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Cyberpunk Area 18 & What is the Projectile Manager?

Welcome to some more Star Citizen this time looking at the CyberPunk Neon Stylings of Area 18, What Exactly is the Projectile Manager, Holidays in Game & a St Patricks Day Sale of Greenships/Vehicles.

ArcCorp’s area 18 is sort of a cyber-punky neon haze, dense urban environment.

Inspired New York’s time square.

They talked about the plaza in area 18 and some of the advertising there.

It’s a big part of the zone, in your face neon signs and holograms.

The Fizz Advert is the “hero” hologram advert for the plaza. It’s actually the coming together of a load of disciplines to make this, props, animation, lighting.

Particles rain off the ad and will interact with the player.

There are going to be abstract adverts that aren’t really leading to anything or just there for lore purposes. Others will be suited to the environment, be logos and signs of shops, encourage you to buy fizz. Some other foodstuffs they have made to compete with big bennys like Torpedo Burritos & Gelbees.

The Projectile Manager exists to improve the performance of the games projectiles.

Projectiles are now entities using the item 2.0 system. This gives them a large amout of flexibility and editable data exposed.

The Projectiles use a Blocking Spawn, basically this means that execution can’t continue until the projectile has spawned.

Although projectiles are cheap entities resource wise there can still be problems creating many projectiles at once.

An example of this is If you had a large hammerhead battle with 6 hammerheads fighting and they all have 4 gatling guns on each turret firing at once, thought this might not be much of an issue now if this is scaled up with a couple of dozen or with capital ships then that could cause performance problems.

They tested with by firing 200 weapons at once in a test environment. It tanks performance.

The Projectile manager optimizes this by detecting what type of projectile needs to be spawned and instead of an entity it spawns a small data structure and then the system manages this, any new projectiles fired from the same weapon then don’t have to be spawned as separate entities and can be updated very quickly.

In regard to rendering projectiles are extremely lightweight, basically being a box with a material on it. The projectile manager is able to bypass a lot of the render logic by just creating these streamline projecticles even if they blocked from view (characters and terrain will be culled still) skipping that step and with the other improvements they can have a huge amount going on in fights at high performance.

Larger Projectiles in the future may still use the old system, think RailGuns on the Idris-M.

Lore Holidays
They are planning 12 – 15 holidays each year in game and they talked about some of them:

Stella Fortuna – this a day about fun, drinking, eating and celebrating living life to the fullest it dates back to the 23rd Century when they wanted to celebrate the first interplanetary holiday jointly on earth and mars at the same time and helped to encourage people to be brave and adventure out amongst the stars. It’s clearly also influenced by St Patricks Day too.

Trigger Fish – April 1st it’s an updated version of April Fools Day… you yell Trigger Fish at people instead tho. The name comes from the non-existent 4th planet in the Magnus System and the inhabitants of Magnus would try to convince people that this planet existed and if they fell for it they were deemed Triggerfish.

Pax Humana – It’s a holiday commemorating members of the Armed Services in game, originally dating back to November 8th 2308 when the UNoE with various armed services in New York City Marched & converged on the Senate building to show that they are a single force for humanity.

 

St Patrick’s Day
There is some St Patrick’s Day or Stella Fortuna Promotions – Starting March 15th there is a Screenshot Contest and some limited-edition green vehicles. At time of recording there is only a bit of info BUT I’ll get more up once the sale goes live so far CI have said:

“We’re introducing a commemorative Ursa Rover Fortuna and making it available all weekend long. But wait! That’s not all. We’re also bringing back the 2948 Constellation Phoenix Emerald (complete with standard Lynx rover and Kruger P-72 Archimedes snub fighter) packaged together with the Fortuna, which will be available in two waves, with the first beginning at (3pm UTC) and another starting at (8pm UTC). “

Also at 5pm again on the 15th is RtV they are taking questions for the IT guys

“From branching build systems to publishing technologies, from major on-site presentations like CitizenCon to the day-to-day workstations and every piece of software used to make the game, these are the people that make gamedev possible.”

That’s on twitch.tv/starcitizen @ 5pm UTC