. Those are the four main ones, plus Humans and Kr’Thak. The question to tackle was who are each of these civilizations.

They started with very rough shapes and refined it, detailed as they worked their way in. That was the approach they took. Once you establish the basic tone and character you can forget, because you’re keeping in mind who they are as a culture. Dave could forget which Xi’An house controlled the second dynasty, because as long as he remembered who they were, he could keep developing.

They used terms to develop them. Banu are the Traders. Tevarin are the Ronin. Vanduul are the Warriors. Xi’An are the Diplomats. Shows what each represents on the surface.

Once they put that info out to art and design teams, they could work in an abstract way and come up with things from there. The Kr’Thak are TBD.

Xi’An are ‘patient diplomats who are slow to anger, but who can carry a grudge for a long time due to their centuries-long lifespan.

There’s a concept of verticality with many Xi’An ships. First popped up with the Xi’An Scout ship.

Who are the Xi’An?

They created 30,000 years of history for the Xi’An. They have a homeworld - RyiX’yan. They’re not the top of the food chain, and they don’t live there anymore.

Xi’An eat carrion, like spicy food. They weren’t the top of the food chain for a long time, so they were cautious and scavenger eaters.

Last week they had the question of “How do Xi’An sleep?” Might not see in-game, but it’s an interesting question. Where they came from, what society is like, do they lie down? Do they stand? Creates a living breathing species.

Xi’An society is ruled by the emperor, but dominated by family houses.

All Xi’An must serve the Emperor, and join houses.

Designing the Xi’An - Xi’An are not a predator. They need to have lips for the language. They’re good at tech (anti-grav) and they have a long lifespan.

Started by putting characters in their natural state in silhouette form

They worked in ideas for costumes, homeworlds, etc…

They also look into interactions between them - how they interact together.

Lots of concept art to explore their culture, their society. None of it’s final, but it all gives ideas for how they look, what they look like, their costumes, etc…

Now they’re talking Xenolinguistics.

There’s a set on Spectrum of how to learn Xi’An.

There’s a 130 page document with videos.

The inspiration is very Asian for the language.

E chi kao xyo ma’ma. E (be) kao (be here in) xyo (house). Someone is here in the house. Chi (now), ma’ma (ma means ‘animal’. Ma’a - fauna. Maten - edible meat. Yal’ma - sentient animal. Ma e ma - her/his animal - ma’ma (beast).

The beast is in the house.

Q: Is this a template to use to create other civilizations?

A: We hope so.

Q: Regarding other languages, will we get tutorials for then?

A: That’s in the plan. Working right now on Xi’An, fleshing it out helping people learn it, but in the future, the plan is to do language full languages for the species. Keeping in fiction about which are more accessible. No diplomatic relations with the Vanduul, so it’s not easy for a human to learn them. Lots of guesswork. But the Banu…

Q: In many games we’ve seen races are very encapsulated to roles. Do you see your races being like this or with more varied roles?

A: Don’t want to have monolithic evil empires. Variations throughout Xi’An culture - youth culture likes the impetuousness of humans. The basic idea of each race is just a launching point. Need elements in the culture that challenge the norms. Not interesting if there’s no variation within the race. Every culture and race is fleshed out - not just the archetype.

Q: Will we have a translation of Xi’An on the website or a live translator?

A: Can’t speak for future tech in the game but if everyone wants it then it’s possible. It’s a full language and there are still some words that need to be added. In theory it could work. You can view the dictionary on the website soon.

Q: Would it be possible to have the lines translated as subtitles in game?

A: If you as a player want it then you are encouraged to ask for it

Q: How would you class, in comparison to other languages like Asian languages, how would you classify the language in terms of difficulty to learn?

A: The grammar is not exactly based on Asian languages. The words don’t change shape. The words are very simple. Don’t need to learn complex morphology. Need to learn to hear things differently, but not too difficult to learn.  Rules are straightforward.

 

The Xi'an Language developer is now on the Livestream and I've posted Links on the Xi'An on this thread below...

Aliens (FPS) - 3.x

oh...oh....oooo

CIG got caught copying  (not a big deal but kinda funny actually)

One thing really cool on the livestream is My Radar AP now shows the moons of Star Citizen - check it out on Google Play

[VoA]

This is another important topic just revealed on the Live Stream - - posted this on the Pioneer Ship thread - but again - you don't need a Pioneer to purchase Land.

Note - JUST revealed.

It cost UEC to lay a claim on land in UEE space - but NOT in NON-UEE space  <<<--- Very important 

+++ Tony is talking about land speculating - which creates a real - life-like real estate market (you don't need a Pioneer to purchase land)

NOTE _ also Outposts are Salvagable

NOTE _  you will be able to respawn at a Medical Outpost 

NOTE _ Outposts are intended to be permanent settlements if you want them to be - Todd Pappy just said you can "Live" on the outpost

ONE IMPORTANT thing that people might have missed from the presentation is Todd Pappy Mentioned that there are now plans for Outposts..... and Apartments (that can be rented in cities).......... but he also mentioned they have plans for VILLAGES !!!! 

LOL _ CR is on and introducing the new weapon that was generated (FPS weapon) and since the crowd like both option A and option B - it means well get both attributed to our accounts

=============

I've never been so impressed with a game before as I was when CR demo'd flying from Area 18 to Area 17 then up to the space station on ArcCorp 

CitizenCon Trophy available now 

ADD-ONS - CITIZENCON 2947 TROPHY

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/16207-CitizenCon-2947-Flair

 

[/segment] [/article]

 

 

CITIZENCON 2947 FLAIR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CitizenCon2947 Trophy

The CitizenCon 2947 trophy is now available to add to your hangar. Fill a spot in your display case and show your support for Star Citizen by snagging this special event trophy. If you attended CitizenCon 2947, the trophy will automatically be attributed to your account on Monday, October 30th. Otherwise, you have until Monday, November 6th to pick one up.

CITIZENCON 2947 TROPHY- Add-Ons

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Add the Kastak Arms Custodian SMG CitizenCon 2947 edition to your arsenal. Featuring a unique skin that celebrates this year’s event, this special edition SMG is available for a limited time. So grab yours before they’re gone on Monday, November 6th.

 

 

 

 

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[VoA]

Nikki often has an insider take on SC development (she chats with Devs other than just Ben)

 

[Donut]

Thanks to @Fintz 

 

Top is Elite, bottom is just a scam, of course

[VoA]

 

[J. Coren]

Considering how last year was a soft letdown, this year's event had my jaw hanging open nearly the entire time.

I liked the panel format showing all the things that come together to make the game what it is. As someone who likes to geek out on tech, seeing how things like cities, stations, planets and solar systems come to life in a fully seamless experience in less time than it takes to boil a pot of water, my mouth was agape the entire keynote.

The panel format was nice too. My favorite thing about attending events is getting my ear talked off by developers who are equally as excited as you are that things are coming together. Seeing department heads show you progress on the game and what their plans are for the future in a dedicated format was fun to watch, especially the one about the Xi'an and design of the Stanton system.

 

 

I did miss the patented CIG cringe though. I desperately wanted to see Cameron Wilkie go out on stage and be awkward as fuck.

Spoiler

Maybe that's to come at the Holiday stream. Fingers crossed.

[AdmiralBoom]

Best presentation CIG has ever made. Truly impressed.

The only minor annoyance was that we still haven't seen s#!t about Squadron 42 in 2 years now.

[Donut]

28 minutes ago, AdmiralBoom said:

Best presentation CIG has ever made. Truly impressed.

The only minor annoyance was that we still haven't seen s#!t about Squadron 42 in 2 years now.

About three weeks before the event, Chris said the Holiday Livestream will be dedicated to SQ42

[AdmiralBoom]

1 minute ago, Donut said:

About three weeks before the event, Chris said the Holiday Livestream will be dedicated to SQ42

[pyro nl]

wel lets hoop chris liked this new setup so it can come back at next year citcon, this was a big test to see if ppl would like it. so i do hope they got alot possitif feedback

 

good info and enough time to chitchat with ppl and devs

[Fizzlefuse]

My god, that ArcCorp cityscape was so impressive. I have to say after being blown away by ArcCorp, Hurston didn't have quite the impact on me. I guess if they'd show Crusader or Microtech would have impressed me more but meh, i'll reckon we'll see that soon enough.

What also really impressed me was the tech on characters so they'll actually place their legs and walk accordingly on what the ground is like.
The Pioneer looks amazing, though not really my thing to own. As i said before, I'm looking forward to helping our construction crews.

[Boildown]

The worst part of the keynote was them flying into space.  There was no sense of having to overcome gravity, or leaving the atmosphere.  Basically the "space station" is floating in space where the upper atmosphere should be.  I suppose this assumes the atmosphere is as thick (proportionally) as Earth's on that planet, but given the size and shape of the buildings I think that's a reasonable assumption.  CIG continually creates art assets devoid of input from science.  Hell, they only need a few of their designers to have a bit of curiosity about how stuff actually works in the real world to inform their design.

Examples:

Shuttle Rocket Boosters only go 40-some km up.  Notice how they immediately lose speed via drag after separation.  That wouldn't happen in a vacuum.  This is still clearly in the atmosphere, and any satellite at that altitude would would be burning up in minutes.  Notice how fast they were going... that isn't enough speed to make orbit, not even close, but yet that's far faster than our pretend spaceships at max cruise.

Contrast that with the external liquid fuel tank from the Space Shuttle. Notice how much longer it stays attached, listen to the call out of how fast they're going, and its increased altitude.  Yet it too falls into the atmosphere.  NASA says it has 98% of the velocity necessary to reach orbit, the remaining 2% is done by the shuttle by itself.

Here's how it looked going to space from ArcCorp. His comment about geosynchronous orbit is just laughable, by the way.  Links to prove that different size and gravity planets still have very high geosynchronous orbit altitudes.

I don't think you need to be an aerospace engineer to care about this. Merely to have an interest in space flight, and have at some point in your life enough curiosity to have spent 30 minutes on Wikipedia to find out how things work.  If you've done that, then what they showed was glaringly just wrong and not at all immersive.

[Scotterius]

1 hour ago, Boildown said:

Notice how fast they were going... that isn't enough speed to make orbit, not even close, but yet that's far faster than our pretend spaceships at max cruise.

@Boildown A lot of people do not realize that orbit is a state of velocity not altitude, but I was pretty stunned about how pretty it was to look down at arc corp.   Yes...it was wrong.  Yes, your right. Man, though...making velocities in orbit is hard.  Kerbal taught me that. I am ok with star wars space fantasy ww2 in space kind of thing.

Edit: Drink more beer. 

Edited October 31, 2017 by Scotterius

[Boildown]

3 hours ago, Scotterius said:

@Boildown Man, though...making velocities in orbit is hard.  Kerbal taught me that. I am ok with star wars space fantasy ww2 in space kind of thing.

But it really shouldn't be that hard.  It should be as easy as a quantum "jump" to the object you want to match speed with or intercept.  So the satellites in low orbit are buzzing past very quickly, faster than any ship can get to via max cruise. You simply target it and quantum jump and not only does it put you in proximity with it, but it changes your inertial reference point, making the object you jumped to the new "zero".  It basically kills two birds with one stone.  Doing things more realistically tends to do this, killing two birds with one stone. 

I'm still curious how the game is going to handle two ships who launch from different reference points meeting in deep space.  How do they agree what zero velocity is?  Is every point in space going to game a pre-determined "zero" speed?  Because that will break down pretty quickly if so.

Doing things the "gamey" way will always end up making more work for CIG in the long run, and CR is all about doing things that are best in the long run, so I really don't understand it.

[Donut]

2 minutes ago, Boildown said:

I'm still curious how the game is going to handle two ships who launch from different reference points meeting in deep space.  How do they agree what zero velocity is?  Is every point in space going to game a pre-determined "zero" speed?  Because that will break down pretty quickly if so.

The server calculates what the targets "zero" is and seamlessly loads it while QT'ing. Regardless of how many ships jump to the target location, back end services would be able to compute the speeds and adjust accordingly. As to how we may see orbiting objects around moons and planets, I assume we would get in the vicinity of some sort of "gravity bubble" that keeps us to the relation of the orbiting object or planet, or both, if you happen to be at the truck stop shown or the gateway to the planets surface.

It's all backend stuff that we could never see ourselves because it's all calculations inside the server mesh