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I hope you all had a fantastic weekend. Things are business as usual around here as everyone is focused on preparing for the imminent release of Star Citizen Alpha 3.0. Last Friday, after a series of… mischievous leaks, we began a new concept sale for the Aegis Eclipse. You can find out everything you need to know about this now declassified ship here.
With that, let’s take a look at this week.
On Tuesday, the Lore Team will release another installment in one of their many continuing series. The Star Citizen Universe is rich with history and a past/future worth exploring. If you find yourself easily immersed in a good story, fascinated by the design of Star Citizen, or just hungry for more information, these posts are made for you.
On Wednesday, Mark Abent is back for another episode of “Bugsmashers!” Have you ever wondered what goes in to finding/fixing a bug you may have encountered in the Star Citizen universe? If so, this show is not one to miss!
And if you are interested in learning more about the Aegis Eclipse, Wednesday also brings us a detailed Q&A which covers the questions you have been asking on Spectrum.
On Thursday, Around the Verse checks in with Foundry 42 Frankfurt for an in-depth look at what the studio has been up to in the last month. I won’t speak for the rest of you, but something about Brian Chambers always gets me excited!
As a reminder, there will be no Happy Hour this Friday, as we are on a bi-weekly schedule now, but we’ll see you next week.
That’s all for this week, we’ll see you in the ‘Verse!
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This week’s theme is “Music Citizen,” highlighting some of the original compositions and music videos from the Star Citizen community. Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing your content here!
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“Space Fleas” is the second video production of Mustang Intergalactic, a YouTube channel highlighting J Matt Wallace, Jake Wallace, and Brian B Barrett’s desire to create music and music videos based on community interaction and lore surrounding Star Citizen.
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A composition written by LilAdamXD on how they imagine the game will be once the game is fully released, and this is sort of a musical take on that feeling of excitement and awe.
Star Citizen bricht weiter Rekorde und sammelt mehr als 150 Mio. Dollar von über 1,8 Mio. Backern ein. Zur Feier zeigen die Entwickler ein neues Schiff.
Sandi Gardiner and Forrest Stephan preview the Aegis Eclipse and share an in-depth look at game lighting. The Los Angeles studio checks in with their monthly update.
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Today we are releasing another episode of Citizens of the Stars, our weekly show dedicated to all of the amazing content creators in the ‘Verse. Our Spotlight guest is Alysianah, a long-time game blogger who has a couple different shows on YouTube. After that, ship designer Josh Coons tries his luck at becoming Quantum Question champion. Find out of he is successful by watching the video here
On Tuesday, tune in for the regular Comm-Link Lore update. This time, they’re going to be talking all about [OFFICIALLY REDACTED AT THE REQUEST OF UEEN BOMBER COMMAND.] As you can tell, you won’t want to miss it!
On Wednesday, Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy returns for it’s bi-weekly episode! Writer Adam Wieser travels to the Nemo System and shares some of the drama that took place when the system was first discovered.
On Thursday, Eric Kieron Davis is back to give you an update from the LA Studio on Around the Verse, our flagship weekly broadcast where we showcase the latest in Star Citizen’s continuing development.
To wrap up the week, we have a day jam-packed full of excitement! To start, Happy Hour Gamedev invites Josh Herman to create another creature live with your input, but only if you tune in live at https://twitch.tv/starcitizen. If you remember the last time Josh was on Happy Hour Gamedev, then you already know this is not one to miss! We also have a top secret Vault Update and new issue of Jump Point exclusively for Subscribers.
That’s all from me this week, I’ll see you in the ‘Verse!
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This week’s theme is Machinima Citizen,” highlighting some of the beautiful short stories and movies in Star Citizen Alpha 2.6. Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing your content here!
Welcome to our April Monthly Report! Below you’ll find a compilation of the ATV studio updates. You can easily find out what the developers in Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Austin, and the UK have been up to for the past four weeks in both written and video form. And the studio update cycle starts all over again next with the LA offices. Check it out on ATV!
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Soon, all new ships will have a Heat and Power component now that the team has finished designing pipes and begun implementing their basic structure. This will manage the flow of respective elements to allow individual component contribution to ship behavior. For example, coolers now contribute to how much heat the system can handle, rather than being statically defined by the heat sink. The old system in the new ships is being replaced with this new management system.
After this is done, the team must implement the minute details of each component influencing one another. For example, coolers not only affect the overheat temperature limit, they also offer IR signature masking. Heat sinks will no longer simply define the temperature at which components overheat and shutdown. The heat will ramp up to its desired temperature, rather than being generated instantaneously.
The Purchase Transaction system has been re-implemented with a new replicated function system called Remote Methods. This system will decrease the number of calls to the server, which should make purchasing things a bit more responsive. Next, the team will improve the Try-On mode and the clientside update to persistent data after purchases.
The team is also working on Object Container editing. When creating a gameplay level, the level is built with a combination of Assets and ObjectContainers. Originally, ObjectContainers had to be built in the dedicated ObjectContainer level, which, unfortunately, made the contents of the ObjectContainer only editable in the actual objectContainer level. In other words, when designers are building levels with ObjectContainers, but want to modify the contents of that ObjectContainer, the only way to do that is exit the current level, open the ObjectContainer level, do some tuning, save, export ,and leave. Then, the designer would have to move back to the level. What the team has done now is allowed the designer to edit the contents of a ObjectContainer, save and export all while inside the level. This creates a much better experience for our design team and saves time.
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Since the previous update about the ultimate light switch, the Light Group entity also has several new features. Its light state can be changed by Track View, which is very useful for cinematics. It allows for individual directional lights to now rotate with a simple property. This was a process that previously required Flow Graph. Light Groups can now replace the antiquated prefabs that vehicle external lights have been using. Next, the team aims to get Light Groups on a vehicle to rely on the vehicle’s power in order to control all lights as well as interior devices such as doors.
Lastly, the team has focused on the control manager. This system will automatically give authority over items across the game and will allow players to dictate the control of an item and its subitems. In the past, there was a system prototype for vehicles that was hardcoded. This meant that item connections would have to be manually defined by the designer, for instance, a particular seat always controlled a specific set of items.
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Now, the control manager will be able to connect to any entity. For example, a designer adds a control manager to a turret and then weapons are added, the turret can then be controlled by an AI module or by an Operator Seat. This can also be added to a vehicle with either an AI module or the operator seat. This framework is universal. It isn’t restricted to weapon systems. If a player wanted to control doors on a space station and there are terminals with an operator seat, it will link to the player and then the player can operate whatever it controls.The control manager will allow for multicrew play, depending on who is in each seat. The team also added this to dataforge so designers no longer have to manually state what each controller does. The system now knows what each control operates. With a set priority, it would manage itself. However, if the designer still wants to, they can give that extra level of control or just let the system function as it wants to.
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The ship team has completed the whitebox phase on the Anvil Terrapin and moved into greybox phase, which includes final geo on the pilot seat, the cockpit, the main engines, landing gear, and housing as well as basic rigs and animation for some of the features. The team has brought the whitebox into the engine to get it up and flying for testing. The team is working on the RSI Aurora’s cockpit, controls, MFD screens, and sleeping quarters as well as general internal polish, such as poms, decals, and LODs. Meanwhile, the QA team has been testing new ships in the pipeline and starting on the new animation pipeline. Their biggest undertaking is testing the new planetary tech on moons, such as Daymar.
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One of the biggest challenges when dealing with multiple asset pipelines is maintaining consistency across every asset. To ensure such consistency, the asset development teams need to create and maintain a shared, unified library. This means the tech art team is constantly evaluating and auditing materials to achieve the best and most efficient result.
Animation is like any other asset. It has a certain memory footprint that needs to be streamed in and out. The DBA, or database of animations, is an optimized animation container comprised of hundreds of animations compressed down to a fraction of their typical size on disk, similar to our Object Container tech, but for animations. Splitting them up logically is important because the speed of streaming will be affected depending on the size of the DBA. For example, a locomotion set can be fairly heavy as it is comprised of hundreds of animations (walking, running, turning, idling, etc.), causing the streaming of a large file to take a few frames. If a character slides prior to the animation beginning, this is an indication that the DBA is too large. So, tech animation developed a tool to create, manage, and sort the animations within DBAs.
This month, engineering, tech art, and DevOps teamed up to automatically output and track errors and warnings associated with certain assets for easy assignment, better visibility, and quicker turnaround. This affects everything from needed fixes to undefined behaviors that could negatively impact the gameplay experience and performance speed. Implementing this tech should alleviate the performance hit from costly asset errors.
With the implementation of Item 2.0, the Tech Content team needed to create a specific loadout editor to handle the characters as they will become fundamentally different than the characters in the base engine. Now that it’s been used in production, there have been some major improvements like new icons, documentation, and general workflow improvements that allow for more developers to get up-to-speed quickly on the usage of this tool. It will also make creating loadouts easier and faster.
They also created a new Skinning Tool to reduce turnaround by taking the CGA format (which is a hierarchy of animated meshes, collisions, and constrained pistons) and turning it into a unified set of skins with LODs that are bound to an animated skeleton with physics. This tool will not only allow for more complex rigging setups and LODs, but also reduce turnaround for skinning complex setups and improve the overall process.
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Since hands tend to be a third of the screen space in a typical first-person shooter, they must be at a higher quality level. An interesting byproduct of unifying the first and third person is that, without a separate asset to represent first-person hands, all character assets must be to the level of a typical first-person shooter arm asset. Meaning, the quality should be to the correct level of fidelity and the hand weights should allow for more accurate animations. The new hand updates done by the rigging team allows for better deformation and drives the eye forward to connect with the weapon, which also lends itself to the use of longer weapons.
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A critical feature required for characters is that the weapons move to their designated positions accurately when players switch armor. Tech Art worked within the confines of the skeleton extension system to develop an override technique that utilizes the correct helper positions based on the asset. This means attachments will now inherit positions in real time as armor pieces are attached and detached.
Also, in terms of attachments, the most complex character to date is the Heavy Marine. A fully equipped Heavy Marine has the most physical attachments, or weapons, than any of our other characters. This presented some unique challenges in trying to fit four grenades, eight magazines, two medpens, two gadgets, one side arm, and two weapons onto a single character.
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The character team is making solid progress across handfuls of different outfits, uniforms, and aliens. The OMC undersuit has completed its high poly pass, making it ready for in-game mesh and texturing. Our Heavy Outlaw has completed its in-game mesh and will move into texturing, rigging and implementation. In Squadron 42, the team is working on major characters to minor background roles. The Marine BDU has moved through texturing and onto its final stages. A medical rep character has finished up her high poly phase and will move to in-game modeling. Concepts for the Xi’an and Banu are near completion. Our newest quest givers, Ruto and Miles Eckhart, will be in-game soon.
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The narrative team dipped their toes in a lot of different pools in the last month. On the alien front, they worked with the design and AI teams in Frankfurt to brainstorm Vanduul behaviors and delved even deeper into the Banu to flesh out more of the civilization to help with the Defender brochure. Dave and Will also appeared on a Subscriber’s Town Hall to field questions about aliens in general. Otherwise, although there were the usual weekly needs (News Updates, marketing blurbs and Jump Point), the bulk of the time was spent working on 3.0. They synced with the UK designers to talk out mission types and the art teams to help figure out ways to dress the various surface outposts that you’ll find around the moons.
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The team has made progress implementing Commodity Trading in 3.0. Since several things need to come together on the tech side first, the programmers worked furiously on the Shopping Code Rewrite, the Commodity Kiosk, and Ship Persistence so Commodity Trading can be possible. Also for 3.0, the designers finished the first batch of usable requests for the first round of shops. These are created so the 4 required disciplines (Design, Animation, Tech Art and System Design) understand each usable’s intended purpose and functionality. Once all the required assets are created, they will come back for design to do the final hookup. Also, the first mission giver experience is being plotted for 3.0. Getting Miles Eckhart, who you met in last year’s Gamescom demo, into the game is the primary focus while work on Ruto, our criminal fixer, is also proceeding nicely. The team worked on giving Eckhart a constant stream of missions and enabling players to earn reputation and higher tier mission options. Lastly, the team did a breakdown of the Levski landing zone, which included how players will smuggle cargo into the city; the placement of the mission givers and their content; the factions within Levski; and the political aims of these factions.
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On the Art side, the team is completing the damage model pass on the Cutlass Black rework. By far, the most time-consuming part during this phase is creating the intricate trellis work on the parts that get blown off, like the wings and the body. This requires working closely with Tech Art to make sure the ship breaks apart and receives surface hull damage in the correct areas. Once we complete the damage phase, all that’s left to make are the LODs.
The team also worked on the lighting for one of the Squadron 42 stations and are also in process of converting existing setups to use the new light group system. This system will allow a much greater degree of control for the look of a room under different gameplay circumstances – such as when the power is on or off, when emergency lighting has been activated, or when gravity has been disabled. All of these changes will not only add a dynamic quality to the lighting but also make the environments feel responsive to player input. Initial testing has begun on a new volumetric fog solution, which lets every light cast volumetric fog, with the hope that it will allow many more high-quality atmospheric effects.
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The PU Animation Team updated all the existing usable animations to the new robust system. This will save on memory footprint and create a larger number of unique animations more quickly. The team also did a quick pick up shoot to capture lifting crates of different sizes from different heights, operating door controls, and various other transition animations. They also worked on picking up two handed objects as part of the Looting system. This allows more object interaction in-game and opens the possibility for more missions and activities. If a player sees a box on the ground and wants it, they will be able to pick it up, carry it back to their ship, and put it in their cargo hold for transport back to their hanger.
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Ship Animation wrapped up the reworked version of the Drake Cutlass, as well as new Zero-G enter-exit animations for the Drake Dragonfly. They also improved the cockpit experience by adding hit reactions, button presses, and updated cockpit layouts.
ENGINEERING
The Backend Services Engineering team has been bringing Diffusion online. The more trivial services, such as Friends, Analytics, Authentication, and Presence, were converted from legacy architecture to fully Diffusionized services running with Ooz. Next, we will start to convert larger and more complex services like Persistence Cache, Game Server Management/Matchmaker (GIM), and Persistence Database. These services will be broken up into smaller micro-services to meet performance, scalability, and availability standards. The Game Server and Client are very close to being Diffusionized, which will close the communication gap between the backend and front-end. In addition, the system is being optimized using a technique called Router Biasing. This allows the team to apply advanced bandwidth and control bandwidth techniques between service types in the Diffusion network.
DEVOPS & IT
This month, the DevOps and IT teams completed a project to expand the build system by 50%. This project is an important part of the build and deployment pipeline and the goal of this upgrade was to fully isolate and expand the try-build system. This will lead to much faster check in times for the engineering team and improve overall stability and performance of the builds in general.
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QA’s focus in early April was testing 2.6.3 to get it out to the players. They helped with multiple PTU pushes that led to 2.6.3 going Live. After the push, the team spent a lot of time supporting the Live build before shifting full-time to test the Game Dev branch. This has been both to stabilize the branch and to begin more rigorous testing and preparation toward 3.0. Some of the items being tested include a number of new ships, in-depth sweeps of some procedural planet environments for bugs, testing megamap improvements, new implementations for player interactions, item 2.0 conversions, movement system refactors, and new field of view controls. The development teams have been lining up new documentation and data for QA to polish up to ensure they are ready to jump on new content as it comes online. One of our testers worked directly with the Austin Animation team to clean up new mocap files for the development teams. Several other team members have been working with the Frankfurt QA team for in-depth testing of new and updated engine tools, ensuring that the new tools will function so designers can better implement and create content.
PLAYER RELATIONS
The Player Relations team was excited to spend a full week with the Turbulent team working on Spectrum improvements and focusing on how we can better improve the new player experience. We’ve begun work on revamping many areas of our service, and started the process of adding headcount to support our ever-growing community. Lastly, of particular relevance to 3.0, the Player Relations team has started adding new Evocati and updating our PTU waves.
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One of the big advances this past month has been with the player interaction system. Further improvement of the personal inner thoughts system will allow players to select functionality which is not directly tied to a particular object, like selecting an emote or exiting your seat. There will still be a quick select function to access default actions for experienced players. Also, item ports now allow objects to be physically attached to other objects, such as, how a sight is attached to a weapon.
The air traffic controller sprint was set up to figure out how to manage the flow of traffic to a location, in particular, it is responsible for assigning out and reserving a landing pad when a player wants to land, as well as freeing up that landing pad once they’ve landed and cleared the area. Conversely, this system will deal with reserving a landing pad and spawning a ship when the player wants to take off. The initial stages of the implementation are now underway and the team worked on the underlying structure of how the system works.
The functionality on the Character Status system is almost finished, which included bringing the procedural breathing and suit punctures to final implementation. Once this is done, the focus will be getting the system switched on by default in the game.
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The team is also working on Pickup and Carry, which is a bit of a mashup between the player interaction system and the usables sprint. The usables were more concerned with getting the AI to interact with objects in the environment, whereas the player interaction system is more for the player UI to interact with the environment. These two systems are now being brought together so the player can pick up, carry, and then place objects in our universe.
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Finally, they completed the initial development of the conversation tech for the subsumption tool, which streamlines the creation of NPC conversations. It has been handed over to the designers to test by setting up different conversations. They’ll provide feedback on any necessary improvements.
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The audio team has been working on procedural planet audio processes, including R&D and planning, for systems to map and modify audio automatically. Work continues on the Audio Propagation System, the breathing system, audio for the character status system and also a dialogue tool called Word Up.
For weapons sound effects, the ship weapon ‘tool kit’ is in progress, which includes reload SFX for the Gallant, the weapon tail refactor and multi-positional code support for weapons, which will handle summing up the audio for many of the same weapons mounted to a single ship. For ships, the Prospector audio is done, with work on the Greycat and Cutlass Black still in progress.
The music department worked on the ‘Dynamically looping cinematic ambient music system’ and the ‘addition of tension system.’ They also cleaned up dogfighting music logic, prototyped planetside procedural music, and added more music to the launcher.
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The graphics team worked on many separate pieces of tech this month. The first is the integration of real-time, lit volumetric fog from Lumberyard, which is going to be a huge boost for the lighting and environment art teams. The render-to-texture feature is progressing quickly, and the initial version is in the UI team’s hands. They will use it to upgrade our 2D UI’s, and create 3D holographic projections to power various holographic displays. The real-time environment probe tech is nearing completion and allows fully dynamic bounced light and reflections on a planet where traditional light-baking techniques are not possible.
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The visual effects team have completed a pass at planetary entry VFX. The effect is controlled by speed and atmosphere density values. With this core functionality in place along with advances in the engine trail tech, these two sprints are now being merged. Design and art feedback were being implemented alongside optimization and bug-fixing. In addition, there have been some lightning entity effect improvements, where realistic lightning and other electrical type effects are created. The first pass of vfx for the MISC Prospector, including thruster improvements and damage, has been completed. For weapons, initial work on the Apocalypse Arms Scourge Railgun continues, including the charging and charged effects. Additionally, the weapons team completed the Preacher Distortion Scattergun and the Apocalypse Arms Scattershot. They also made good headway on the Klaus and Werner LMG.
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This month the Reclaimer received a lot of attention. On the exterior, work on the hull was completed and the huge claw came together. The team is now splitting the mesh up and getting it ready to use the damage tech. On the interior, the habitation, tech decks, and an enormous salvage processing room have been fully fleshed out. Next on the list is finishing the drone room, engineering deck and cockpit.
Work also began on derelict ships, so that design can lay the groundwork for mission specific scenarios encompassing ships and wreckage.
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An initial batch of ships that include the Connie, Caterpillar, Starfarer and Freelancer are being broken down to their structural elements and made to look destroyed. Material work is being done in tandem to give the ships a more deteriorated and aged look. A wreckage component was also worked on. This is a library of nondescript ship parts that will be used to help embed and integrate derelict scenarios into the environments. The Razor artwork is now complete, and the ship has gone through a full damage pass. Some cool work has been done on breaking it into pieces. Currently, LODs are being finalised on the hull, and art is working closely with tech design to get it flight ready.
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The Hull C also progressed nicely. The hull mesh is now largely complete, manoeuvring thrusters were incorporated and polish work done to match the interior and exterior. A detail pass adding all the finer details expected is ongoing. The interior went through the block out phase, and is now well into art production. By utilising assets from other MISC ships, spaces can be created quickly and efficiently, with the intention to use these across the Hull series.
ENVIRONMENTS
The environment team alongside the graphics team continues to explore ways to create volumetric forms in space through simulations and initial renders.The surface outposts are finishing their interior visual benchmarks for engineering, habitation and hydroponics. These will then be distributed to the various outpost layouts and configurations. The team continues to set dress, light and polish these interior spaces to build character while also exploring options for navigation and branding based on the lore. The Truck stop space stations have moved into the final art phase, so the team is busy building the shader library and working on example pieces to final quality. As it’s a modular system, the building set is being refined to explore potential build configurations, which will ensure the set is as flexible as possible.
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The animation team worked on cover AI, with the aim to improve all animation assets beyond ‘functional.’ Breathing state improvements are now in line with backend code improvements. This involves getting curve data out of Maya and into Dataforge, which allows for more refined procedural breathing curves. The team started implementing multi-directional takedowns for killing enemies within close proximity of the player. Also, there were further improvements to weapon setup & reloads across the board, including the Devastator shotgun, Arrowhead sniper rifle, Gallant laser rifle, and P8-SC ballistic SMG As well as melee improvements for pistol and stocked weapons.
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Finally, the Derby Foundry team were busy with face and body animations for our 3.0 Mission Givers and handed over 500 facial animation files that are now ready to be implemented in Squadron 42. The Motion Capture team has tracked and solved almost 1000 new body animations for various characters within the Persistent Universe.The team also worked on new facial animations for shooting guns. Animation Director Steve Bender has been a great source of inspiration, so expect new and improved faces soon.
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The Environment Art team fleshed out the different procedural terrain elements of Delamar, which is mostly covered with mountainous shapes.When placing the Levski landing zone onto the planet, there were a few challenges such as: What’s the best workflow to create the large borehole in front of the landing zone and the roads leading up to it, and what specific elements are needed to make the station blend smoothly with the terrain? The exterior of Levski had a few changes made to it, such as integrating garages on the lower levels so players can make an approach with ground vehicles. The team also made progress on the mining structures in and around the borehole to give them a more functional feeling and a polish pass. There were also some final touches done to the moons to differentiate them from each other.
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Work moved forward as the team collaborated with the engineers to flesh out the tools and tech required for the procedural planets. Progress was made on the manual setups required to spawn the effects in engine, and moons are slowly taking on their own subtle personalities.
CINEMATICS
The team’s primary focus continued to be performance capture scenes across numerous Squadron 42 chapters. The current priority are story scenes on board the giant Shubin Archon facility, so the level designers and artists can finalize the Shubin environments. In addition, the team edited a big sequence for the middle of the story and progressed with setting the vista for a major story event during the opening of the game.
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The Tech Art team performed R&D regarding foot constrain locomotion. The end goal is to get the feet to properly plant on the ground with each step, to the give the character a true sense of weight, at all speeds and angles. There was work on some skinning tasks to widen the range of character customization. Collaboration with the weapons team continued, both on Tools to help programmatically spot errors in the pipeline, as well as rigging for new and updated weapons.
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The System Design team progressed on the Actor Status system. It now incorporates player breathing, suffocating, stamina, g-forces, drinking, injuries, etc. Other work included: subsystems for suits getting punctured in combat, the ability to patch damaged suits, and recharge oxygen tanks.
The usable systems reached full production status and is now being mass produced for both S42 and PU. Once implemented into the levels, these will make the world feel so much more alive as the AI will be able to interact with almost any item in the world. The system is incredibly flexible from simple actions such as an AI leaning on a wall to complex ones like the opening of a service locker, accessing the power supply item inside, inspecting an item inside the power supply, removing a broken item and replacing it with a new one, and restarting the power supply. The system allows either the player or AI perform those actions, or have both players and AI working on the same usable together.
On the social side of things, the design for the Spectrum game integration is being finalized. This will allow players to access core Spectrum functions inside the game, like party creation and management, chat, friend’s list, organizations, etc. The goal is to keep the majority of the stuff available in the Spectrum app, while the core functionality needed for minute to minute gameplay remains available directly in game.
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The Level Design team finished their design pass on the Surface Outpost, as the Art Team worked on its modular system. Levski is now being integrated into the procedural version of Delmar. An Upper Lobby was created, which will connect the Levski interior to the planetary surface via airlocks and serve as a place for a future possible air rail to outlying landing areas. Garages were implemented on the surface so people can spawn or park their vehicles. We also added new approaches to the Levski site itself, with roads and parking zones. Additional custom work that included planning out the elevator network and worker’s areas, and adding administration offices, was also done.
QA
The QA team began testing the new Stanton System persistent universe level this month with a focus on finding any major gameplay blockers. The entire process of connecting to this new PU level has changed, which led to additional tweaks and testing done to the in-house server launcher tool called Catapult. With Port Olisar now in the Stanton System level, traveling between the different moons, landing on them, getting out, etc, is being tested. In the Subsumption Editor, the new Conversation system was recently added and was available for an initial round of testing. All issues encountered were entered in JIRA and sent over to our Austin studio to be investigated.
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The QA team also worked with the internal system designers to fix up the AI Basic Feature Test level and add behaviors for all AI NPCs, so that their designated tests could be run. The Feature Tester is kicked off whenever new code changes are submitted to the Game-Dev stream. The AI Basic FeatureTest level catches any AI related issues that could potentially be caused by a code submission. The team also further expanded QA’s depth of testing with the Particle Editor. New VFX test cases were created and added to the Editor checklist. These tests will continue to be maintained as additional feedback is gathered from other technical testers and the team.
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The lighting team supported the upcoming 3.0 release of the moons Celin, Yela, and Daymar. There’s been a particular focus on the visual quality of the surface outposts for 3.0 and all subsequent surface outpost variations. The first stage of our new Light Group system is being implemented, which will alter the lighting and mood of a surface outpost based on various states like low power, emergency, or hazardous conditions.
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The ship AI team refactored the Movement system to unify the movement pipeline between NPC’s and Ships. This enables the NPC’s to truly control ships while piloting them, amongst other things. This will ultimately give the AI a finer level of control and a way to contextualize their actions. There were some general improvements to NPC’s AI pathfinding and navigation. At times, AI NPC’s were getting blocked on certain configurations of corners, and this work will resolve that. There were also some fixes for the mesh regeneration to correctly exclude areas that AI should not be able to get to.
Regarding the mission system, the team focused on two different chapters of S42 mission: expanding existing functionalities and adding new ones for the designers. Through dataforge, designers can now define and initialize which default missions play when entering specific game modes. Through the subsumption visualizer, designers are now allowed to overwrite the starting mission for a specific level. This ultimately makes the setup and review of missions much more efficient for the team. Designers can now create a platform, which is a list of items that live within an object container with their known world coordinates at runtime. A platform can be accessed by the mission logic and customized in numerous configurations. For example, an Idris would be a basic platform and, in the game, multiple Idris’s can be setup in different ways: occupied by pirates, another by UEE, etc. All those unique setups would reference the same base platform of the Idris and have their own unique customization layers on top.
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The weapons team has been blocking out new FPS weapons: two Vanduul weapons, four from Kastak Arms, three from Gemini, and one from a new manufacturer. For ship weapons, a first pass on the Knightbridge Arms Ballistic Cannon Size 2 and 3 was completed. This is the first ship weapon through the new pipeline to prep for the modular upgradeable system.
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The engine team worked on Object Container streaming to help with the PU and SolEd, which is an internal tool that helps easily build full Solar Systems. Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are developed with C++, a programming language known for high performance. But due to the languages design, large projects can suffer from long compile times if not careful (the time spent translating program code into machine instructions).
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Even with careful code design, compile times for a large project tends to increase over time, so the team recently spent time doing house cleaning on existing code. For this, the team had to touch each GameCode file (nearly 2000 files). In the end, it improved the compile time by several minutes, which will have a positive impact company wide.The engine team also spent time further improving the procedural planet tech, including terrain blending, blending of terrain and scattered objects, and improved transition-dissolve-blending.
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This month, Turbulent released Spectrum version 0.3.3. This version contains a new type of discussion called nested threads. A nested thread works by stacking replies to an earlier comment directly below it, so users can see a discussion evolve from a specific comment or reply. The first level is sorted by votes, so the most upvoted sub trees are on to top. Nested threads are akin to Reddit discussions.
When a new discussion is started on Spectrum 0.3.3, the user can choose between a nested thread and a chronological thread. This new type of discussion allow for faster and more dynamic threads. The upvote feature is also useful for the community teams to gather questions, among other things. Turbulent is looking into how the nested thread option can be transformed into a view option, so users can decide how to view threads. The team is also improving the unread status as well as adding staff tracking, so users can know from the top of the thread list which ones have a had a staff response. This will be particularly useful for the Ask The Dev forums.
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Also included in 0.3.3 is the ability to flag posts for moderation. This works within orgs and the public community. Users can flag a reply, a thread, or message for moderation, so public moderators know to intervene. In your private orgs, anyone who has the moderation permission will receive a notification to investigate. There has been massive progress on mobile support for the keyboard system in 0.3.3 and it should be fixed in the next release.
Currently the team is working on the 0.3.4 release. The main feature of this release will be more refinement on tags in sub forums. These tags will be surfaced at the top level of the community index in the channel list, so that users can jump directly from a global community index to a specific tag within a channel. The second part of this release is that users will be able to bookmark a tag just like it was a channel in itself. This will give the functionality of a sub forum, while keeping the tagging system in place.
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The team is also adding more filters and working on the search subsystem, which will power all the “view my own posts,” “view somebody else’s posts,” and let users search by author, role, or dev posts. This feature will also power a new mini profile, so users will be able to just jump directly to a list of posts from a specific player directly from the mini profile.
Virtual lists are also being developed on the back end. Currently, there is an issue rendering long presence lists in the chat lobbies, which causes the backers group to collapse by default in the general forum. Virtual lists will allow for rendering what is visible plus a buffer. This will save on performance and allow everybody to be present in the lobby lists. One of the most reported issues is that users can’t jump directly to a message and then go back in time. Virtual lists will allow this.
In the meantime, the research team from Spectrum is working on the overlay for Spectrum desktop, which is an integration between the game and Spectrum. This means taking the redux application store and moving it to an area where two processes can benefit from it. Then, there can be an overlay that will keep the game and the desktop client synchronized without having to double the resources for it.
There has been some research on PM groups, specifically the ability to refactor the currently 1 on 1 PM system to have more than one person in a group, so users can have a party system for specific a lobby.
Turbulent also visited the Austin studio to presented the new art design for the site revamp. There were also some major infrastructure changes as the platform was moved to a new set of hardware. There was a brief downtime while it was shifted, but everything was quickly back up and running better than before.
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The Banu Defender was launched via a concept presentation. As part of the process, the ship rollout system was upgraded with an improved Q&A, a live Town Hall to discuss the ship, and a focus on the development process in Jump Point and the Vault. Simultaneously, the updated Banu race was revealed in a futuristic ‘National Geographic’ style magazine.
The Star Citizen store added new merchandise, including Star Citizen and Squadron shirts and hats, plus a beautiful new Terra mousepad. Subscribers can purchase exclusive Polaris shirts. Shipping and handling was revamped as a part of these new additions. Now, merchandise ships immediately instead of as a pre-order.
Internally, the team is in the process of supporting a major website update, which includes a long-awaited overhaul to the ship stats page. New player content is also in production thanks to community feedback, which has highlighted how daunting Star Citizen can be to new players.
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Tickets for Gamescom went on sale this month and event planning continues. Our community team and staff from Austin attended DREAMHACK, where they met with backers and talked Star Citizen. The con concluded with an appropriately Texas-themed BBQ Bar Citizen. Devs also attended the backer-organized BritizenCon and took part in not one, but two panels! It was an honor to participate and connect with the community.
The team ran four Happy Hour livestreams this month, including a live look at how production schedules are made. Happy Hour will be going on a ‘half hiatus’ for a bit as the team works on the New Player Experience videos, but it will return to its usual schedule in the near future.
Welcome to our April Monthly Report! Below you’ll find a compilation of the ATV studio updates. You can easily find out what the developers in Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Austin, and the UK have been up to for the past four weeks in both written and video form. And the studio update cycle starts all over again next with the LA offices. Check it out on ATV!
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Soon, all new ships will have a Heat and Power component now that the team has finished designing pipes and begun implementing their basic structure. This will manage the flow of respective elements to allow individual component contribution to ship behavior. For example, coolers now contribute to how much heat the system can handle, rather than being statically defined by the heat sink. The old system in the new ships is being replaced with this new management system.
After this is done, the team must implement the minute details of each component influencing one another. For example, coolers not only affect the overheat temperature limit, they also offer IR signature masking. Heat sinks will no longer simply define the temperature at which components overheat and shutdown. The heat will ramp up to its desired temperature, rather than being generated instantaneously.
The Purchase Transaction system has been re-implemented with a new replicated function system called Remote Methods. This system will decrease the number of calls to the server, which should make purchasing things a bit more responsive. Next, the team will improve the Try-On mode and the clientside update to persistent data after purchases.
The team is also working on Object Container editing. When creating a gameplay level, the level is built with a combination of Assets and ObjectContainers. Originally, ObjectContainers had to be built in the dedicated ObjectContainer level, which, unfortunately, made the contents of the ObjectContainer only editable in the actual objectContainer level. In other words, when designers are building levels with ObjectContainers, but want to modify the contents of that ObjectContainer, the only way to do that is exit the current level, open the ObjectContainer level, do some tuning, save, export ,and leave. Then, the designer would have to move back to the level. What the team has done now is allowed the designer to edit the contents of a ObjectContainer, save and export all while inside the level. This creates a much better experience for our design team and saves time.
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Since the previous update about the ultimate light switch, the Light Group entity also has several new features. Its light state can be changed by Track View, which is very useful for cinematics. It allows for individual directional lights to now rotate with a simple property. This was a process that previously required Flow Graph. Light Groups can now replace the antiquated prefabs that vehicle external lights have been using. Next, the team aims to get Light Groups on a vehicle to rely on the vehicle’s power in order to control all lights as well as interior devices such as doors.
Lastly, the team has focused on the control manager. This system will automatically give authority over items across the game and will allow players to dictate the control of an item and its subitems. In the past, there was a system prototype for vehicles that was hardcoded. This meant that item connections would have to be manually defined by the designer, for instance, a particular seat always controlled a specific set of items.
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Now, the control manager will be able to connect to any entity. For example, a designer adds a control manager to a turret and then weapons are added, the turret can then be controlled by an AI module or by an Operator Seat. This can also be added to a vehicle with either an AI module or the operator seat. This framework is universal. It isn’t restricted to weapon systems. If a player wanted to control doors on a space station and there are terminals with an operator seat, it will link to the player and then the player can operate whatever it controls.The control manager will allow for multicrew play, depending on who is in each seat. The team also added this to dataforge so designers no longer have to manually state what each controller does. The system now knows what each control operates. With a set priority, it would manage itself. However, if the designer still wants to, they can give that extra level of control or just let the system function as it wants to.
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The ship team has completed the whitebox phase on the Anvil Terrapin and moved into greybox phase, which includes final geo on the pilot seat, the cockpit, the main engines, landing gear, and housing as well as basic rigs and animation for some of the features. The team has brought the whitebox into the engine to get it up and flying for testing. The team is working on the RSI Aurora’s cockpit, controls, MFD screens, and sleeping quarters as well as general internal polish, such as poms, decals, and LODs. Meanwhile, the QA team has been testing new ships in the pipeline and starting on the new animation pipeline. Their biggest undertaking is testing the new planetary tech on moons, such as Daymar.
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One of the biggest challenges when dealing with multiple asset pipelines is maintaining consistency across every asset. To ensure such consistency, the asset development teams need to create and maintain a shared, unified library. This means the tech art team is constantly evaluating and auditing materials to achieve the best and most efficient result.
Animation is like any other asset. It has a certain memory footprint that needs to be streamed in and out. The DBA, or database of animations, is an optimized animation container comprised of hundreds of animations compressed down to a fraction of their typical size on disk, similar to our Object Container tech, but for animations. Splitting them up logically is important because the speed of streaming will be affected depending on the size of the DBA. For example, a locomotion set can be fairly heavy as it is comprised of hundreds of animations (walking, running, turning, idling, etc.), causing the streaming of a large file to take a few frames. If a character slides prior to the animation beginning, this is an indication that the DBA is too large. So, tech animation developed a tool to create, manage, and sort the animations within DBAs.
This month, engineering, tech art, and DevOps teamed up to automatically output and track errors and warnings associated with certain assets for easy assignment, better visibility, and quicker turnaround. This affects everything from needed fixes to undefined behaviors that could negatively impact the gameplay experience and performance speed. Implementing this tech should alleviate the performance hit from costly asset errors.
With the implementation of Item 2.0, the Tech Content team needed to create a specific loadout editor to handle the characters as they will become fundamentally different than the characters in the base engine. Now that it’s been used in production, there have been some major improvements like new icons, documentation, and general workflow improvements that allow for more developers to get up-to-speed quickly on the usage of this tool. It will also make creating loadouts easier and faster.
They also created a new Skinning Tool to reduce turnaround by taking the CGA format (which is a hierarchy of animated meshes, collisions, and constrained pistons) and turning it into a unified set of skins with LODs that are bound to an animated skeleton with physics. This tool will not only allow for more complex rigging setups and LODs, but also reduce turnaround for skinning complex setups and improve the overall process.
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Since hands tend to be a third of the screen space in a typical first-person shooter, they must be at a higher quality level. An interesting byproduct of unifying the first and third person is that, without a separate asset to represent first-person hands, all character assets must be to the level of a typical first-person shooter arm asset. Meaning, the quality should be to the correct level of fidelity and the hand weights should allow for more accurate animations. The new hand updates done by the rigging team allows for better deformation and drives the eye forward to connect with the weapon, which also lends itself to the use of longer weapons.
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A critical feature required for characters is that the weapons move to their designated positions accurately when players switch armor. Tech Art worked within the confines of the skeleton extension system to develop an override technique that utilizes the correct helper positions based on the asset. This means attachments will now inherit positions in real time as armor pieces are attached and detached.
Also, in terms of attachments, the most complex character to date is the Heavy Marine. A fully equipped Heavy Marine has the most physical attachments, or weapons, than any of our other characters. This presented some unique challenges in trying to fit four grenades, eight magazines, two medpens, two gadgets, one side arm, and two weapons onto a single character.
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The character team is making solid progress across handfuls of different outfits, uniforms, and aliens. The OMC undersuit has completed its high poly pass, making it ready for in-game mesh and texturing. Our Heavy Outlaw has completed its in-game mesh and will move into texturing, rigging and implementation. In Squadron 42, the team is working on major characters to minor background roles. The Marine BDU has moved through texturing and onto its final stages. A medical rep character has finished up her high poly phase and will move to in-game modeling. Concepts for the Xi’an and Banu are near completion. Our newest quest givers, Ruto and Miles Eckhart, will be in-game soon.
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The narrative team dipped their toes in a lot of different pools in the last month. On the alien front, they worked with the design and AI teams in Frankfurt to brainstorm Vanduul behaviors and delved even deeper into the Banu to flesh out more of the civilization to help with the Defender brochure. Dave and Will also appeared on a Subscriber’s Town Hall to field questions about aliens in general. Otherwise, although there were the usual weekly needs (News Updates, marketing blurbs and Jump Point), the bulk of the time was spent working on 3.0. They synced with the UK designers to talk out mission types and the art teams to help figure out ways to dress the various surface outposts that you’ll find around the moons.
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The team has made progress implementing Commodity Trading in 3.0. Since several things need to come together on the tech side first, the programmers worked furiously on the Shopping Code Rewrite, the Commodity Kiosk, and Ship Persistence so Commodity Trading can be possible. Also for 3.0, the designers finished the first batch of usable requests for the first round of shops. These are created so the 4 required disciplines (Design, Animation, Tech Art and System Design) understand each usable’s intended purpose and functionality. Once all the required assets are created, they will come back for design to do the final hookup. Also, the first mission giver experience is being plotted for 3.0. Getting Miles Eckhart, who you met in last year’s Gamescom demo, into the game is the primary focus while work on Ruto, our criminal fixer, is also proceeding nicely. The team worked on giving Eckhart a constant stream of missions and enabling players to earn reputation and higher tier mission options. Lastly, the team did a breakdown of the Levski landing zone, which included how players will smuggle cargo into the city; the placement of the mission givers and their content; the factions within Levski; and the political aims of these factions.
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On the Art side, the team is completing the damage model pass on the Cutlass Black rework. By far, the most time-consuming part during this phase is creating the intricate trellis work on the parts that get blown off, like the wings and the body. This requires working closely with Tech Art to make sure the ship breaks apart and receives surface hull damage in the correct areas. Once we complete the damage phase, all that’s left to make are the LODs.
The team also worked on the lighting for one of the Squadron 42 stations and are also in process of converting existing setups to use the new light group system. This system will allow a much greater degree of control for the look of a room under different gameplay circumstances – such as when the power is on or off, when emergency lighting has been activated, or when gravity has been disabled. All of these changes will not only add a dynamic quality to the lighting but also make the environments feel responsive to player input. Initial testing has begun on a new volumetric fog solution, which lets every light cast volumetric fog, with the hope that it will allow many more high-quality atmospheric effects.
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The PU Animation Team updated all the existing usable animations to the new robust system. This will save on memory footprint and create a larger number of unique animations more quickly. The team also did a quick pick up shoot to capture lifting crates of different sizes from different heights, operating door controls, and various other transition animations. They also worked on picking up two handed objects as part of the Looting system. This allows more object interaction in-game and opens the possibility for more missions and activities. If a player sees a box on the ground and wants it, they will be able to pick it up, carry it back to their ship, and put it in their cargo hold for transport back to their hanger.
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Ship Animation wrapped up the reworked version of the Drake Cutlass, as well as new Zero-G enter-exit animations for the Drake Dragonfly. They also improved the cockpit experience by adding hit reactions, button presses, and updated cockpit layouts.
ENGINEERING
The Backend Services Engineering team has been bringing Diffusion online. The more trivial services, such as Friends, Analytics, Authentication, and Presence, were converted from legacy architecture to fully Diffusionized services running with Ooz. Next, we will start to convert larger and more complex services like Persistence Cache, Game Server Management/Matchmaker (GIM), and Persistence Database. These services will be broken up into smaller micro-services to meet performance, scalability, and availability standards. The Game Server and Client are very close to being Diffusionized, which will close the communication gap between the backend and front-end. In addition, the system is being optimized using a technique called Router Biasing. This allows the team to apply advanced bandwidth and control bandwidth techniques between service types in the Diffusion network.
DEVOPS & IT
This month, the DevOps and IT teams completed a project to expand the build system by 50%. This project is an important part of the build and deployment pipeline and the goal of this upgrade was to fully isolate and expand the try-build system. This will lead to much faster check in times for the engineering team and improve overall stability and performance of the builds in general.
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QA’s focus in early April was testing 2.6.3 to get it out to the players. They helped with multiple PTU pushes that led to 2.6.3 going Live. After the push, the team spent a lot of time supporting the Live build before shifting full-time to test the Game Dev branch. This has been both to stabilize the branch and to begin more rigorous testing and preparation toward 3.0. Some of the items being tested include a number of new ships, in-depth sweeps of some procedural planet environments for bugs, testing megamap improvements, new implementations for player interactions, item 2.0 conversions, movement system refactors, and new field of view controls. The development teams have been lining up new documentation and data for QA to polish up to ensure they are ready to jump on new content as it comes online. One of our testers worked directly with the Austin Animation team to clean up new mocap files for the development teams. Several other team members have been working with the Frankfurt QA team for in-depth testing of new and updated engine tools, ensuring that the new tools will function so designers can better implement and create content.
PLAYER RELATIONS
The Player Relations team was excited to spend a full week with the Turbulent team working on Spectrum improvements and focusing on how we can better improve the new player experience. We’ve begun work on revamping many areas of our service, and started the process of adding headcount to support our ever-growing community. Lastly, of particular relevance to 3.0, the Player Relations team has started adding new Evocati and updating our PTU waves.
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One of the big advances this past month has been with the player interaction system. Further improvement of the personal inner thoughts system will allow players to select functionality which is not directly tied to a particular object, like selecting an emote or exiting your seat. There will still be a quick select function to access default actions for experienced players. Also, item ports now allow objects to be physically attached to other objects, such as, how a sight is attached to a weapon.
The air traffic controller sprint was set up to figure out how to manage the flow of traffic to a location, in particular, it is responsible for assigning out and reserving a landing pad when a player wants to land, as well as freeing up that landing pad once they’ve landed and cleared the area. Conversely, this system will deal with reserving a landing pad and spawning a ship when the player wants to take off. The initial stages of the implementation are now underway and the team worked on the underlying structure of how the system works.
The functionality on the Character Status system is almost finished, which included bringing the procedural breathing and suit punctures to final implementation. Once this is done, the focus will be getting the system switched on by default in the game.
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The team is also working on Pickup and Carry, which is a bit of a mashup between the player interaction system and the usables sprint. The usables were more concerned with getting the AI to interact with objects in the environment, whereas the player interaction system is more for the player UI to interact with the environment. These two systems are now being brought together so the player can pick up, carry, and then place objects in our universe.
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Finally, they completed the initial development of the conversation tech for the subsumption tool, which streamlines the creation of NPC conversations. It has been handed over to the designers to test by setting up different conversations. They’ll provide feedback on any necessary improvements.
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The audio team has been working on procedural planet audio processes, including R&D and planning, for systems to map and modify audio automatically. Work continues on the Audio Propagation System, the breathing system, audio for the character status system and also a dialogue tool called Word Up.
For weapons sound effects, the ship weapon ‘tool kit’ is in progress, which includes reload SFX for the Gallant, the weapon tail refactor and multi-positional code support for weapons, which will handle summing up the audio for many of the same weapons mounted to a single ship. For ships, the Prospector audio is done, with work on the Greycat and Cutlass Black still in progress.
The music department worked on the ‘Dynamically looping cinematic ambient music system’ and the ‘addition of tension system.’ They also cleaned up dogfighting music logic, prototyped planetside procedural music, and added more music to the launcher.
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The graphics team worked on many separate pieces of tech this month. The first is the integration of real-time, lit volumetric fog from Lumberyard, which is going to be a huge boost for the lighting and environment art teams. The render-to-texture feature is progressing quickly, and the initial version is in the UI team’s hands. They will use it to upgrade our 2D UI’s, and create 3D holographic projections to power various holographic displays. The real-time environment probe tech is nearing completion and allows fully dynamic bounced light and reflections on a planet where traditional light-baking techniques are not possible.
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The visual effects team have completed a pass at planetary entry VFX. The effect is controlled by speed and atmosphere density values. With this core functionality in place along with advances in the engine trail tech, these two sprints are now being merged. Design and art feedback were being implemented alongside optimization and bug-fixing. In addition, there have been some lightning entity effect improvements, where realistic lightning and other electrical type effects are created. The first pass of vfx for the MISC Prospector, including thruster improvements and damage, has been completed. For weapons, initial work on the Apocalypse Arms Scourge Railgun continues, including the charging and charged effects. Additionally, the weapons team completed the Preacher Distortion Scattergun and the Apocalypse Arms Scattershot. They also made good headway on the Klaus and Werner LMG.
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This month the Reclaimer received a lot of attention. On the exterior, work on the hull was completed and the huge claw came together. The team is now splitting the mesh up and getting it ready to use the damage tech. On the interior, the habitation, tech decks, and an enormous salvage processing room have been fully fleshed out. Next on the list is finishing the drone room, engineering deck and cockpit.
Work also began on derelict ships, so that design can lay the groundwork for mission specific scenarios encompassing ships and wreckage.
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An initial batch of ships that include the Connie, Caterpillar, Starfarer and Freelancer are being broken down to their structural elements and made to look destroyed. Material work is being done in tandem to give the ships a more deteriorated and aged look. A wreckage component was also worked on. This is a library of nondescript ship parts that will be used to help embed and integrate derelict scenarios into the environments. The Razor artwork is now complete, and the ship has gone through a full damage pass. Some cool work has been done on breaking it into pieces. Currently, LODs are being finalised on the hull, and art is working closely with tech design to get it flight ready.
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The Hull C also progressed nicely. The hull mesh is now largely complete, manoeuvring thrusters were incorporated and polish work done to match the interior and exterior. A detail pass adding all the finer details expected is ongoing. The interior went through the block out phase, and is now well into art production. By utilising assets from other MISC ships, spaces can be created quickly and efficiently, with the intention to use these across the Hull series.
ENVIRONMENTS
The environment team alongside the graphics team continues to explore ways to create volumetric forms in space through simulations and initial renders.The surface outposts are finishing their interior visual benchmarks for engineering, habitation and hydroponics. These will then be distributed to the various outpost layouts and configurations. The team continues to set dress, light and polish these interior spaces to build character while also exploring options for navigation and branding based on the lore. The Truck stop space stations have moved into the final art phase, so the team is busy building the shader library and working on example pieces to final quality. As it’s a modular system, the building set is being refined to explore potential build configurations, which will ensure the set is as flexible as possible.
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The animation team worked on cover AI, with the aim to improve all animation assets beyond ‘functional.’ Breathing state improvements are now in line with backend code improvements. This involves getting curve data out of Maya and into Dataforge, which allows for more refined procedural breathing curves. The team started implementing multi-directional takedowns for killing enemies within close proximity of the player. Also, there were further improvements to weapon setup & reloads across the board, including the Devastator shotgun, Arrowhead sniper rifle, Gallant laser rifle, and P8-SC ballistic SMG As well as melee improvements for pistol and stocked weapons.
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Finally, the Derby Foundry team were busy with face and body animations for our 3.0 Mission Givers and handed over 500 facial animation files that are now ready to be implemented in Squadron 42. The Motion Capture team has tracked and solved almost 1000 new body animations for various characters within the Persistent Universe.The team also worked on new facial animations for shooting guns. Animation Director Steve Bender has been a great source of inspiration, so expect new and improved faces soon.
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The Environment Art team fleshed out the different procedural terrain elements of Delamar, which is mostly covered with mountainous shapes.When placing the Levski landing zone onto the planet, there were a few challenges such as: What’s the best workflow to create the large borehole in front of the landing zone and the roads leading up to it, and what specific elements are needed to make the station blend smoothly with the terrain? The exterior of Levski had a few changes made to it, such as integrating garages on the lower levels so players can make an approach with ground vehicles. The team also made progress on the mining structures in and around the borehole to give them a more functional feeling and a polish pass. There were also some final touches done to the moons to differentiate them from each other.
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Work moved forward as the team collaborated with the engineers to flesh out the tools and tech required for the procedural planets. Progress was made on the manual setups required to spawn the effects in engine, and moons are slowly taking on their own subtle personalities.
CINEMATICS
The team’s primary focus continued to be performance capture scenes across numerous Squadron 42 chapters. The current priority are story scenes on board the giant Shubin Archon facility, so the level designers and artists can finalize the Shubin environments. In addition, the team edited a big sequence for the middle of the story and progressed with setting the vista for a major story event during the opening of the game.
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The Tech Art team performed R&D regarding foot constrain locomotion. The end goal is to get the feet to properly plant on the ground with each step, to the give the character a true sense of weight, at all speeds and angles. There was work on some skinning tasks to widen the range of character customization. Collaboration with the weapons team continued, both on Tools to help programmatically spot errors in the pipeline, as well as rigging for new and updated weapons.
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The System Design team progressed on the Actor Status system. It now incorporates player breathing, suffocating, stamina, g-forces, drinking, injuries, etc. Other work included: subsystems for suits getting punctured in combat, the ability to patch damaged suits, and recharge oxygen tanks.
The usable systems reached full production status and is now being mass produced for both S42 and PU. Once implemented into the levels, these will make the world feel so much more alive as the AI will be able to interact with almost any item in the world. The system is incredibly flexible from simple actions such as an AI leaning on a wall to complex ones like the opening of a service locker, accessing the power supply item inside, inspecting an item inside the power supply, removing a broken item and replacing it with a new one, and restarting the power supply. The system allows either the player or AI perform those actions, or have both players and AI working on the same usable together.
On the social side of things, the design for the Spectrum game integration is being finalized. This will allow players to access core Spectrum functions inside the game, like party creation and management, chat, friend’s list, organizations, etc. The goal is to keep the majority of the stuff available in the Spectrum app, while the core functionality needed for minute to minute gameplay remains available directly in game.
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The Level Design team finished their design pass on the Surface Outpost, as the Art Team worked on its modular system. Levski is now being integrated into the procedural version of Delmar. An Upper Lobby was created, which will connect the Levski interior to the planetary surface via airlocks and serve as a place for a future possible air rail to outlying landing areas. Garages were implemented on the surface so people can spawn or park their vehicles. We also added new approaches to the Levski site itself, with roads and parking zones. Additional custom work that included planning out the elevator network and worker’s areas, and adding administration offices, was also done.
QA
The QA team began testing the new Stanton System persistent universe level this month with a focus on finding any major gameplay blockers. The entire process of connecting to this new PU level has changed, which led to additional tweaks and testing done to the in-house server launcher tool called Catapult. With Port Olisar now in the Stanton System level, traveling between the different moons, landing on them, getting out, etc, is being tested. In the Subsumption Editor, the new Conversation system was recently added and was available for an initial round of testing. All issues encountered were entered in JIRA and sent over to our Austin studio to be investigated.
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The QA team also worked with the internal system designers to fix up the AI Basic Feature Test level and add behaviors for all AI NPCs, so that their designated tests could be run. The Feature Tester is kicked off whenever new code changes are submitted to the Game-Dev stream. The AI Basic FeatureTest level catches any AI related issues that could potentially be caused by a code submission. The team also further expanded QA’s depth of testing with the Particle Editor. New VFX test cases were created and added to the Editor checklist. These tests will continue to be maintained as additional feedback is gathered from other technical testers and the team.
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The lighting team supported the upcoming 3.0 release of the moons Celin, Yela, and Daymar. There’s been a particular focus on the visual quality of the surface outposts for 3.0 and all subsequent surface outpost variations. The first stage of our new Light Group system is being implemented, which will alter the lighting and mood of a surface outpost based on various states like low power, emergency, or hazardous conditions.
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The ship AI team refactored the Movement system to unify the movement pipeline between NPC’s and Ships. This enables the NPC’s to truly control ships while piloting them, amongst other things. This will ultimately give the AI a finer level of control and a way to contextualize their actions. There were some general improvements to NPC’s AI pathfinding and navigation. At times, AI NPC’s were getting blocked on certain configurations of corners, and this work will resolve that. There were also some fixes for the mesh regeneration to correctly exclude areas that AI should not be able to get to.
Regarding the mission system, the team focused on two different chapters of S42 mission: expanding existing functionalities and adding new ones for the designers. Through dataforge, designers can now define and initialize which default missions play when entering specific game modes. Through the subsumption visualizer, designers are now allowed to overwrite the starting mission for a specific level. This ultimately makes the setup and review of missions much more efficient for the team. Designers can now create a platform, which is a list of items that live within an object container with their known world coordinates at runtime. A platform can be accessed by the mission logic and customized in numerous configurations. For example, an Idris would be a basic platform and, in the game, multiple Idris’s can be setup in different ways: occupied by pirates, another by UEE, etc. All those unique setups would reference the same base platform of the Idris and have their own unique customization layers on top.
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The weapons team has been blocking out new FPS weapons: two Vanduul weapons, four from Kastak Arms, three from Gemini, and one from a new manufacturer. For ship weapons, a first pass on the Knightbridge Arms Ballistic Cannon Size 2 and 3 was completed. This is the first ship weapon through the new pipeline to prep for the modular upgradeable system.
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The engine team worked on Object Container streaming to help with the PU and SolEd, which is an internal tool that helps easily build full Solar Systems. Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are developed with C++, a programming language known for high performance. But due to the languages design, large projects can suffer from long compile times if not careful (the time spent translating program code into machine instructions).
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Even with careful code design, compile times for a large project tends to increase over time, so the team recently spent time doing house cleaning on existing code. For this, the team had to touch each GameCode file (nearly 2000 files). In the end, it improved the compile time by several minutes, which will have a positive impact company wide.The engine team also spent time further improving the procedural planet tech, including terrain blending, blending of terrain and scattered objects, and improved transition-dissolve-blending.
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This month, Turbulent released Spectrum version 0.3.3. This version contains a new type of discussion called nested threads. A nested thread works by stacking replies to an earlier comment directly below it, so users can see a discussion evolve from a specific comment or reply. The first level is sorted by votes, so the most upvoted sub trees are on to top. Nested threads are akin to Reddit discussions.
When a new discussion is started on Spectrum 0.3.3, the user can choose between a nested thread and a chronological thread. This new type of discussion allow for faster and more dynamic threads. The upvote feature is also useful for the community teams to gather questions, among other things. Turbulent is looking into how the nested thread option can be transformed into a view option, so users can decide how to view threads. The team is also improving the unread status as well as adding staff tracking, so users can know from the top of the thread list which ones have a had a staff response. This will be particularly useful for the Ask The Dev forums.
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Also included in 0.3.3 is the ability to flag posts for moderation. This works within orgs and the public community. Users can flag a reply, a thread, or message for moderation, so public moderators know to intervene. In your private orgs, anyone who has the moderation permission will receive a notification to investigate. There has been massive progress on mobile support for the keyboard system in 0.3.3 and it should be fixed in the next release.
Currently the team is working on the 0.3.4 release. The main feature of this release will be more refinement on tags in sub forums. These tags will be surfaced at the top level of the community index in the channel list, so that users can jump directly from a global community index to a specific tag within a channel. The second part of this release is that users will be able to bookmark a tag just like it was a channel in itself. This will give the functionality of a sub forum, while keeping the tagging system in place.
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The team is also adding more filters and working on the search subsystem, which will power all the “view my own posts,” “view somebody else’s posts,” and let users search by author, role, or dev posts. This feature will also power a new mini profile, so users will be able to just jump directly to a list of posts from a specific player directly from the mini profile.
Virtual lists are also being developed on the back end. Currently, there is an issue rendering long presence lists in the chat lobbies, which causes the backers group to collapse by default in the general forum. Virtual lists will allow for rendering what is visible plus a buffer. This will save on performance and allow everybody to be present in the lobby lists. One of the most reported issues is that users can’t jump directly to a message and then go back in time. Virtual lists will allow this.
In the meantime, the research team from Spectrum is working on the overlay for Spectrum desktop, which is an integration between the game and Spectrum. This means taking the redux application store and moving it to an area where two processes can benefit from it. Then, there can be an overlay that will keep the game and the desktop client synchronized without having to double the resources for it.
There has been some research on PM groups, specifically the ability to refactor the currently 1 on 1 PM system to have more than one person in a group, so users can have a party system for specific a lobby.
Turbulent also visited the Austin studio to presented the new art design for the site revamp. There were also some major infrastructure changes as the platform was moved to a new set of hardware. There was a brief downtime while it was shifted, but everything was quickly back up and running better than before.
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The Banu Defender was launched via a concept presentation. As part of the process, the ship rollout system was upgraded with an improved Q&A, a live Town Hall to discuss the ship, and a focus on the development process in Jump Point and the Vault. Simultaneously, the updated Banu race was revealed in a futuristic ‘National Geographic’ style magazine.
The Star Citizen store added new merchandise, including Star Citizen and Squadron shirts and hats, plus a beautiful new Terra mousepad. Subscribers can purchase exclusive Polaris shirts. Shipping and handling was revamped as a part of these new additions. Now, merchandise ships immediately instead of as a pre-order.
Internally, the team is in the process of supporting a major website update, which includes a long-awaited overhaul to the ship stats page. New player content is also in production thanks to community feedback, which has highlighted how daunting Star Citizen can be to new players.
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Tickets for Gamescom went on sale this month and event planning continues. Our community team and staff from Austin attended DREAMHACK, where they met with backers and talked Star Citizen. The con concluded with an appropriately Texas-themed BBQ Bar Citizen. Devs also attended the backer-organized BritizenCon and took part in not one, but two panels! It was an honor to participate and connect with the community.
The team ran four Happy Hour livestreams this month, including a live look at how production schedules are made. Happy Hour will be going on a ‘half hiatus’ for a bit as the team works on the New Player Experience videos, but it will return to its usual schedule in the near future.
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Greetings Citizens,
I hope you all had a stellar weekend. I know I did! I am in the final stretch of my trip to LA, where I have been working closely with the rest of the team planning and discussing all things community/event related for 2017. We’re really excited about meeting many of you at Gamescom and CitizenCon later this year.
With that, let’s take a look at this week.
On Tuesday, the Lore Team will release another installment in one of their many continuing series. The Star Citizen Universe is rich with history and a past/future worth exploring. If you find yourself easily immersed in a good story, fascinated by the design of Star Citizen, or just hungry for more information, these posts are made for you!
On Wednesday, Mark Abent returns to smash yet another bug in an all new episode of Bugsmashers! This show gives a unique opportunity to explore the complexity of Star Citizen’s development.
On Thursday, Around the Verse checks in with Foundry 42 UK for an in-depth look at what the studio has been up to in the last month.
Speaking of last month, Friday brings us the April Monthly Report! Having the opportunity to take a step back and see all the work being done by our team around the globe is nothing less than inspiring. These are a treat for us as much as they are for all of you!
As a reminder, there will be no Happy Hour this Friday, but we are really excited to have Josh Herman joining us next week for another installment of Happy Hour: Gamedev.
That’s all for this week, we’ll see you in the ‘Verse!
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This week’s theme is “Gameplay Citizen,” highlighting some of the beautiful gameplay in Star Citizen Alpha 2.6. Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing your content here!
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A collection of fast paced kills using the Arrowhead Sniper in Star Citizen Alpha 2.6.3. This video is a friendly reminder to tread lightly when matched with Diabolus.
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The United Earth Mining Corporation took part in a training mission designed by the paramilitary organization VVARMACHINE. UEMC member Solarmute recorded the event and now presents a video after action report.
This video demonstrates the exciting level of emergent gameplay that the Star Citizen universe provides.
In der neuesten Ausgabe von "Around the Verse", der begleitenden Entwickler-Dokumentation zu Star Citizen und Squadron 42, erfahren wir mehr über Schadensmodell und Animationen. Außerdem hat am Ende des rund 25 Minuten langen Clips Mark "Luke Skywalker"…
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Short, sweet, and to the point this week.
The Banu Defender concept sale finishes up today. It was a unique sale in that we got to support it not just with a dedicated ATV segment the day before, but a Town Hall in the middle, both a Jump Point magazine and Vault Update for Subscribers with the BTS of it’s development and unused concept images, and finally one of the most robust Q&A we’ve gotten to do towards the end. There was no shortage of information this sale, and I think it’ll become a template for how we support the amazing work our developers are doing going forward.
In community shows, this week sees Gaige Hallman take on the Quantum Questions challenge and community member Nighthawk Zale discusses his tabletop creation, Traverse the ‘Verse while Dave Haddock explores the Rilah System in Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This week’s ATV comes to us from Austin and Montreal, while the Happy Hour Interview will be your chance to put questions directly to another of our developers. Stay tuned for the specific time later this week.
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This week’s theme is “Fan Art Citizen,” highlighting cool images that you have created using original art, concept images, in-game screenshots and photo editing software. Normally we highlight a few different images that the developers have as their desktop backgrounds in the office, but this week, I think it’s long overdue to shine a light on someone that brings a lot of joy to our offices around the world: AdzAdama.
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AdzAdama started his crusade to immortalize CIG developers in pop art way back in October 2014. In his own words, “This is a compilation of the CIG Staff Tribute Photo Montage Art works I have created in dedication to the hard work of all individuals within the Teams who toil so constantly to create the Verse for all Star Citizens, I want all of you to know this Citizen truly appreciates your efforts.”
In the subsequent months and years, his thread grew to 22 pages with about 30 posts each, and has become a defacto Table of Contents for nearly every developer we’ve ever highlighted on one of our broadcasts, not to mention a sort of time capsule of our development.
So today, all four entries in This Week in Star Citizen are devoted to exploring the one-of-a-kind voice of AdzAdama, and the way he chose to express his appreciation has affected CIG staff over the years.
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It’s not uncommon for staff members to check in on the thread every couple months, and it’s always a delight when you discover that Adz had turned his certainly unique and very creative eye in your direction. Being made up in an original AdzAdama soon becomes a kind of rite-of-passage for those new to CIG. You know you’ve made it when you’ve made it to the infamous AdzAdama thread.
Choosing which images of the hundreds of images he’s done over the last two years to highlight isn’t an easy thing to do, and I’m certain no four can fully express the entire AdzAdama experience, but I’m including this specific picture here because today is Brian Chambers’ birthday, and I imagine this is precisely how he’s spending the day.
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If you’re a regular watcher of Bugsmashers! you know that Mark usually has a unique image posted up on his desktop. One of the most common questions we get about the show is, “Where do those come from?!” Well, look no further than AdzAdama. His artwork has graced the desktops of many a developer over the last two years, and has even made the bulletin board in the kitchen on more than one occasion.
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AdzAdama has become prolific in making hundreds of these images over the last two years, with a style all his own and a good nature that comes through in each and every one of his creations. If his original thread was a tribute to our “dedication and hard work” then this post today is my tribute to the same in him. If this is your first time seeing the work of AdzAdama, I encourage you to check out his original thread and do what every CIG developer does the first time they see it: Ask yourself if what you’re seeing is real, accept that it’s actually happening, and give in to the sheer delight involved in ever image.
Since the introduction of the Hull Series back in April 2015, every new concept ship reveal has had an accompanying Q&A post, where we spend a couple days collecting questions from you, pass those on to the relevant ship designer, and provide you the best answers we have available at that time.
With the recent addition of Spectrum, we can now allow you to add your vote to the questions you most want to see answered. The questions included below are a combination of those that received the most votes, and those we felt we could confidently answer at this early stage in the Banu Defender’s life.
Now that the ship is concept complete, it will enter our development pipeline where many of the answers you see below will be fleshed out, and those missing will be determined and implemented. While it will still be some time before we see the Banu Defender in game, we hope you’re as excited as we are as the Star Citizen pantheon of ships expands with the exotic addition of this alien spacecraft.
As always, a special thanks to Jonny Jacevicius, John Crewe and Todd Papy for their help in answering your questions.
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Will you address the issue with cockpit visibility?
Short Answer: Yes.
Longer Answer: As we discussed on the Subscriber’s Town Hall (helpfully included down below) we’ve been looking at several solutions for the visibility issue since before the sale was announced, as indicated in this month’s Jump Point. While we’re exploring several options, none of them should majorly impact the overall look or aesthetic of the ship, but we anticipate will greatly improve pilot and co-pilot visibility.
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Will the front prongs fold back during combat to offer a better view forward?
The mechanisms on the prongs offer a lot of movement flexibility, so this is certainly one of the likely avenues for improvements to the visibility we’re exploring, possibly by angling them down/outwards more.
How will the range and mobility of the Defender compare to other fighters?
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The Banu developed the Defender to provide protection and fly alongside the Merchantman, so its design includes a much improved range over other fighters of similar size due to its fuel intakes, dual fuel tanks, and large quantum drive, as noted in the brochure.
We intend it to have an edge in mobility for a fighter of its size, due to a light hull construction and its use of Xi’An engine tech. As often happens in game design, all this mobility and range must come at a price, for this case in armor protection, so you’ll need to use that agility to your advantage.
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Are the four S3 gimbal mounts including the size reduction for the gimbal or not? (Four S3 or Four S2 weapons on gimbals?)
The size indicated in the stat block is for the hardpoint as a whole, so it doesn’t include the size reduction. Therefore, these S3 hardpoints are fully utilized, fitted with gimbals capable of mounting S2 weapons.
Can the Defender mount fixed S3 guns instead of using gimbals?
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Yes, the current plan for the Defender’s gun hardpoints is that you can choose to mount either a S3 fixed weapon or a S2 gimbaled weapon. We expect this sort of loadout to be favored by solo pilots or used in a crew arrangement where the co-pilot is completely focused on other tasks, like shield or power management, as a fixed weapon loadout for this ship would make life harder for a co-gunner who doesn’t have independent control of where they’re pointing.
Does it come with a jump drive as standard?
It does!
While not every fighter-sized ship comes with a jump drive, since escorting Merchantmen on their journeys is part of the Defender’s job description, it’s natural for them to have one as standard equipment.
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Will it be possible to store a Defender inside a Merchantman’s cargo hold?
We’re considering options for this but haven’t decided one way or another whether the Defender will be able to be carried internally in the Merchantman at this time.
How does the Banu weaponry differ from other weapon types?
The Defender introduces a brand-new weapon to our in-game armory, the tachyon cannon!
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It is an energy weapon that fires its projectiles at an extremely high velocity, making it both very long-ranged and accurate relative to its peers, while we are still working out what its other performance characteristics and balancing characteristics will be. As some of you may have noticed from our newsletter sneak peek several weeks ago, the tachyon gun deviates from other Banu engineering choices, and UEE historians suspect that the Banu assimilated this weapon technology from some other culture.
In terms of combat capability, how does it compare to ships like the Anvil Super Hornet or Aegis Sabre?
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The Defender has an edge in maneuverability over human mainstays like the Super Hornet and Sabre, which themselves have edges in durability and armament, respectively. Defenders excel in distracting and confounding would-be attackers, giving their charges (like the Merchantman) the chance to slip away to safety. Their speed and mobility make them good for holding the point position, intercepting threats, and reacting quickly to flanking maneuvers. These traits make the Defender an excellent… well, defender. They present attackers with a dilemma; expend precious time and fuel trying to pin down an agile escort, or try to weather their fire while focusing on the Merchantmen? Since raiders often favor fast, heavily armed, but lightly armored ships, the choice can be a difficult one.
The Defender’s robust shielding combined with its agility make it an enduring adversary when piloted well, but in a straight up brawl, the Sabre and Super Hornet might have the edge. Both of these fighters are designed with a heavy focus on attack, and particularly when the attackers are less concerned with another objective, they’ll present a hearty challenge to Defenders and their crews. Between the three, we’d bet on the skilled pilot that knows how to utilize their ship best more than just the ship.
Can this ship be used effectively in combat by a solo pilot?
Yes – the Defender is completely functional with a crew of one. There is no reason you must have a second crewman for a Defender any more than you would for the currently flyable Super Hornet, with the pilot tasked in managing all ship functions. The main edge granted by a second pilot in the Defender would be having someone to manage ship systems optimally during combat, whether handling the weapons and/or shields while the pilot focuses on maneuvering, or jumping into the back and conducting repairs or damage control on the fly to keep this long-ranged fighter in play over a long haul.
The Banu prefer to fly their Defenders with two-person crews, but as a player, the choice is in your hands. Because the Defender relies more on its shields than it does on its armor, it can pay handsome dividends to have a crew member dedicated to getting the best performance out of them.
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No – the Banu predilection for specialization leaves the cargo hauling to the Merchantman, which has more than enough space to go around. =) Once we’ve blocked out the Defender’s needs for internal space and equipment, it’s possible we might have some space on the ship for storing personal items, but that’s not the same as setting aside dedicated space for more serious haulage, like cargo pallets or crates.
Since it is a nimble ship where does it compare to other ships like the Sabre, Buccaneer or Khartu-al?
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The Khartu-Al emphasizes mobility in general; it’s hard for most ships in its size category to compete with, especially the lightly-armed Scout variant. In terms of straight SCM or AFB speed, the Defender will edge out the Sabre. With the Buccaneer, the Defender should outperform slightly in terms of general maneuvering, but have to contend less favorably with the Buccaneer’s strong retro-thrusters and better strafing ability.
Since we seem to get access to most components in the ship from the inside, does it have the benefit of easier maintenance over other fighter ships?
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Yes – internal access to components should provide an advantage when it comes to maintenance and repair, especially while on the move or in space. With other fighters, particularly single-seat fighters with no walk-able interior to speak of, or whose component access is strictly by way of external access panels, a crew member would have to exit the ship in order to perform most repairs on damaged components. In space, this means EVA, and it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to manage these things in pitched battle, or while speeding along towards a destination! For a Merchantman on the move, having to stop to make repairs isn’t ideal; an escort that can keep pace is worth its weight in… well, anything you’ve got in the cargo hold, potentially.
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Do the shields perform better because of their Tevarin origins?
Another point discussed in the Town Hall this week! (See below if you haven’t already…) The Tevarin were masters of shield technology, especially for their time. Their Phalanx and air shields are far more capable and sophisticated than the shields fielded by the UPE during the Tevarin War. The Defender’s shield generators, while not Phalanx in design, are still of Tevarin origin, considered large for a ship of the Defender’s size, and are backed up by an impressive dual power plant system which feeds the necessary juice to keep those exotic shields going while powering the Xi’An propulsion system as well.
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How good is this ship’s range? How will its range compare to that of the Merchantman and other vessels in need of escort?
For a fighter in its size class: very good indeed.
While the Defender should never quite be able to match the long-range endurance of a Merchantman, as it’s size gives it ample room for a powerful, efficient jump drive and lots of fuel, a Merchantman that wants to keep its escorts around for the entire trip might need to stop more often for resupply and make fewer jumps at a time than it might be able to do on its own. Even so, if you want to make a long, multi-system journey, the Defender should have the the best range of same-size fighters, and be your best option for longer hauls.
Does the Banu Defender come with an ejection system?
It does! The Banu are highly skilled in their roles and therefore put a lot of value on the safety of their crew. Both cockpits will have ejection capability, with the compartmentalized ejection systems allowing each crewmember to eject independently.
Features like the Xi’an engines, Tevarin shields, and tachyon guns are discussed as central features of the ship. Will these be hull-locked like the nose guns on the Vanguard?
The engines, shield generator and all weaponry can all be swapped out as usual. The component interchangeability will be normal.
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How will the Banu Defender perform in atmospheric flight?
It’s sleek enough to not suffer too much from drag, but the maneuverability might take a slight hit compared to what it can do in Zero-G. The ideal is that it is able to accompany the Merchantman from ground to space and space to ground without having any problems to remain an effective escort.
Is this ship intended to be used with long range and high damage weapons?
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The Defender is quick and agile and able to maneuver its way into position where it’s out of harms way but still able to fire, so the tachyon cannons are a good fit. Of course, as always, should these weapons not suit your style of play you can swap them out for something you might find more in tune with your own preferences.
Why does the ship only have 1x S1 shield listed, and only 1x S1 power plant?
It has an S2 shield generator and 2x S1 power plants.
As noted previously in the Monthly Reports, Around the Verse and most recently this week’s Town Hall, we are still in progress on a major revision to the presentation of ship stats on our website, due to the changes inherent in the continuing development of Item System 2.0. As such, they don’t translate too well to the current display. The information given in this answer tracks properly with what is shown in the Defender brochure here.
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Will there be size 3 and 2 versions of the tachyon cannons available in the EA store when the ship is flyable?
We intend for the full range of sizings to be available in time, but dependent on resources only the S2 may be available from the start.
Recommended Viewing
Introducing the Banu Defender
In the Banu Protectorate, tradesmen are known for hauling precious cargo across long distances in their Merchantman ships. While the Merchantman boasts a cavernous cargo area, it lacks the offensive capabilities to ward off large numbers of attackers.
Meet the Banu Defender, a multi-crew fighter whose patchwork design features both Xi’an thrusters, Tevarin shields, and four Singe tachyon cannons. Though cargo space is limited, the Defender features modest accommodations for its crew and provides easy access to components. The Defender gets its name from the role it serves: the first line of defense against enemy attacks.
That’s why the Defender makes the ideal companion to the Merchantman: one to do the heavy hauling and the other to perform the deadly dogfighting. Every Banu merchant knows an investment in defense is an investment in their livelihood.
Now, you can purchase both ships as part of the Banu Pack! This exclusive 2-ship pack is available for a limited time. The Defender and Merchantman can also be bought individually in two models: Standard and War Bond. This special sale ends on May 1, 2017.
About the Sale
The Defender is being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar, fight in Arena Commander or fly in the Alpha. All revenue collected from Concept Sales goes directly to supporting the development of Star Citizen; to building a game with a scale and depth that’s never been accomplished in games before. Your contributions directly finance the hundreds of developers striving to create the Best Damn Space Sim ever and the team engaging with the Best Damn Community Ever. Concept Sale profits don’t go to shareholders or personal pockets; they go directly into developing a better game. Star Citizen wouldn’t exist without the continued support of our backers.
The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add a Defender poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Defender mini ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Lifetime Insurance or these extras.
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
Additionally, please note that the Defender will be entering the ship pipeline now, it will ultimately be released after other concept ships have been completed. All decorative ‘flare’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches.
Since the introduction of the Hull Series back in April 2015, every new concept ship reveal has had an accompanying Q&A post, where we spend a couple days collecting questions from you, pass those on to the relevant ship designer, and provide you the best answers we have available at that time.
With the recent addition of Spectrum, we can now allow you to add your vote to the questions you most want to see answered. The questions included below are a combination of those that received the most votes, and those we felt we could confidently answer at this early stage in the Banu Defender’s life.
Now that the ship is concept complete, it will enter our development pipeline where many of the answers you see below will be fleshed out, and those missing will be determined and implemented. While it will still be some time before we see the Banu Defender in game, we hope you’re as excited as we are as the Star Citizen pantheon of ships expands with the exotic addition of this alien spacecraft.
As always, a special thanks to Jonny Jacevicius, John Crewe and Todd Papy for their help in answering your questions.
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Will you address the issue with cockpit visibility?
Short Answer: Yes.
Longer Answer: As we discussed on the Subscriber’s Town Hall (helpfully included down below) we’ve been looking at several solutions for the visibility issue since before the sale was announced, as indicated in this month’s Jump Point. While we’re exploring several options, none of them should majorly impact the overall look or aesthetic of the ship, but we anticipate will greatly improve pilot and co-pilot visibility.
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Will the front prongs fold back during combat to offer a better view forward?
The mechanisms on the prongs offer a lot of movement flexibility, so this is certainly one of the likely avenues for improvements to the visibility we’re exploring, possibly by angling them down/outwards more.
How will the range and mobility of the Defender compare to other fighters?
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The Banu developed the Defender to provide protection and fly alongside the Merchantman, so its design includes a much improved range over other fighters of similar size due to its fuel intakes, dual fuel tanks, and large quantum drive, as noted in the brochure.
We intend it to have an edge in mobility for a fighter of its size, due to a light hull construction and its use of Xi’An engine tech. As often happens in game design, all this mobility and range must come at a price, for this case in armor protection, so you’ll need to use that agility to your advantage.
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Are the four S3 gimbal mounts including the size reduction for the gimbal or not? (Four S3 or Four S2 weapons on gimbals?)
The size indicated in the stat block is for the hardpoint as a whole, so it doesn’t include the size reduction. Therefore, these S3 hardpoints are fully utilized, fitted with gimbals capable of mounting S2 weapons.
Can the Defender mount fixed S3 guns instead of using gimbals?
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Yes, the current plan for the Defender’s gun hardpoints is that you can choose to mount either a S3 fixed weapon or a S2 gimbaled weapon. We expect this sort of loadout to be favored by solo pilots or used in a crew arrangement where the co-pilot is completely focused on other tasks, like shield or power management, as a fixed weapon loadout for this ship would make life harder for a co-gunner who doesn’t have independent control of where they’re pointing.
Does it come with a jump drive as standard?
It does!
While not every fighter-sized ship comes with a jump drive, since escorting Merchantmen on their journeys is part of the Defender’s job description, it’s natural for them to have one as standard equipment.
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Will it be possible to store a Defender inside a Merchantman’s cargo hold?
We’re considering options for this but haven’t decided one way or another whether the Defender will be able to be carried internally in the Merchantman at this time.
How does the Banu weaponry differ from other weapon types?
The Defender introduces a brand-new weapon to our in-game armory, the tachyon cannon!
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It is an energy weapon that fires its projectiles at an extremely high velocity, making it both very long-ranged and accurate relative to its peers, while we are still working out what its other performance characteristics and balancing characteristics will be. As some of you may have noticed from our newsletter sneak peek several weeks ago, the tachyon gun deviates from other Banu engineering choices, and UEE historians suspect that the Banu assimilated this weapon technology from some other culture.
In terms of combat capability, how does it compare to ships like the Anvil Super Hornet or Aegis Sabre?
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The Defender has an edge in maneuverability over human mainstays like the Super Hornet and Sabre, which themselves have edges in durability and armament, respectively. Defenders excel in distracting and confounding would-be attackers, giving their charges (like the Merchantman) the chance to slip away to safety. Their speed and mobility make them good for holding the point position, intercepting threats, and reacting quickly to flanking maneuvers. These traits make the Defender an excellent… well, defender. They present attackers with a dilemma; expend precious time and fuel trying to pin down an agile escort, or try to weather their fire while focusing on the Merchantmen? Since raiders often favor fast, heavily armed, but lightly armored ships, the choice can be a difficult one.
The Defender’s robust shielding combined with its agility make it an enduring adversary when piloted well, but in a straight up brawl, the Sabre and Super Hornet might have the edge. Both of these fighters are designed with a heavy focus on attack, and particularly when the attackers are less concerned with another objective, they’ll present a hearty challenge to Defenders and their crews. Between the three, we’d bet on the skilled pilot that knows how to utilize their ship best more than just the ship.
Can this ship be used effectively in combat by a solo pilot?
Yes – the Defender is completely functional with a crew of one. There is no reason you must have a second crewman for a Defender any more than you would for the currently flyable Super Hornet, with the pilot tasked in managing all ship functions. The main edge granted by a second pilot in the Defender would be having someone to manage ship systems optimally during combat, whether handling the weapons and/or shields while the pilot focuses on maneuvering, or jumping into the back and conducting repairs or damage control on the fly to keep this long-ranged fighter in play over a long haul.
The Banu prefer to fly their Defenders with two-person crews, but as a player, the choice is in your hands. Because the Defender relies more on its shields than it does on its armor, it can pay handsome dividends to have a crew member dedicated to getting the best performance out of them.
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No – the Banu predilection for specialization leaves the cargo hauling to the Merchantman, which has more than enough space to go around. =) Once we’ve blocked out the Defender’s needs for internal space and equipment, it’s possible we might have some space on the ship for storing personal items, but that’s not the same as setting aside dedicated space for more serious haulage, like cargo pallets or crates.
Since it is a nimble ship where does it compare to other ships like the Sabre, Buccaneer or Khartu-al?
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The Khartu-Al emphasizes mobility in general; it’s hard for most ships in its size category to compete with, especially the lightly-armed Scout variant. In terms of straight SCM or AFB speed, the Defender will edge out the Sabre. With the Buccaneer, the Defender should outperform slightly in terms of general maneuvering, but have to contend less favorably with the Buccaneer’s strong retro-thrusters and better strafing ability.
Since we seem to get access to most components in the ship from the inside, does it have the benefit of easier maintenance over other fighter ships?
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Yes – internal access to components should provide an advantage when it comes to maintenance and repair, especially while on the move or in space. With other fighters, particularly single-seat fighters with no walk-able interior to speak of, or whose component access is strictly by way of external access panels, a crew member would have to exit the ship in order to perform most repairs on damaged components. In space, this means EVA, and it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to manage these things in pitched battle, or while speeding along towards a destination! For a Merchantman on the move, having to stop to make repairs isn’t ideal; an escort that can keep pace is worth its weight in… well, anything you’ve got in the cargo hold, potentially.
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Do the shields perform better because of their Tevarin origins?
Another point discussed in the Town Hall this week! (See below if you haven’t already…) The Tevarin were masters of shield technology, especially for their time. Their Phalanx and air shields are far more capable and sophisticated than the shields fielded by the UPE during the Tevarin War. The Defender’s shield generators, while not Phalanx in design, are still of Tevarin origin, considered large for a ship of the Defender’s size, and are backed up by an impressive dual power plant system which feeds the necessary juice to keep those exotic shields going while powering the Xi’An propulsion system as well.
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How good is this ship’s range? How will its range compare to that of the Merchantman and other vessels in need of escort?
For a fighter in its size class: very good indeed.
While the Defender should never quite be able to match the long-range endurance of a Merchantman, as it’s size gives it ample room for a powerful, efficient jump drive and lots of fuel, a Merchantman that wants to keep its escorts around for the entire trip might need to stop more often for resupply and make fewer jumps at a time than it might be able to do on its own. Even so, if you want to make a long, multi-system journey, the Defender should have the the best range of same-size fighters, and be your best option for longer hauls.
Does the Banu Defender come with an ejection system?
It does! The Banu are highly skilled in their roles and therefore put a lot of value on the safety of their crew. Both cockpits will have ejection capability, with the compartmentalized ejection systems allowing each crewmember to eject independently.
Features like the Xi’an engines, Tevarin shields, and tachyon guns are discussed as central features of the ship. Will these be hull-locked like the nose guns on the Vanguard?
The engines, shield generator and all weaponry can all be swapped out as usual. The component interchangeability will be normal.
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How will the Banu Defender perform in atmospheric flight?
It’s sleek enough to not suffer too much from drag, but the maneuverability might take a slight hit compared to what it can do in Zero-G. The ideal is that it is able to accompany the Merchantman from ground to space and space to ground without having any problems to remain an effective escort.
Is this ship intended to be used with long range and high damage weapons?
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The Defender is quick and agile and able to maneuver its way into position where it’s out of harms way but still able to fire, so the tachyon cannons are a good fit. Of course, as always, should these weapons not suit your style of play you can swap them out for something you might find more in tune with your own preferences.
Why does the ship only have 1x S1 shield listed, and only 1x S1 power plant?
It has an S2 shield generator and 2x S1 power plants.
As noted previously in the Monthly Reports, Around the Verse and most recently this week’s Town Hall, we are still in progress on a major revision to the presentation of ship stats on our website, due to the changes inherent in the continuing development of Item System 2.0. As such, they don’t translate too well to the current display. The information given in this answer tracks properly with what is shown in the Defender brochure here.
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Will there be size 3 and 2 versions of the tachyon cannons available in the EA store when the ship is flyable?
We intend for the full range of sizings to be available in time, but dependent on resources only the S2 may be available from the start.
Recommended Viewing
Introducing the Banu Defender
In the Banu Protectorate, tradesmen are known for hauling precious cargo across long distances in their Merchantman ships. While the Merchantman boasts a cavernous cargo area, it lacks the offensive capabilities to ward off large numbers of attackers.
Meet the Banu Defender, a multi-crew fighter whose patchwork design features both Xi’an thrusters, Tevarin shields, and four Singe tachyon cannons. Though cargo space is limited, the Defender features modest accommodations for its crew and provides easy access to components. The Defender gets its name from the role it serves: the first line of defense against enemy attacks.
That’s why the Defender makes the ideal companion to the Merchantman: one to do the heavy hauling and the other to perform the deadly dogfighting. Every Banu merchant knows an investment in defense is an investment in their livelihood.
Now, you can purchase both ships as part of the Banu Pack! This exclusive 2-ship pack is available for a limited time. The Defender and Merchantman can also be bought individually in two models: Standard and War Bond. This special sale ends on May 1, 2017.
About the Sale
The Defender is being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar, fight in Arena Commander or fly in the Alpha. All revenue collected from Concept Sales goes directly to supporting the development of Star Citizen; to building a game with a scale and depth that’s never been accomplished in games before. Your contributions directly finance the hundreds of developers striving to create the Best Damn Space Sim ever and the team engaging with the Best Damn Community Ever. Concept Sale profits don’t go to shareholders or personal pockets; they go directly into developing a better game. Star Citizen wouldn’t exist without the continued support of our backers.
The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add a Defender poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Defender mini ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Lifetime Insurance or these extras.
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
Additionally, please note that the Defender will be entering the ship pipeline now, it will ultimately be released after other concept ships have been completed. All decorative ‘flare’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches.
Chris Roberts and Sandi Gardiner share the Frankfurt studio update. Also, get some insight on the department responsible for assuring the quality of Star Citizen.
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This is TRACKER, your best source for official Bounty Hunter Guild news. I’m you host, Garet Coliga, and it is my distinct pleasure to track down all the latest info, tips and tech reviews before they have a chance to slip away.
Today’s show is sponsored by WillsOp Systems, makers of quality avionics, sensors and targeting systems for over four decades. Personally, I got one of their Mobius scanners hooked into my Dragonfly, and while I don’t pull down too many contracts these days, it’s fairly obvious that it would be a real boon hunting an asset surface-side. Plus, I’ve heard from plenty of others that WillsOp’s targeting systems are among the more consistently high-rated suites you can buy. If you check them and like what you see, you can use the code TRCK47 to get a special bonus offer on your order.
Now before we get started, there’s a bit of Guild business to take care of. It seems that a fair amount of members may have started recently using a new Xi’an focus-drug called E’tâm. From what I hear, it can really be a huge help on long stakeouts or extended surveillance ops, but it’s looking like there may be some unexpected side effects for Humans. Turns out that a few weeks back there was a murder case in Lo where the suspect went into some sort of fugue state after a bad ‘flow’ ride and killed her crew. Guild Health Services is currently recommending that members avoid the herbal supplement until more testing can be done, just in case this isn’t an isolated incident. While you’re at it, it’s probably worth being more careful if you’re approaching a target who seems to be under the influence.
With that out of the way, let’s move on to today’s HotSheet, shall we? Now, since today’s sponsor specializes in high tech, we figured it would be a good excuse to do a bit of a themed warrant list and highlight a few of the more choice tech-focused contracts available on the boards. Of course, before you pursue any of these jobs and confront a fugitive, remember to consult your local Guild or Law Enforcement office as bounties may have been cleared. And as always, all contracts must be executed by licensed Guild Members in good standing, so please make sure that if you’re planning to work, you get those dues in on time.
First up on the HotSheet is a hacker who goes by the alias GibMercy and is wanted in connection to a series of heists out in Hadrian. Turns out Gib had managed to infiltrate a couple of the shopping kiosks in one of the busier sectors of the flotilla and reroute the loading protocols for several high-value orders. By the time the discrepancy was noticed, Gib and their cargo-laden Hull-C were long gone. The authorities were able to identify GibMercy’s handywork based off their coding fingerprint, but they haven’t been able to pin down a real ID to go with the handle. That’s why they passed it off to the Guild. All you’ll have to go on is the ship make and the manifest for the stolen cargo, so it will definitely be a puzzler, but on the plus side, the payout’s a large one.
Next bounty that caught our eye is for one Shakara Toula. Last seen operating near Asura, she is what’s commonly known as a “gasper.” In other words, she hacks remote stations, seals all the doors and begins venting rooms until the poor folks aboard pay her demands. There’s been a bounty on her head for a little while now, but recently she knocked over an older station and the aging life support system wasn’t able to kick back online. Two people expired before a nearby ship was able to arrive and lend assistance to the rest of the station. That tragedy was enough to move Toula up a warrant-class. Note that she’s proven difficult to apprehend thus far, as her advanced computer skills have allowed her to slip away from the few Agents and bounty hunters who’ve managed to catch up with her. Bit of advice, anyone who attempts the job should make sure their electronic security measures are up to snuff.
The final snag and bag on our list is one I’m sure many of you have heard of — Ivan Pannich. The illegal gun and ammo mods he manufactures have been linked to eleven Guild deaths over the years, including the unfortunate passing of my good friend Ariel Liang. After four months off the grid, two days ago a security scan picked up Pannich leaving Severus. With his weapon proficiency, he should be considered extremely dangerous. My advice would be to go in wearing heavier armor as an extra precaution. A few deployable shields would probably not be entirely amiss either. Now, since the Guild has a vested interest in seeing Pannich brought to justice, they are offering to fund bonuses on the contract to any hunters who assist in bringing him in before the trail goes cold again. TRACKER will definitely be providing any updates as they come in.
Looking at the three jobs in the rundown today, you can see why it’s vitally important for a bounty hunter to stay up to date on the latest tech. Not only because it might give an advantage out on the job, but because you can be sure that as soon as a new piece of gear hits the market, there’s going to be some outlaw scum perverting it for ill-gotten gain. Don’t get me wrong, I know how tough it can be staying current. Sometimes, the last thing you want to do after keeping tabs on a bail-skip all day is study a tech manual. So, to help you out, famed Guild member Joss Han will be joining us after the break to explain how with a few core skills under your belt, you’ll be able to better analyze and adapt to malicious tech you may encounter on the job. Joss Han, you may remember, is the hunter who took down the notorious infoagent SyNide a few years back, so he knows his stuff.
All right, TRACKER’s going to take a quick pause for a word from our sponsor, WillsOp Systems, but make sure to stay put to hear what Joss has to say when we come back. Right after these commercial messages.
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Last week was out of this world with the reveal of the Banu and their role in the universe. On top of learning more about the Banu, we revealed their newest spacecraft: the Banu Defender. In last week’s ATV, we shared the spec, design, and took a dive into the Banu lore with Lead Writer Dave Haddock and Senior Writer Will Weissbaum. Learn more about the Banu and their integral part of the Star Citizen universe here.
We’ve also introduced new reward levels to our existing referral program and kicked off a limited time contest to get everyone pumped for Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 and Gamescom. We’ve heard a lot of excellent feedback over the weekend that we are working on further updates; stay tuned!
So what’s going on this week?
Today’s Citizens of the Stars has Jared Huckaby talking with Tirent, co-founder of the Star Citizen Competitive League, a massive Star Marine tournament that was broadcast live on Twitch.tv with over 55 teams that signed up! Then, I sit down with Mark Abent, Senior Gameplay Engineer and host of “Bugsmashers!” for this week’s Quantum Questions. Will Brian Chambers be knocked down from being Quantum Champion? Only one way to find out!
Tuesday is a new Subscribers Town Hall featuring the Banu! Join Jared Huckaby, writers Dave Haddock and William Weissbaum, and ship designer Jonny Jacivious as they take questions from subscribers about the Banu and other alien races found within the Star Citizen universe. Also if you are a Subscriber, this is your last chance to get your question submitted or upvote the ones you want to be asked by visiting the Subscriber’s section on Spectrum here.
On Wednesday, our bi-weekly show “Bugsmashers!” is back! Bug hunter extraordinaire Mark Abent tackles a bug in Single Player Arena Commander, where a player floats indefinitely out of his ship and into the verse if left idle at the start of the match. These episodes give detailed insight into the development process and is a must watch for those interested in the technical aspects of the Star Citizen.
This Thursday on Around the Verse is the Foundry 42 Frankfurt Studio Update! Brian Chambers shows off all the cool tech the team is working on to bring Star Citizen to life. Also included is a feature about our QA teams from around the globe and the never-ending work they do to verify changes, and report new bugs to our development team.
Every new concept sale brings with it our dedicated Questions and Answers post, and last week’s launch of the Banu Defender is no different. There’s a thread open in Spectrum now where you can not only submit your questions for consideration, but upvote on the ones you want us to answer most. Questions will be picked later this week, and a single, super-sized post will go up this Thursday.
Rounding out the end of the week is Happy Hour: Museum. Resident historian Ben Lesnick dives deep into the lore and history of the games that pave the way to Star Citizen.
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It’s no secret that the Star Citizen community is the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be! Some people have dedicated their time to be able to spread the word and share all the new details regarding the development of Star Citizen. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to reach nearly as many other citizens without them.
Below you will find a few of the communities dedicated to sharing the news and updates from within Star Citizen to fans around the world.
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Welcome, Citizen, to the official “A Guide to Visiting the Banu Protectorate”, 65th edition. There are new, fun, and informative additions to the Guide, such as tips on negotiation and personal safety.
Enjoy your time in the Protectorate and thank you for making us your choice in planning your voyage.
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Why visit the Banu?
The Banu are not only the first alien species that Humanity had contact with, but they have been a consistently peaceful and respectful neighbor who have fostered a close relationship with the UEE and her citizens through economic trade and cultural exchange. On top of all that, they are a rich and vibrant people well worth a closer look.
Known best for their industrious nature, Banu pride themselves on their artisanal craftsmanship and astute business acumen. Rather than the traditional family units or corporations typically found among Humans, the Banu instead have a societal structure that combines both into one single unit – the Souli. Often translated as ‘guild,’ the Souli is the foundation for life in the Protectorate, where Banu work and live together. Each Souli specializes in a specific industry and can vary widely; from a ship manufacturing Souli, to a trade Souli, even a Souli that raises Banu young. There is a Souli for everything. This regimented division of labor translates directly into the skilled expertise present on Banu worlds, markets and trade-vessels making for a memorable visit.
Where to go?
Travelling throughout the Banu Protectorate offers a variety of exotic sights and sounds. From the flotillas of Yulin to the hallowed halls of Trise, you can find adventure and mystery around every corner. So where do you even start? We’ve assembled a handy guide of some of the systems to make planning your journey even easier.
Bacchus II – Skip between the thousands of archipelagos and islands across this vast
ocean world to experience what many consider the quintessential Banu world.
Geddon I – Fancy a little danger? Visit the arcologies among the beautiful desolation of this geologically active volcanic world to see how mining soulis are harvesting planetary resources for trade goods.
Gliese IV – Ever wonder what an uninhabited planet looks like? Traverse the unkempt
wilds of Gliese IV, perfectly habitable to Humans and Banu, but completely unoccupied.
Kins II – For you history buffs, no trip to the Banu Protectorate would be complete
without seeing the ancient structure on Kins II. Completely defying any existing Banu
engineering styles, these sites have long baffled xenoarchaeologists about who (or
what) built them.
What to do when I get there?
Of course, the Banu don’t spend all their time working and trading. With a strong belief that you should always live in the moment and focus on the present, they take their relaxation almost as seriously as they take their work. There are plenty of options to choose from when it comes to diversions and there’s sure to be something to match almost any taste. Maybe you would like to try your hand at one of the bustling gambling halls where goods are exuberantly exchanged in games of chance. If you’re passionate about sports, the Banu have taken a strong liking to the Human game of Sataball with many arenas to be found throughout the Protectorate — just be warned that it’s common for Banu to cheer for both sides in a match!
For many who visit the Banu, the biggest draw will be the markets which many consider to offer some of the best shopping anywhere in the universe. Not only can you peruse the elite craftsmanship of the various Souli, but because the Banu trade with many other species, you can often find exotic goods from almost every corner of known space and some items from even farther than that. Wandering down the crowded stalls of a Banu Flotilla can be a treat for the senses, but to get the full experience you will definitely want to have the fun of purchasing an item of your very own. For those looking for just a small keepsake of their travels, a popular item to purchase is a tholo, a small three-sided token representative of Cassa, the Banu patron of luck.
- These trinkets are sold as decision-making devices, so ask a question, then roll the tholo to get a ‘yes,’ ‘no’ or (what roughly translates to)‘run’ as an answer.
And after all that exploring and shopping, make sure to stop by one of the dining Souli to experience some of the Banu’s hospitality firsthand and partake in one of their large communal meals. While Banu typically eat with their hands, some places that cater to Humans will have silverware available.
In the Marketplace
When visiting any Banu population center, from the smallest enclaves to the thriving cities, you will notice one thing: they are always built around a central marketplace. Human anthropologists theorize that early Banu societies must have grown around crossroads, placing themselves along the confluences of travellers allowed them to maximize their exposure to goods moving around their planet. The more popular crossroads attracted more and more Banu until permanent settlements began to take shape around them. Interestingly enough, these are just theories and not even Banu ones. The most comprehensive historians of the Banu culture are actually Humans and that only goes back as far as our first interactions with them. The Banu belief that one should always live in the present has created a cultural mentality that disregards facts of the past. To that end, while technical knowledge will be preserved (until they come across a better design), all other facts (historical figures, key events, even their own homeworld) have been lost to the ages. So, while Humans place great value on deeds and noteworthy
actions, to the Banu it is the accumulation of material goods that truly represents a life well spent. No where is this clearer than in their markets.
From stalls packed to the brim with odds and ends to the immaculate showrooms aboard a Merchantman, there are a few things to keep in mind when trading with the Banu:
Negotiating is a must. It is considered very strange to accept an initial offer.
Even though an item or a ship can look the same on the outside, it’s worth taking a
closer look as Banu manufacturing can vary widely from Souli to Souli. It may be worth
shopping around till you find the one that matches your price and quality standards.
As trade between our two species grows, many Banu are making products specifically to
cater to Human tastes. For example, there are now numerous ship Souli who are
constructing Human flight ready versions of ships like the Merchantman and Defender.
It is traditional for Banu to offer hospitality while negotiating and you will often see traders
gathered around a slomaddon, a large ornate brewing vessel, each of them
having contributed an ingredient to the drink, sloma.
If you are offered a cup, be polite and take a sip, but make sure to drink responsibility — sloma can sometimes be quite potent.
Most Banu will consider a deal final once the transaction is complete. Make sure you
inspect everything closely and double check the terms of your agreement before leaving.
A good tip for finding a reputable dealer is watching where other Banu shop. If a Souli doesn’t have very many customers there might be a reason for it.
If you see something you like, go ahead and buy it! Banu traders are often transient and may not be there next time you return.
Safety and Security
Here are a few tips and pointers to keep in mind during your visit:
Many Humans find that bringing earplugs or other hearing protection can be helpful since the Banu’s hearing isn’t as sensitive and noise levels can get quite high.
While many Banu will deal with you honestly, they have what can be described as a lax view of crime and expect visitors to look after themselves, so keep your wits about you at all times. Some travelers find hiring local Banu mercenaries or Defender escorts to be a sound investment.
If you are the victim of a crime, you will be expected to hire a security Souli to investigate the matter for you. In cases of theft, many are willing to take a percentage of the recovered goods as their fee.
One of the biggest dangers that Humans can encounter in the Banu Protectorate is slavery. We strongly advise people avoid the “Servant Markets” of Kins II for this reason. However, please note that if you are captured by Banu slavers you will most likely be offered the opportunity to purchase your own freedom. There are few companies that offer travelers slavery insurance in case of emergency.
Please note that while many visitors have read the popular book A Human Perspective, we would like to remind people that this is a work of fiction and should not be counted on as an accurate source of information on the Banu.
A Guide to Visiting the Banu Protectorate
“A Guide to Visiting the Banu Protectorate” is prepared by the United Empire of Earth Diplomatic Corps for the use of UEE members, both public and private. Logos & photos used with permission. All Rights Reserved.
In the Banu Protectorate, tradesmen are known for hauling precious cargo across long distances in their Merchantman ships. While the Merchantman boasts a cavernous cargo area, it lacks the offensive capabilities to ward off large numbers of attackers.
Meet the Banu Defender, a multi-crew fighter whose patchwork design features both Xi’an thrusters, Tevarin shields, and four Singe tachyon cannons. Though cargo space is limited, the Defender features modest accommodations for its crew and provides easy access to components. The Defender gets its name from the role it serves: the first line of defense against enemy attacks.
That’s why the Defender makes the ideal companion to the Merchantman: one to do the heavy hauling and the other to perform the deadly dogfighting. Every Banu merchant knows an investment in defense is an investment in their livelihood.
Now, you can purchase both ships as part of the Banu Pack! This exclusive 2-ship pack is available for a limited time. The Defender and Merchantman can also be bought individually in two models: Standard and War Bond. This special sale ends on May 1, 2017.
About the Sale
The Defender is being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar, fight in Arena Commander or fly in the Alpha. All revenue collected from Concept Sales goes directly to supporting the development of Star Citizen; to building a game with a scale and depth that’s never been accomplished in games before. Your contributions directly finance the hundreds of developers striving to create the Best Damn Space Sim ever and the team engaging with the Best Damn Community Ever. Concept Sale profits don’t go to shareholders or personal pockets; they go directly into developing a better game. Star Citizen wouldn’t exist without the continued support of our backers.
The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add a Defender poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Defender mini ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Lifetime Insurance or these extras.
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
Additionally, please note that the Defender will be entering the ship pipeline now, it will ultimately be released after other concept ships have been completed. All decorative ‘flare’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches.
Chris Roberts and Sandi Gardiner are all about the Banu. Also, the Los Angeles studio shares their update. Learn how you can earn a trip to GamesCom here: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/referral-contest
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It’s been a busy week.
Last week saw the release of ATV with our always stellar UK Studio Update and the addition of what was almost certainly our largest, most in-depth Ship Shape segment of all time: the Aegis Javelin. ATV has grown and evolved by leaps and bounds over the last year, and a large part of that is due to the continued support of our Subscribers, and the tremendous work of team members across the world dedicating their time and efforts to pulling back the curtain and showing you more of what we’ve been working on than ever before.
So to you and to them, I just wanted to add one more, “Thank You” to the pile. You’re the best.
Yeah, you.
Okay, maybe not YOU, but definitely you.
Also last week we published our March Monthly Studio Report and our biggest schedule update, ever, including a behind-the-scenes video detailing just some of the considerations made when putting together a production schedule at any level. Doing this was something Chris was extremely passionate about, and I don’t have to tell you how contagious that passion for making Star Citizen can be. It’s one of the many reasons we enjoy working on a project like this.
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I also got to visit a replica of the Hotel Room from the end of 2001: a Space Odyssey this weekend and I’m still excited about it so I’m including a line about it and picture here and nobody can stop me. I’m even gonna bold it.
This week brings us continuing episodes of Citizens of the Stars and Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an ATV on Thursday from the LA Studio, and the return of Happy Hour Gamedev on Friday. What’s on this week’s Gamedev? Well, if things go how I think they’re gonna go, it won’t be like anything you’ll ever see from any other game studio, so check that out. Of course, thinking about it, that’s every episode of Happy Hour Gamedev so far, isn’t it?
Subscribers can look for a thread about the next Subscriber’s Town Hall to go up in the Den sometime this week, and a thread for the next 10 for the Chairman Special Edition to go up in the weeks after that.
And in case you missed it, the price for our next concept ship, the Banu Defender was announced over the weekend in the Ship Prices announcement thread. It’s $185 dollars, and the ship and the Banu race will be revealed to the world on Friday.
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There are many ways to spread the word that Space Sims are back, be that in webforums or chatrooms, news articles or reviews, but perhaps one of my favorite ways to share our mutual love of Star Citizen is through streaming. There are many folks out there that showcase Star Citizen to others through their streams on a variety of platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, and Beam, and you can get a real sense for how the game is progressing by watching the reactions of players live. This week, we shine the spotlight on these industrious individuals who share their love of Star Citizen through streaming.
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A self-proclaimed “gamer from the days of the Sinclair Spectrum and somehow still remaining a complete noob at most games,” Talung can often be found streaming Star Citizen and was recently partnered with Twitch.
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A fan and backer since May 2013, Grakees streams Star Citizen throughout the week. You can join in the fun at twitch.tv/grakees and experience the HUGS. He’s big on hugs. Watch out.
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RedLir streams nearly every day of the week, often highlighting his adventures in Star Citizen. As a member of TEST Squadron… well, what more do I really need to say, right?
