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BECK: Hello and welcome to Empire Report. I’m Beck Russum and joining me at the desk again tonight is none other than our very own Victoria Hutchins. She’s been doing an absolutely wonderful job covering for Alan this week while he’s taking some much-needed time off for his birthday.
VICTORIA: It has been my pleasure to fill in. If anyone deserves a bit of a break, it’s Alan.
BECK: And if you’re watching, Alan, we haven’t forgotten that you promised to share pics of your surfing adventure on Tangaroa when you get back.
VICTORIA: I can’t wait to see Alan Nuevo hanging ten on a monster wave.
BECK: That makes two of us. Now, we go from catching waves to tonight’s top story, the new trade deal that has been making waves. The Human-Xi’an Trade Initiative, or HuXa as it’s come to be known, has continued to be hotly debated since its unveiling in March. It should come as no surprise that the rhetoric from both sides has only escalated since it was announced that the Senate will hold its vote to decide the issue next week on June 6th.
VICTORIA: In the wake of the vote announcement, anti-HuXa advocates from across the Empire have begun gathering at the popular Xi’an-owned CTR stations to protest the Initiative. They have called for a boycott of the repair and refuel shop, as well as boycotts of all Xi’an corporations operating in the UEE, like Aopoa and Torral Aggregate. Some have gone so far as to suggest that even companies with strong ties to Xi’an interests like MISC should likewise be avoided, in the interest of encouraging Citizens to spend their credits at entirely Human-owned businesses.
BECK: Later in the program we will be sitting down with Empire Report special correspondent and political strategist, Ben Warden, author of Steps for Humanity: A Study of Political Discourse, to hear more about what those in the Senate are saying, as well as his predictions for the results of the vote.
VICTORIA: Next, ready-to-eat meals can be a huge help when you’re traveling or when fresh food isn’t available. But for some, that convenience is coming at a price.
BECK: That’s right, Victoria. The UEE Health Division released a statement earlier today showing that the recent outbreak of severe food poisoning that sickened dozens and left many more hospitalized has been traced back to a batch of foodpacks that were improperly sealed. Bevic Group, who manufactures Ma’s Ready-to-Eat Meals, has issued a full recall of all the home stew flavors — which include the beef, chicken and fish varieties — and urges everyone to check the production batch serial code on the packaging before consuming. They also went on to clarify that the other flavors of Ma’s remain safe to consume and that they are committed to food safety for all their products. A full list of affected packages along with contact information for Bevic is available on our spectrum.
VICTORIA: Definitely important to get the word out. Would hate to think of a poor solo pilot getting sick just before a long haul.
BECK: Of course, as terrible as food poisoning can be, it seems there’s a bigger threat looming for travelers in Kellog thanks to a new pack of outlaws operating in the system. We go now to Emily Havilan, who has been investigating this troubling trend. Emily?
EMILY: Fear and terror are on the rise in Kellog as a new criminal organization has begun preying upon one unfortunate group in particular — research scientists. According to local Advocacy Agents, five ships have been hit already and that may only be the beginning of this worrying trend. It seems that there is likely —
BECK: I’m sorry, Emily. I have to stop you right there for this breaking news. The Empire Report has just received word from Earth that there has been an attempt on Imperator Costigan’s life. Facts are still coming in as comm-drones arrive, but early reports say that the assassin was not successful and that Imperator Costigan has been taken to an undisclosed secure location until the threat is fully neutralized. The Imperator was scheduled to speak at the Banking Federation Summit going on in New York City this week, when the assailant opened fire at the stage. At least two members of the 1st Marine Combat Battalion were injured in the initial attack as well as —
VICTORIA: We have a quick update, there’s been confirmation that one of the Marines guarding the Imperator has died from their injuries sustained in the line of duty. The other Marine is in critical condition, along with several civilians who were attending the summit and got caught in the crossfire.
BECK: New York City has been placed on complete lock-down with all incoming and outgoing traffic stopped. It is not clear yet what motivated the attack or who was behind it, but a joint effort by local authorities, the Advocacy, and the 1st Combat Battalion is being made to apprehend those — Wait … I am being told that at least one of the assailants has been shot dead near the scene of the attack after a confrontation with Marines. No word yet on their identity.
VICTORIA: To re-highlight what we know so far, a failed assassination attempt was made on Imperator Costigan at the Banking Federation Summit in Sol. One believed assailant has been killed on site. We still do not know if they were working alone or what their motivations were. Our thoughts are with the victims and their friends and family during this tragic time.
BECK: Advocacy Director Thomas Carmody is scheduled to give an official statement in the next few minutes, and we will have further updates once that comm-drone arrives. Until then, we need to take a quick break, but please stay tuned as we bring you more details on this shocking turn of events.
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Greetings Citizens,
We are back from a long weekend and hitting the ground running!
Let’s waste no time and jump straight into what’s going on this week.
Yesterday, we released our weekly fan-centric show, Citizens of the Stars. This week’s episode highlighted special guests Clifford_aka_Miku, Design Director Todd Papy, and more!
Tuesday, the Lore Team will release another installment in one of their many continuing series. The Empire Report brings you important news from across the universe. 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.
Wednesday, we will journey to the Kallis System in an all new episode of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Thursday brings us Around the Verse, this time checking in with Jake Ross from our Austin, TX studio to see what his team have been working on this month. And if Austin wasn’t enough, we’ll also be visiting Benoit from Turbulent as he guides us through what’s been going on with Spectrum and the website.
To wrap up the week, we will be broadcasting LIVE at 12PM EDT for Happy Hour Friday. Theme is TBD, but you can tune in at https://twitch.tv/starcitizen.
Lastly, the Aegis Eclipse sale will end the morning of June 2nd, so don’t miss your chance to pick up the recently declassified advanced stealth bomber. Tarp not included.
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This week’s theme is “Cockpit Citizen,” highlighting some of the custom gaming rigs 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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Custom design, with raising arm rests for easy entry and exit. The entire rig is customizable for each person’s needs including adjustable monitors, keyboards tray, and chair.
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Talk about immersion! Dr_Oversteer has a fully functional battlestation. He didn’t want to create just a cockpit because he will be flying all kinds of different ships in the ‘verse. It includes a X-56 HOTAS, Madcatz FLY1, Logitech G27 Pedals, and Thrustmaster MFDs!
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Stormservant created a custom cockpit dedicated to their organization. It’s a great looking, no-nonsense setup that gets him in and out of Star Citizen in style.
Die Around the Verse-Videoreihe bietet Star-Citizen-Fans regelmäßig einen Einblick in den Entstehungsprozess des Mammut-Projekts. In dem neuesten Teil der Reihe sprechen Sean Tracy und Josh Herman über den Entstehungsprozess der Umwelt in Star Citizen.…
Die Star Citizen-Entwickler nutzen ihre Videoreihe Around the Verse, um Fans des Weltraum-Spiels einen Blick hinter die Kulissen des Spiels zu geben oder um neue Schiffe und Inhalte zu teasern. In dem neuesten Video der Reihe gehen die Entwickler auf…
Sean Tracy and Josh Herman host this week’s Around the Verse, which features an update from our German office and a Ship Shape segment focused on the Aegis Eclipse.
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, similar questions that were merged into a single instance, and those we felt we could comfortably answer at this stage in the Aegis Eclipse’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 Aegis Eclipse in game, we hope you’re as excited as we are as the game expands with the further development of stealth mechanics for the Star Citizen universe.
As always, a special thanks to Geoffrey Coffin, John Crewe, Todd Papy and Ben Lesnick for their help in answering your questions.
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What does “stealth” mean within the Star citizen universe?
Stealth in Star Citizen resolves around being hard to detect via in-game systems, these being primarily radars and scanners. As mentioned previously in the Sabre Q&A, the Sabre and Eclipse are both built from the ground up around the concept of stealth whereas the Hornet Ghost was retrofitted to this mechanic. Not only does the specific hull design of the Sabre and Eclipse provide benefits to reduce their visibility on radar, but they are both equipped by default with Stealth-class items.
The item/component classes we currently have are Military, Civilian, Industrial, Stealth and Competition. Stealth class items of each item type provide the lowest emissions (IR and EM) at the expense of raw output and durability. Other classes will have comparable benefits and weaknesses allowing players to mix and match items to tune their ship’s behavior. Ships like the Eclipse come default with all Stealth class items, whereas the Sabre comes with some Military and some Stealth and the Ghost has Civilian and Stealth. We’ll be discussing the different classes of items in-depth in the future.
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It’s said that the Eclipse will bring unique stealth components to the game. Will older stealth ships like the Sabre and Hornet Ghost be updated to include these stealth components, or are they specific only to the Eclipse?
It is very rare that these items are hull locked and currently none of the default items (i.e. power plants and shield generators) are tied to a specific ship such as the Eclipse. As mentioned previously, we have the stealth class of items which provide significant benefits to signature reduction and applicable ships will either come default with these or be able to equip them.
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Wouldn’t Size 9 torpedoes in fighters be considered “game breaking” when the Retaliator already has S9 and the Polaris capital ship has S10?
The Eclipse was designed from the start to carry S9’s, the tradeoff is it doesn’t carry much else and is neither very tough, nor agile. It’s not designed to be a dogfighter, but rather a very specialized bomber that wants to approach a target silently, fire its payload, and leave. The Eclipse carries three size 9 torpedoes, and two size 2 ballistic gatling weapons. These larger torpedoes take a while to lock on to smaller ships, and combined with its relative lack of agility, that will mean the Eclipse will have a tricky time trying to use them in a dogfight.
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The Eventual $330 Flight ready tag is quite expensive for a single-person ship and given how little detail we have at this stage. What is the intention behind the ship’s design that warrants the high tag that we may be missing at initial glance?
For its size, the Eclipse punches far above its weight class with its ordnance armament. It’s capable of destroying large ships, and causing serious damage to capital ships. Its specialized loadout of stealth equipment and large torpedoes all contribute to its ability to perform this task.
With regards to the announced future price, keep in mind that every Star Citizen concept ship is priced below its component value in the in-game economy. In the past, it was difficult to predict the final price with ships going through significant iterations between the concept and flight ready stages. With the ship pipeline functioning as it does today, we can now provide a solid estimate of future pricing.
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Will there be any civilian companies looking to retrofit this military craft’s torpedo ports allowing for stealth cargo running?
A fun idea, but this is not something we’re currently exploring.
Will the Eclipse torpedo bay be modular, so that the ship can be used for other purposes such as electronic warfare?
This is not something currently planned. The Eclipse was designed around this sole purpose, while something like the Vanguard series will be more flexible with its modularity.
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Can the Eclipse carry anything other than 3xS9 torpedoes (like for instance a ton of regular missiles or multiples of smaller torpedoes like the S5 carried by the Gladiator)?
Again, the Eclipse is an extremely specialized vessel, designed to excel at its intended task and role, so this is not something currently planned.
What ship hangars will the Eclipse fit into?
It’s a sizable ship, to be certain. While it cannot fit into the Polaris, it should be able to operate snugly out of a Javelin hangar.
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The Eclipse currently sits in-between the Gladiator (essentially a carrier born torpedo bomber) and the Harbinger in terms of range, and is expected to stay around there. It doesn’t currently have a lot of fuel reserves so a single mission is the best plan of attack rather than daisy chaining a few together, where a Retaliator or Harbinger would fare better.
Can a Terrapin pick up the trail of an approaching Eclipse (both in their default configuration) in time to warn a nearby fleet?
It’s possible, but it won’t be easy for either ship. Terrapins are extremely strong at detecting signatures and whilst the Eclipse is very good at having low signatures, it still has one. With a Terrapin in a good location, with an operator on their toes they should be able to detect it but whether they have time to get the message across is a different problem entirely.
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What purpose does the Eclipse serve in the civilian market? Can the bay be retrofitted for carrying cargo or data storage modules, or some other use, or is this a dedicated bomber suited for private military contractor use only?
There are no plans for swap-able bays, it is a dedicated bomber with that sole focus.
What are the expected Speed and Agility levels of the Eclipse
The Eclipse is currently planned to be pretty fast (in a straight line), having comparable speed to the Gladius, but it’s also not an agile ship. It’s currently planned to be comparable with the Gladiator for flight agility.
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How many Eclipse will it take to take down say a 890 Jump, Polaris or Idris?
As always, we must preface this by reminding everyone that all things are subject to change during game development, but our current thinking about how this should currently play out is:
A pair of Eclipses, going unnoticed attacking an Idris with its shields down and its defense turrets disabled can cripple the ship if they hit in the right areas. Attacking such a large target like this though would be fairly foolish with such a small attack force though once you factor in the overall shields and defensive capabilities of everyone involved. Sub Capital ships however are much more vulnerable to an Eclipse or two, whereas assaulting a capital ship would most likely require a first strike with an Eclipse or two followed by a heavier sustained assault with Retaliators, Gladiators or Harbingers.
Is 2x fixed ballistic S2 really going to hurt anything significant?
While the weapon compliment is only one component in the overall success of any dogfight, similar loadouts on other ships designed for that purpose can often be more effective than on a ship with a specialized focus like the Eclipse. Here, they function more as deterrent, or tool to finish off a crippled target, than an effective fighting loadout. The Eclipse isn’t supposed to be hanging around in a dogfight. This is a specialist ship with a very niche role: to deliver its devastating torpedo payload to unsuspecting targets.
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Considering the sensitive nature of this ship, will purchases of this ship be limited in game, like by reputation? Does the UEE try to prevent ships like this from falling into pirate hands?
With the 2947 announcement, we consider the Eclipse to now be ‘for export,’ meaning that it can be sold to select groups outside the UEE military (including you). We anticipate there will be any number of limitations in the game world including both the number of bombers produced at any given time and other factors relating to reputation. It seems unlikely that the UEE would sell bombers directly to known pirates or other criminals, but it’s also easy to imagine other ways for such individuals to acquire military spec’d ships.
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How does the Eclipse place among other bombers, specifically in range, speed, maneuverability, armament, survivability, role flexibility, and jump capability?
Range can be a tricky one to quantify, but basing it on duration and distance we see it as follows: Polaris, Retaliator, Harbinger, Eclipse, Gladiator. The first three all have support for long duration trips with on-board facilities while the Eclipse and Gladiator do not.
As speeds will naturally change over the course of development, the current ordering in terms of max SCM speed, going from fastest to slowest in a straight line acceleration, is as follows: Eclipse, Gladiator, Harbinger, Retaliator, Polaris
Maneuverability will be the Eclipse’s “Achilles’ Heel” and is squarely at the bottom of the smaller ships in this trait, with both the Gladiator and Harbinger outmaneuvering it.
Armament is another trait not easily compared straight across against other ships, as it obviously packs a devastating punch with its torpedoes, but once those are gone it will be considerably outgunned if you choose to stick around without re-arming. If you intended to hang around after attacking then the Eclipse is not the ship for this and a Gladiator or Harbinger are much more suited to that role.
Survivability also comes into play here with the Eclipse being less durable than either the Gladiator or Harbinger, currently expected to have a similar durability to that of a 300i.
Basically, if you use it for it’s intended role, we expect the Eclipse to excel above others, but deviating outside of that the Eclipse will not fare well with its lack of cargo space, a single seat with no interior and limited weaponry. The Harbinger will allow you to maintain a longer time in the ‘verse and the Gladiator will pack a more rounded punch.
To summarize the intended roles between the four bombers (Polaris excluded):
The Gladiator is the short range bomber, capable of absorbing and dishing out damage.
The Eclipse is the mid range stealth bomber, capable of sneaking behind enemy lines and delivering a high damage strike, but should not stay in combat due to its defensive shortcomings.
The Harbinger is the mid to long range endurance bomber, carrying more weapons and armament than the Gladiator and able to take more of a pounding and survive deeper into space, but without the stealth capabilities of the Eclipse.
The Retaliator is the dedicated long range bomber, able to carry the most ordnance, the most men and the most weaponry to defend itself via its turrets. It can sustain itself and its crew much deeper in the verse and is ideal for striking targets a long way away. This is a good opportunity to mention that we are well aware of many in the community’s issues with the Retaliator (capacity, turret behavior, layouts, etc) and whilst we can’t commit to changes presently in the short term, it is on our radar and we’ll be reviewing at some point in the future.
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Will I be able to purchase a large cloth to keep this covered in my hanger?
While the Historical Truth Act has permitted an unprecedented release of previously-classified UEEN military information (including the existence of the Eclipse bomber) it has NOT authorized any discussion of the Crusader Industries B419-AR Tactical Stealth Utility Tarp (TSUT.) Any discussion of its capabilities or availability should be reported to the nearest Advocacy agent.
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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.
