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-----------------Distribution Centers------------------
--------------------------------------Community Highlights--------------------------------------
About:
Distribution Centers are mission locations created for both peaceful mission types like Investigation and Delivery, as well as combat missions. Originally known as Underground Facilities these massive locations features massive interior and exterior areas made for shipcombat, vehicular traversal and fps combat. These centers are surrounded by various structures and smaller locations to provide a sense of scale and multi-staged approaches. Distribution Centers showcase a lot of the design challenges that comes with Star Citizens sandbox gameplay. As combat can break out in any section of the universe outside of major cities these locations need to work as well as combat arenas as they do delivery points, while still maintaining a sense that everything in universe exists for a practical purpose.
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Most of my work was done on the exterior area. While I joined fairly late in development I did most of the exterior coverpasses, created a lot of the surrounding gameplay locations, as well as blocked out and iterated on a few internal rooms, mainly the ones bridging the interior and exterior. The Distribution Centers went through a lot of troubled development. Originally envisioned as massive, sprawling underground complexes utilizing procedural generation, they had to be scaled back into more bespoke overground locations. This was one of the first areas I worked on when I moved from the Squadron42 team to the Persistent Universe team.
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The overarching layout had to be mirrored due to a lack of development time. Originally we wanted these locations to have major differences depending on which side of the facility you approached from, however due to artists already being overloaded we opted for making one side feel as good as possible and then mirroring it once the layout was locked in.
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Exterior Areas
Main Focus of the exterior areas was to provide a mid-to-longrange combat experience. Due to the nature of the space I could play with a lot of containers, walkways and concrete barriers to create clusters of cover for players to tactically move on foot through. Massive roads provide space for vehicles to move over, which players can also utilize as moveable cover. The general shape and form of the entire facility was created by environment artist and it was largely my job to make sure it felt good for players to navigate by adding stairs, walkways, ladders and other types of traversal options everywhere.
Inspiration for how we handled sightlines and navigation came from Call of Duty Warzone and DMZ. Due to the large open stretches caused by the roads, we allowed players access to rooftops as these height differences served as a type of natural cover when shooting down. Elevated walkways would allow easier crossings.
In an earlier iteration of Distribution Centers we wanted there to be a multi-staged approach where you had to travel by ground vehicle to small Anti Air control facilities and shut them down, before players traveling by ships could approach. The Forward Operating Bases still survived into the final release as mission locations surrounding the facility, adding a feeling of these DC's being more established in their environments. Star Citizen has always had an issue with locations feeling very plopped down and artificial, and we have been trying to eliminate these feelings in all further releases by drastically changing our workflow and mentality internally.
Interior Areas
One of the biggest complaints in the past with Star Citizen is that its been very good at creating expansive and epic exteriors but interiors have always suffered by feeling corridor-y and bland. For Distribution Centers we addressed this by building areas with massive vista spaces with clear separation from playable space, then building all navigatable paths around them to give a feeling of sense and awe. The roads running through the interiors needed to always remain clear as players needed to be able to drive along these for delivery missions, so for combat we had to build along the road, adding lower crawlspaces and maintenanceditches for players to duck into if needed. The combatexperience favoured CQC to Mediumranged combat in order to distinguish itself from the exteriors.
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