Star Citizen Jump Points
Jump Points are the start and end of wormhole passages that connect star systems. The first one connects Stanton and Pyro.
The CIG video clip shows a ship entering a jump gate being tossed around by a powerful shock wave as it approaches. The sound design makes all the difference, especially the lag between the impact and the sound.
House toolsets such as the CIG Cloud Tools have been utilised to assemble geometry representing the entrances of Jump points and the gaseous clouds that surround it.
The wormhole is procedurally generated and is then selected and modified by the art team. Within the game framework, the wormhole will be encased by an OCS entity so that it can be created and removed from the game resources as needed.
Similarly, the star system you are leaving will be removed from memory and the new start system will be loaded as you travel towards it in the wormhole.
A new shader was developed to create the effects in the wormhole. A VFX Transparent particle shader was combined with a shader that could handle lighting and the resulting shader was distilled from the original mix.
The animations for the shader are derived from the vertex displacements in the wormhole model where the tube twists and bends. In addition, particles have been added to the central line of the tube to enhance the sense of direction.
The tunnel geometry is a prebuilt asset and the effects within the tunnel are generated in real-time using the tunnel geometry as a guide.
It is possible to have multiple branches with a wormhole, so we may start to see these as the number of star systems grow, or perhaps to end up at different jump points within the destination system.
