Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.PU Monthly Report
Welcome to August’s PU Monthly Report! While most teams contributed toward Alpha 4.10: Siege of Orison throughout the month, many devs continued with tasks for exciting content coming soon and further down the road. Read on for all the latest details.
AI Content
The recent Alpha 4.10 patch marked an exciting milestone for AI Content, with the re-release of Recco Battaglia and the introduction of a narrative-driven mission chain. These features required careful coordination with teams across multiple disciplines as they utilize in-person conversations, mission comms, and the new Instancing tech. The information gathered from this work will be instrumental in building narrative-driven content toward the 1.0 vision.
Alongside this, the team supported comms for Siege of Orison, which takes players across a sprawling multi-step mission with a handful of characters to guide and fight. Elsewhere, content was developed for upcoming events, issues were addressed with existing social spaces, and initiatives were outlined for future patches.
AI (Features & Tech)
AI Features and Tech spent August improving Starchitect, fixing nav-meshes, and progressing with Star Paws. For the latter, multiple adult valakkar will now spread out when attacking at melee range and the kopion will properly handle unreachable targets (they now run away if their target can't be reached following an attack).
Motive display parameters were made available in debug, debug controls for switching between boss phases were improved, and error handling for missing parameters was improved.
For Human AI, the team fixed an issue with projectile and beam impacts not creating stimulus in the right place and, therefore, not being heard by AI.
Also, various improvements from Squadron 42 were integrated into Subsumption, the Token system, and AI melee.
Animation
Last month, animations were worked on for the apex valakkar, including for major attacks on ship targets. The team also created enter and exit animations for an all-new ship.
Art (Characters)
In August, the Character Art team finalized a new combat armor set and its variants, completed Subscriber flair items, and progressed with a new type of armor. They also supported mission rewards and spent time bug-fixing. Support for StarWear is ongoing.
Art (Ships)
The UK team began the month with a final polish pass on the Kruger Stingray after utilizing the PTU to catch a number of small bugs before its full release.
Two vehicles received their final materials and paints ahead of release.
The RSI Galaxy continued development, with progress building up to its greybox gate review in early September. Refinement of the interior color palettes and lighting across the ship was done after a few iterations on various options.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The Anvil Liberator progressed through greybox, with much of the interior being refined as the devs finalize the needs of each area. On the exterior, the main thrusters, maneuvering thrusters, and landing gear were integrated. Going forward, the team will continue to build details into the technical areas of the hull in line with Anvil’s manufacturing style.
Progress continued on three unannounced vehicles too. The first is approaching its greybox gate review, with additional modelling work being done to emphasize how different parts of the ship interact. For the second, the majority of the interior moved quickly through the art stages and large areas of the ship are closing in on LOD0, mainly due to having the interior being split across multiple artists. The exterior of the ship, with fewer artists working on it, is progressing at the typical rate, with the team refining its large, complex mechanisms. The third is in the final stages, with the devs adding paints and closing out bugs.
Finally for the UK team, an all-new ship entered pre-production, with the devs breaking down the brief and concept to begin building out the geometry.
The North American team finished an unannounced ship they’ve been working on for the past few months. In August, its final pass was completed, with paints currently being finalized and bugs fixed.
Development of the Drake Kraken continued, too. The exterior progressed well, with panel work, material break up, and detailing helping to sell the scale and complexity. On the interior, the devs are seeing the final vision across certain areas. For example, the bridge progressed toward final and, alongside the hangar, is setting the visual standard of the rest of the ship. Strike teams are being used to close out individual areas, so major updates are being implemented as the ship moves through the LOD0 phase.
Community
August began with the team supporting two ongoing events that started in July: Foundation Festival, which welcomes new pilots and celebrates the community members who help them find their way, and Ship Showdown, the community's yearly vote to crown its favorite vehicle. Foundation Festival wrapped up in mid-August after several weeks of activities, while Ship Showdown advanced to Phase 2: The Live Showdown. The team announced the community winners of the Phase 1 contest and posted a Spectrum thread covering the Phase 2 daily head-to-head matchups. When the competition reached the Elite Eight, they published a comm-link highlighting the finalists and announcing the Free Fly event for all backers. As the bracket narrowed further, the team published a Final Four post, spotlighting the Drake Ironclad Assault, Drake Corsair, Origin M80, and RSI Perseus as this year's remaining contenders.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.August also saw the release of Alpha 4.10 after an extended PTU phase. Following the patch launch, the team helped the Production team publish an Improving the Live Experience comm-link, detailing progress on some of the game's most persistent issues. The patch introduced Siege of Orison, now rebuilt using new Instancing technology, a rebalance of fuel tank capacity and consumption across all ships, and the introduction of the Kruger S-65 Stingray. The team supported the launch with a catch-all post to help players navigate the new content.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The Bar Citizen World Tour continued with a stop in Denver, Colorado, and a Gamescom meetup in Cologne, Germany. Behind the scenes, the Community team also continued preparing for upcoming events.
Alongside these, the team maintained the regular publishing schedule, including This Week in Star Citizen, bi-weekly Roadmap Updates and Roundups, the Monthly Report, and Arena Commander schedule updates, while coordinating feedback across multiple development teams to ensure community voices reached the appropriate channels.
Narrative
Work continued in August on generating mission text for the huge number of missions that will be arriving with Nyx I. This consisted of not only a swath of contracts being offered by the various factions of the UEE, but new Local Contracts, where someone who lives at the settlement you’re visiting is looking for help.
Additionally, an upcoming event required Narrative support for the overall lore that players will experience, along with text for the suite of missions and rewards that will come with it. Every patch also sees dozens of new items, weapons, and rewards, which all need text that the Narrative team generates, along with detailed reviews of ships in development to help ensure that the signage and decals are lore-appropriate.
August also saw the release of a new issue of the Subscriber magazine, Jump Point, which features a brand-new narrative story about Nyx I.
Online Technology
Last month, the Online Services team focused on improving the reliability of missions and contracts, specifically the system that generates jobs and delivery tasks. The devs worked through a bug where accepting a mission that another player had just started could get them stuck. The fix will show a clear message and automatically refresh the list instead of leaving players in a broken state. A technical issue was also addressed where missions tied to instanced areas (like certain locales or private spaces) weren't properly ‘cleaned up’ after players left, which was creating unnecessary buildup behind the scenes.
Furthermore, Online Services worked on various improvements for Instancing. They also cleaned up the side effect of a previous bug that had mistakenly granted some players extra Wikelo-related items, which involved running data cleanup passes to correct it while being careful not to disrupt normal gameplay in the process.
Looking ahead, Online Services began scoping two new internal tools to help support staff resolve player account issues more efficiently. Both ideas are still in early planning and design.
In August, the Live Tools team pushed Hex 4.0 toward release and moved the Bootstrap client revamp from planning into development.
The busiest area remained Hex 4.0, the team's internal platform for player support and operations staff, where most of the month went into pre-release work. The team brought the player support Arbiter toolset directly into the platform, replacing the external browser extensions staff previously relied on, and reworked the sanction and discipline workflow around it. Some manual steps in tracking recurring issues were also automated.
A round of interaction and UX polish was also completed, including reworked tab behavior and quick-view routing, clearer sanction and page header controls, responsive account grids, a new feedback button, a past suspensions view, and a fix for a critical gateway crash when querying entitlements. Attention then turned to closing out the remaining feature parity and pre-release UX work to get Hex 4.0 release-ready, with post-release improvements already being scoped. Alongside this, progress continued on Citadel, the service behind Hex's data access.
On Bootstrap, the tool developers use to set up their local work environments, the team completed the client revamp implementation roadmap, finalizing the delivery phasing and producing mock-ups of the new interface. This closes out last month's design phase and clears the way to begin rebuilding the client.
For Error Reporting, the crash-processing pipeline was updated to clean up leftover files after each run for better reliability.
Finally, attention was given to the broader crash pipeline and post-launch polish for Panic Switch, the live incident management tool.
R&D
August saw the R&D team working on planet atmosphere, including making improvements to the overcast skylight. Improvements to cloud injection into the atmosphere continued too.
However, the bulk of the team’s work went into the temporal render mode. As part of this, the handling of dynamic objects was improved to reduce trails when moving through clouds. Motion-based confidence was replaced with a new coherence metric, which gives much better convergence and stability at little or no motion, and also helps to deal with evolving clouds, camera cuts, and dynamic objects in general without special-case handling. The history clamp was also improved, and in combination with a guide mask, now largely resolves transmittance halos at ridges.
A number of performance and memory improvements were made as well. The history helper texture was reduced to 25% by compressing and quantizing its attributes. Noise LOD computation was optimized, and shape and erosion noise now receive individual LODs. The temporal upsampler was optimized to reduce register pressure, and various transmittance profile improvements and fixes were made.
Several items remain in progress: folding opaque scene visibility into the upsampler's filter kernel and neighborhood clamp BBox hull setup, and the cloud injection work and VGPR reductions for the spatio-temporal upsampler.
Tech Art/Animation
Throughout August, the Technical Animation team focused on the systems that make characters look and move convincingly, including faces, deformation, cloth, and creatures. Much of this work is foundational, improving the underlying tech that every character in the 'verse relies on rather than any single asset.
For character faces and DNA heads, the team continued the expression and polish work that brings the PU's growing cast of faces to life, running detailed passes across a batch of DNA heads and correcting alignment issues that had crept in between the artists' Maya scenes and what players actually see in-game. A new set of eye textures was integrated into the live Star Citizen branch, alongside an updated base head. Improvements were also made to how facial regions blend together, laying groundwork for more varied and natural-looking characters.
Significant progress was made on the RBF system, which drives how skin, muscle, and clothing deform as characters move. The team solved a tricky issue where jaw movement was incorrectly pulling on collars, streamlined how deformation data is exported so multiple setups can share a single asset, and pushed the system out across the core Star Citizen skeletons. Tool improvements requested directly by Tech Art also landed.
The StarCloth toolset gained per-vertex control over how strongly cloth is pulled toward the body, giving artists far finer authority over how capes, coats, and loose garments behave. Support for unified skins was added, along with automatic health checks that catch broken cloth setups before they reach the game.
Weakspot implementation on the apex sand valakkar moved into review, and new creature variants began playtesting.
