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Squadron 42 Monthly Report: December 2018
This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We’re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to, and plan on following this process for future Squadron 42 Monthly Reports.
Attention Recruits,

What you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42.

Read on for pertinent details from our planet-wide operations on Squadron 42-related work over the last month, as well as intel on an exciting new dispatch. The information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.

Over and out,

UEE Naval High Command

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The Road to Glory
Today sees the unveiling of our Squadron 42 roadmap, a useful piece of intel that tracks the progress of development in detail. Much like the Persistent Universe roadmap, this is linked to our JIRA tracking system, and thus lets you see at a glance the work remaining on the game as we thunder on toward the finish line. Of course, also like its Star Citizen counterpart, the Squadron 42 roadmap is not necessarily exhaustive and may be changed or updated as development continues. Make sure you read the caveats, and enjoy this insight into the process.

This monthly project update will work as something of a companion piece, shedding more light on specific work done by each development team, while the roadmap will provide dynamic real-time tracking of progress weekly.

Without further adiue, let’s see what the devs fighting the good fight on the frontlines have been up to…

AI
This month, Ship AI’s focus was on optimizing the Tactical Point System. They now have multiple queries bundled together in a batch from different threads, which allows more control over the cost of the overall system. They submitted several optimizations for the character movement system, which can now update all the components in a multithreaded batch approach and will utilize the maximum the CPU resources during the game update. A pass for thread safety of several subsystems was performed, including the attention target component and communication system. This is required to eventually move the Subsumption component update to the multithreaded batch update step.

In FPS Combat, the ‘Defend Area’ assignment was introduced; correctly achieving this behavior requires monitoring the mastergraph transitions to evaluate if the recipients of the Subsumption event can actually process it. In the Defend Area example, they might be executing any regular behavior when receiving the assignment. If the behavior can handle the request in a specific way, great. If not, then the mastergraph takes care of selecting one that can. Alongside this, they’re adding new behaviors to improve combat and patrol to respect this assignment.

New behaviors and functionality to support stealth gameplay were implemented, with new audio and visual stimuli being added to allow players to draw the attention of guards, prepare traps, and open up otherwise blocked paths.

Work also continued on the bartender for Lorville. To achieve several functionalities of his behavior, they implemented the first pass of UseChannel routing and are continuing to expand the usable functionalities.

The Usable Builder Tool received a new feature too: it’s now able to correctly preview different characters using different usables so that designers, animators, and programmers can easily test and verify the content as it’s delivered.

Animation
On the Story front, the Animation kicked-off production passes on a handful of Squadron 42 scenes. They’re also working to finalize the Armorer character for SQ42 – itself a large and intricate task.

Audio
Audio worked closely with the SQ42 composer Geoff Zanelli to establish themes for the game’s different races and important characters. This, combined with the second round of music implementation, allowed the team to better support pacing and overall development.

The Dialogue Team worked to ensure animation and design had all the assets required to successfully implement their conversations, comms, and cinematics.

Character Art
The Character Art Team polished the Vanduul armor and concepted the Navy Gunner’s outfit.

Cinematics
After completing the CitizenCon SQ42 teaser trailer, Cinematics took time to verify that each scene was functioning correctly from start to finish. This mainly involved the Shubin Station art pocket, but also other things like the battleground around Vega II. Once complete, they worked on a pivotal scene for the game featuring a key character not revealed yet. This involved using a new method of character hair and skin creation (tweaked for more realism), and small modification to costumes.

The Cinematic Animation Team carried on with regular scene work. Having completed first passes for much of the game’s narrative, they transitioned to scenes where a full implementation pass with a state machine is required. They also supported the engineers working on key workflow tools.

Along with navspline improvements, new functionality was added to allow the team to edit multiple cinematic sequences at once. Previously, TrackView only supported a master and child sequence and didn’t allow editing of the master if the child was edited, or vice versa. Some SQ42 scenes feature characters on capital ship bridges reacting to things they see through windows, which requires the team to split sequences between interior and exterior. The new multi-sequence workflow allows multiple sequences to be open and active at once and syncs the timelines for both the master and child.

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Engine Tools
The Engine Team resumed work on GPU skinning. They added vertex velocity support (motion blur), completed several optimizations to skip zero weights (improved throughput), prepared background data, and made the first pass on memory layout and LOD support.

They also made the execution of ray collision checks and the defragmentation of grids run concurrently. This achieved a 30-50% speedup for physics planet terrain computation, reduced the number of cell queries on planets, and improved proxy mesh generation of terrain ground volumes.

Terrain rendering improvements were added (glow forward pass) as well as fixes for water volume and ocean rendering. The existing hair shader was improved, and a new depth of field algorithm was created to improve quality, performance, and fix halos around silhouettes.

Part of the team worked on additional culling refinements in the zone system to submit fewer objects to the renderer, as well as various low-level optimizations to reduce load on the render thread.

Engineering
Engineering actualized a system to allow variable limits on how far players can move their heads when looking around. The default amount is overridden by the outfit and helmet, so wearing heavy armor will restrict how far they can look.

Pickup and Carry was finished off, including the solving of an issue when interacting with items in EVA.

Developments on the female character continues. Because of her different sized skeleton, the team implemented animation-driven inverse kinematics to allow her to reach a ship’s controls without the need for new animation sets.

Progress has been made on the usables builder tool, which allows the content creators to drop in a character and play all the related usable animations, move locators around, and generally test a setup without having to go into the game.

As part of comms, a ‘Tannoy’ system can now pump audio to multiple parts of an environment. For example, an announcement to a single ship’s hangar or a more global ship-wide announcement.

The ship AI Team helped out with the new Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS), tweaking ship behavior to better utilize these new flight controls for a better dogfighting experience.

Environment Art
Art began using their new hard surface shader and new blending features for wear and tear. This enables a more realistic appearance of localized damage without a jarring transition between worn and pristine areas. They’re paying particular attention to make sure wear looks natural and unforced. One of the high-level goals for SQ42 is for every asset and its features to sit in a scene naturally, feel unforced, and for the lighting to have a slightly softer, more realistic feel (except for some areas where the intensity is cranked up to 11).

Lighting focused on the Javelin found in an early campaign level, taking into account the emphasis on making one key light do more of the work. This new approach looks great and is less demanding on the engine too. Tweaks to a control room seen close to the end of the campaign progressed, with the aim being to set the correct tone for the narrative and gameplay moments that spread from it.

Props seen throughout the campaign (including monitors, screens, wiring looms, hatch covers, ropes, destructible lights, and pressurized items) all received attention, this time to determine how they break or deform when damaged. Several key events take place where these assets need to react correctly to gravity, decompression, damage, pulse, etc.

The vast Shubin mining station gained more detail to the supporting structures around it. Development of the facility’s Bridge (as first seen in the CitizenCon 2948 trailer) continued, which comes in at around three times the size of a Bengal’s.

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Gameplay Story
The Gameplay Story Team made swift progress throughout November and continuously added more scenes to their Q4 list. They are currently working on 38 scenes for the quarter and are expecting to add several more by the end of the year.

Graphics
The Graphics Team worked on several shader effects, including the resurrection of the caustics water effect, which is needed in several locations throughout SQ42. The new hard surface shader was rolled out to the entire team and should improve performance, allow new surface shading features, and enable more dynamic wear & dirt effects.

Performance was also a focus, with most attention on the low-level texture and mesh streaming systems to help squeeze as much content in with as little performance impact as possible.

Level Design
The Level Design Team converted the older sables inside the Idris to a more efficient and flexible system, which also incorporates crew behaviors for things like ‘off-duty’ and ‘mess hall’. Level work is an ongoing collaboration with the Art Team and is constantly reviewed at senior level.

“It’s all going well and now that we have almost all the scenes in the levels you really get a great feel for the story flow and pacing.”

Cockpit scenes are coming to life thanks to ‘Render to Texture’ technology, while the new IFCS system is fully implemented into SQ42 and making a huge difference to dogfighting. Regular feedback and suggested improvements mean spline technology and flight controls are constantly refined.

Narrative
The Narrative Team continued plugging away at [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] as well as [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] and that was a lot of fun.

Props
The Props Team continued work on the assets required for NPS interactions and activities by creating additional sub items used by the engineering crew and the storage cases to house them. The larger maintenance machinery assets are now ready for the animation and cinematic departments to use in their work, too.

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System Design
The System Design Team integrated the New Flight Model into enemy ship AI, ensuring that they are still engaging to fight against and don’t become unbalanced. They noticed that the new IFCS currently causes too much unwanted ‘jousting’ behavior, so are currently looking into ways to modify it.

Dialogue wildlines for the ship/FPS/social AI were reworked to unify them within the same overall structure. Collaboration with the audio & writing teams ensured the system works properly for all systemic dialogue in the game. The team is also working to develop tools to automate the setup of dialogue lines.

Stealth gameplay elements continue to be developed, which require the AI perception to be upgraded to cater for peripheral vision, as well as various audio events and stimuli from environmental sources, such as throwing a pebble to distract enemies.

Tech Animation
The Technical Animation department progressed with the initial batch transfer of male animations to the female skeleton. This included updating low-level assets for animation database referencing to ensure she can run around and fire weapons. It has been successful and handed off to animation for further review and polish.

Some much-needed toolsets for authoring skinning data on the many different costumes were finished. Used in conjunction with the existing toolsets, these will make skin authoring a more efficient process.

An interesting dilemma was presented recently, whereby the team needed to show some sort of fluid dynamics, which usually require intensive calculations The Technical Animation department came into its own and used the existing physics solution to create a dynamic yet economic fake for the various glasses & cups in the bar scenes.

Multiple animations for cinematics and gameplay were added, as were several new tools to the animation pipeline along with bug fixes and additions to existing tools. Time was also spent fixing several smaller bugs like animation compilation errors, missing integrations, weapon entities, and DBA setups.

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Tech Art
The Tech Art Team analyzed the full requirements of the character ‘DNA gene pool’. In order for the next-gen facial customizer to work most effectively, a limited pool of heads with specific and unique shapes is required. Relevant factors are gender, ethnic origin, age, physical constitution, and distinct facial features such as hooked vs. pointy nose, thin vs. full lips, and so forth. Several scenarios with varying pool sizes were created to determine the mid-to-long-term plans for populating the pool. The planned release of the new customizer will initially use as many heads as possible from the selection scanned, providing they fulfill requirements.

The team also worked on the asset authoring tools and pipeline for the new cloth/softbody solver, which was first showcased at CitizenCon. Optimal simulation mesh topology and vertex density are key to making it work efficiently and fast enough while yielding high-fidelity visual results. Another important factor is creating the best possible binding between the high and low res simulation mesh – this can only be fully automated for simpler cloth asset types and requires artistic ‘guidance’ and fine-grained control in more complex cases. The team went to great lengths to ensure the authoring tools provide this capability in a convenient, easy-to-use way.

UI
Last month, the SQ42 team specced-out improvements to how AR mission objectives are displayed to the player. For both the PU and SQ42, they’re aiming to create a common unified methodology for how important information is imparted regarding type, position, whether it’s obstructed, etc. They’re also looking at the long-term requirements of missions and building a system to help to surface important information when it’s contextually needed.

Another major feature worked on is the area map. Pre-visualizations of how the map could be were built procedurally using existing underlying systems, such as the room system. This informs not only the overall layout but also how it becomes more defined as the player traverses the environment for the first time.

Vehicle Features
The team spent the month on Vehicle Scanning improvements. The groundwork necessary to allow ships to aim at the engines on target ships has been completed, and the feature itself is nearly ready to be rolled out. Scanning nav points for destination info have been completed and are also ready for implementation.

VFX
VFX continued to iterate on lightning effects by putting the new texture noise functionality through its paces, which will allow them to create much finer detail up close at a fraction of the previous cost. They also developed a tool to allow artists to create VDBs (including gas clouds) more quickly and with more control over the finer details.

Thruster improvements were made to more closely match the VFX. They gained new effects and functionality including damage, overheat, and misfire options.

R&D for a Xi’an missile launcher kicked off too.

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Weapons
The Weapon Art Team carried on with the Multi-Tool rework and made progress with the Kastak Arms Ravager-212 and the level two and three upgrades for the Hurston Dynamics Laser Repeaters. They also made minor adjustments to the iron sights on a handful of weapons to improve the sight picture and to make them more user-friendly when no optics are attached.

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Covert Intel

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Conclusion
WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…t-December-2018

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

Wann ist denn mit dem Einzelspieler-Part Squadron 42 von Star Citizen zu rechnen? Darauf gibt es nun eine ungefähre Antwort. Das Entwicklerstudio Cloud Imperium Games hat nämlich vor kurzem eine aktuelle Roadmap veröffentlicht. Demnach ist mit einer…

Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-S…warten-1272014/

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

Star Citizen Alpha 3.4 Available!

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Alpha 3.4

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Today, we open Alpha 3.4 to all backer!

Alpha 3.4 launches several massive technical upgrades to the game including:
The Lorville Central Business District, including the Hurston Dynamics Showroom and Transfers Commodity Exchange

Six new ships including the Freelancer variants and the Anvil Hawk

New armor, helmets, and a new personal weapon

Two ship weapons have been reworked and their offerings expanded

New visual updates to quantum markers and turrets

Expanded the mission system into Hurston and surrounding moons

And more!

And of course, you can read the comprehensive Alpha 3.4 Patch Notes here.

3.4 Flyable Ships

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With this major milestone of Alpha 3.4, we’re introducing newly flyable ships, as well as updating some older favorites.

The list of new & updated ships includes:
Anvil Hawk

RSI Constellation Phoenix Emerald

MISC Freelancer Variants

Origin 600i Touring Module

MISC Reliant Kore Improvements

Please enjoy the trailers below and find even more information on our 3.4 Flyable Ships page here.

Bug Reporting

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Remember, while there’s a lot to explore in Alpha 3.4, the game is still just a portion of the Star Citizen experience! You can help the team improve future releases by reporting bugs and other issues using the Star Citizen Issue Council. The amazing feedback from Star Citizen backers is what has allowed us to iterate on the PTU so quickly, and we’re eager for feedback about the Live release as well. You can access the Issue Council here.

Finally, we would be remiss if we did not thank our incredible community of PTU testers for helping make this patch the best it can be! Your dedication is exemplary of the UEE’s finest defenders!

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…ha-34-Available

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

Breaking news on Squadron 42, 3.4 and more, in this week’s update.

Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…round-The-Verse

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

Letter from the Chairman

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Hello everyone,

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2018 brought some pretty big things in the universe of Star Citizen; our first planet, Hurston, our first major landing zone, Lorville, four new moons, 32 new flyable ships, Face Over IP, much improved performance thanks to Object Container Streaming, Network Bind Culling and a complete overhaul of the game code to run on multiple CPU cores simultaneously. We had our largest CitizenCon to date in Austin, Texas and just recently wrapped up a really fun Anniversary Event. How cool was it to make the journey to Lorville, visit the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo West and get an up close and personal sneak preview of some ships that are coming to the ‘verse, or fly dozens of already flyable ships? It has been exciting reading the posts from people discovering the project for the first time and seeing so many people having a blast playing Star Citizen.

As we look forward to the holidays, I wanted to give you all a couple of updates. The first item of news is the Squadron 42 public roadmap is going live today. As with our Persistent Universe roadmap, this is linked to our company’s internal JIRA tracking system, so you can see at a glance the work remaining to complete the game. It was a lot of work to make sure every remaining task was broken down in detail and estimated to the best of our ability, and the same caveats will apply to the Squadron 42 roadmap as they do to the PU one, but our plan is to be feature and content complete by the end of 2019, with the first 6 months of 2020 for Alpha (balance, optimization and polish) and then Beta.

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When we started the campaign for Star Citizen and Squadron 42, I said that the crowdfunding would go towards development of the game, and that the amount would define the scope and ambition of what we were working on. That is a commitment I am proud to say we have been upholding; its why we have over 500 staff around the world working on the games and have spent very little on marketing.

You can see this investment into development in the UK financials that we publish every year on Companies House. In a further effort at transparency we have decided to publish our historical financials from 2012 through 2017 on our new corporate website to allow all of you to see not just how much money we raise via the public counter, but also how the money has been spent globally.

All of our marketing is community focused and viral; events we host for all of you, in-fiction lore, commercials that help flesh out the world, and PR outreach. The fact that we have raised over $211M via word of mouth and viral marketing is staggering and a testament to how amazing a community all of you are. Everyone at Cloud Imperium is humbled to have your trust and support on this journey together.

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As a result, we are building two of the most ambitious games ever embarked on in gaming, with budgets that are unmatched by all but the very biggest projects.

Having a great game is only half the battle. As we look towards the release of Squadron 42, we have been acutely aware that having a AAA game that matches the biggest single player games out there only goes so far if no one knows about it. The games we will be competing with for attention have tens and, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising behind them.

Other companies in a similar situation have normally tackled this problem by partnering with a Publisher for the marketing and sales of their game. As you all know I am not in favor of putting my destiny in the hands of a third party. On the other hand, I don’t feel it would be right to go back to all of you to raise funds to market the game to other people; most of you already have a copy earmarked for you and I still strongly feel that the money brought in from our crowdfunding should continue to go to the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.

Because of this, we started to investigate ways to raise money to fund the upcoming marketing and release needs of Squadron 42. We turned away some approaches from Private Equity and Venture Capital because we were concerned about them fully understanding what makes our company tick and pushing us towards short term decisions.

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During this process we were introduced to Clive Calder and his son Keith, who have both been interested in the confluence of entertainment with the ability to directly connect with an audience online. Clive founded the most successful independent music company, Zomba, which was home to some of the biggest music acts in the world. Keith is an independent film producer whose company Snoot Entertainment’s most recent films are the critically acclaimed Blindspotting and the Academy Award-nominated Anomalisa. During our first meeting, we got on like a house on fire, with Clive telling me about how he wished that when he built Zomba you could have connected to the fans of an artist bypassing the myriad of media gatekeepers in the way Star Citizen does, and which wasn’t possible 15 years ago. Keith and I swapped war stories about the film industry and talked about how refreshing it is to be able to utilize crowdfunding to create a project that normally would fly against what is currently considered mainstream.

During the course of these discussions it became clear to me that if Clive and Keith joined us as investors in our company, we’d have true partners that respected what we had built, but also fully understood the ins and outs and the patience required with a business based on creating entertainment. Taking in like-minded partners helps us solve the need of funding the marketing and release of Squadron 42, but also stay attuned to what makes us special.

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So, it’s with this that I would like to announce that we have closed a minority investment into Cloud Imperium US & UK, from Clive’s family office and Keith’s Snoot Entertainment for $46M for approximately 10% of the shares in the Cloud Imperium US and UK companies, which is a testament to the value, future potential and longevity of the company.

As part of this process we’ve taken on two outside board members. The first is Dan Offner, an experienced lawyer and entrepreneur with over twenty years of experience in Interactive Entertainment, who is Clive and Keith’s board nominee and second is Eli Klein, a long term friend who has been acting as an advisor to the company over the past couple of years.

The control of the company and the board still firmly stays with myself as Chairman, CEO and majority shareholder.

We wouldn’t have taken anyone on board if we didn’t feel that they were fully aligned with our vision, philosophy and could add valuable insight in navigating the business challenges ahead.

This investment helps secure our independence. We may not have the resources that an Activision or EA have to launch one of their tentpole games, but we now control our own destiny in marketing Squadron 42, especially as we have a secret weapon: all of you! Between the power of the best community in gaming to help get the message out and these additional funds we will be well positioned to enable Squadron 42 to enjoy the success that it deserves.

Beyond this, this investment gives Cloud Imperium the ability to take the long view when needed and allows us to grow as a company. I couldn’t be happier.

So I would like to welcome Clive, Keith, Dan and Eli to the Cloud Imperium family, and I look forward to great success with them and all of you.

See you in the ‘Verse!

-Chris Roberts

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…om-The-Chairman

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Zitat von Star Citizen

Writer’s Note: Phantom Bounty: Part Four was published originally in Jump Point 3.4. Read Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here.

Mila was a traitor. She’d risked her career as a bounty hunter . . . had betrayed her partner, Rhys, to free Casey. Was it all worth it? Had Casey been telling the truth about her father developing bioweapons?

Mila snuck a glance at Casey as she returned to the co-pilot’s seat. The dark-haired woman offered her a small smile, then harnessed herself into her seat. Mila’s childhood friend. A terrorist.

The emptiness of space loomed before them, nothing but darkness beyond Devana’s forward screen. Mila gripped the controls so tightly her hands ached.

“I’ve managed to mask our signal,” Casey said, “but it’s a temporary fix only. We have a half hour. No more.”

“How . . . ?”

Casey explained the method, and Mila shook her head, partially in awe of the hacking skills required, partially in dismay over the length of the resulting prison sentence if she were caught at it.

“Could have used that trick myself a time or two,” Mila muttered.

“Not if you want to stay on the right side of the law.” Casey cleared her throat. “After this is over. Of course. Just picked up the signal on the scanner. Gotta be my contact. The ship’s waiting a few clicks from the jump point.”

Mila’s hands grew tighter on the controls as she glanced at the scanner screen. Space normally held the dual promises of endless possibility and endless danger . . . but today it held only danger for her.

“Any sign of the Advocacy?” Mila asked tightly.

“Not yet. But . . . they’ll follow. They always do. Get me to my contact, and we’ll execute the plan.”

Mila tried to calm her breathing, but her heart was racing, and she couldn’t make it stop. It was supposed to be simple. Mila would pull up next to the contact ship; Casey would knock her out, then transfer to the other ship. When Rhys and the Advocacy found Mila, she’d tell them Casey took her ship and ran with it. Then everything could go back to normal. Or almost normal. Would Rhys believe the lie? Could she lie to him?

This was stupid. So stupid. She’d acted rashly. There was no way she could lie well enough to convince the Advocacy and Rhys that Casey had somehow escaped the containment pod, overpowered her, and then locked her inside. But Mila didn’t have another solution.

“Straight ahead.” Casey plotted new coordinates, and Mila followed the trajectory.

A long, sleek yacht came into view in front of them. A few thin lights gleamed along the length of the 890’s hull. The owner of this ship had plenty of money; Casey’s contact was the real deal.

“Freelancer,” came a voice over the comm. “State your business.”

Casey replied, “Tell S Whispering Wind approaches.”

“Around which sun does the finest planet orbit?”

“Ilios.”

Mila’s heart skipped a beat and she slammed a hand over the comm, silencing it. “Ilios,” she hissed. “Like the project?”

Casey’s brows rose for a split second, then her expression smoothed. “Exactly like that.”

“I thought you destroyed all that data.”

“S has cleared you for docking,” the comm interrupted, “but we’ll need to scan you at close range.”

Casey pushed Mila’s hand out of the way and hit the comms. “Roger that.”

“Tell me what’s going on,” Mila hissed. “What is this about Ilios?”

Casey sighed. “I can’t tell you about S. Or Ilios. If I did, I’d have to kill you.”

Mila tensed in her seat. There was no hint of humor in Casey’s voice. None. She was serious.

“I risked everything for you!”

“Look . . . all I can say is that People First has friends in high places. They support the cause. But not all friends are created equal. Many do things . . . for their own reasons. And can be persuaded to help if you offer the right terms.”

Mila pulled the ship up beside the much longer 890. “This contact is connected with People First? And what were her terms for you, to get you out of here and betray PF?”

The 890 commed them before Casey could answer. “We detect two life signs in the Freelancer. S says you were supposed to come alone.”

“I needed help getting here,” Casey replied tersely.

“S says both of you must board. Or we leave.”

Casey glanced at Mila with a veiled expression, “I’m sorry to drag you into this. But we both have to go over there.”

“No.” Panic rushed through Mila, and she tightened her grip on the stick. “No way. That wasn’t the deal. You go over. I stay here. Or I’m leaving.”

“Evony.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said through gritted teeth. “My name is Mila now.”

“Mila,” Casey’s voice was low, soothing. “How do you think it’ll look if we fly away now? They’ll shoot us out of existence and jump without a glance back. You have to go over there. I’ll make sure S sends you back here.”

“How will you make sure?”

“I just will. Now suit up. We’re wasting too much time. S definitely won’t be happy if the Advocacy shows up at her door. But I’m pretty sure you understand that.” Casey left her seat and headed back to suit up herself.

Mila stared at the yacht, trying to decide if she could outmaneuver it and escape. But then what? She had to get rid of Casey, not keep her on board. She let out a frustrated sigh, unbuckled, and headed back to her gear. She ignored Casey, not meeting her gaze.

Her injured shoulder, shot by Casey, cried out in pain as she pulled her suit up. She slapped a new numbing patch on it and continued dressing. As she closed the suit up, her hand touched her necklace.

Mila’s heart twisted as she pulled the bronze token over her head. She stared down at it, at the infinity symbol, the special iridescent “good luck” stones dangling from it, and a new wave of regret washed over her.

Rhys had spent some of their last creds on this. To make her happy. Mila took the necklace and tucked it in the space between the bunk and the wall. She didn’t deserve it. And it hadn’t brought her good luck anyway, had it?

When Mila got back to the cargo hold, Casey was suited up, her helmet under one arm.

“Ready?”

“Yeah,” Mila mumbled.

They both latched their helmets on, then Mila depressurized the cargo hold and opened the back ramp. She and Casey pushed off the ramp and drifted toward the 890’s rear lift. When they were inside the empty space, the cage lifted under them, and artificial gravity gently resumed. A light turned green above them, and Casey took off her helmet. Mila did the same.

They stared at the double doors before them, waiting in tense silence.

The doors finally slid open, revealing a broad-shouldered man in a dark grey flight suit. “S will see you now.”

The man stepped into the lift, one hand gripping a pistol, and gestured for Mila and Casey to enter the ship.

Mila squared her shoulders and met the man’s hard glare with one of her own. She wouldn’t be afraid of these thugs. She’d faced off against dozens of wanted criminals and come out on top. She could do it again.

Another pair of guards met them in the next corridor where it widened. One of them patted Casey and Mila down and removed their mobiGlas as the other kept his gun trained on them. When they were satisfied, they led them down the corridor and into a well decorated lounge.

Mila’s eyes darted around. The lounge was on two decks, and more guards looked down at them from behind the rail of the upper deck. By the taste displayed here, Casey’s contact was old money. It could have been owned by Mila’s parents or any of their friends on Terra. Silk panels from Rihlah, famous Terran brocade applied to the benches, a delicate glass and metallic table at the center, and a very impractical glass chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling. Iridescent stones decorated the chandelier, and Mila’s hand almost went to the spot where her good luck necklace used to be. They looked just like the stones on it.

Two more guards entered, bringing the total to five on the main deck. Mila’s lips parted as a woman, apparently the mysterious ‘S,’ walked in behind them.

It was the woman from the market stall where Rhys had purchased her necklace.

Mila did a double take. No . . . there were differences. This S was petite, with space-black hair and light blue eyes, just like the woman at the stall. But the woman before her wore a well-tailored suit and robe, not loose skirts. And her hair wasn’t done up in braids, and she didn’t have a nose ring. She looked more . . . well-preserved — her skin smooth, a product of youth treatments. This was not the same woman . . . but Mila would be willing to bet they had some relation to each other.

The woman walked up to them with a smile, and exchanged kisses on the cheek with Casey.

“Brought a friend?” she asked, raising a brow at Mila.

“Like I said. I needed a ride.”

“And who is this?”

Mila didn’t answer, just tried to keep her expression blank. She couldn’t let this woman know she knew anything about her.

“She’s just an old friend of mine,” Casey said, her voice light.

The woman’s eyes darkened, her polite demeanor fading a fraction. She gestured to one of the guards.

“Come with me, Elaine. Let us talk over here.”

Casey followed her to an ottoman near the center of the room, while the guard grabbed Mila’s arm and pulled her to the edge of the space and out of earshot of Casey and S’s quiet conversation. Did S know who Casey was originally? She’d called her Elaine, the name she’d used on Tevistal.

The two of them engaged in an intense, quiet talk for a few minutes and then Casey lifted the sleeve of her suit and peeled off a piece of her skin. False skin. Mila went cold at the sight of it. Casey hadn’t mentioned any hidden data . . . or details on the price for her passage. Casey scraped a chip from the skin and passed it to S.

Casey was selling data, probably Phan Pharmaceutical data. Had she lied about everything? Was she just stealing data to sell to competitors? Anger started to bloom in Mila’s chest, and she fought to keep her mouth shut. All that mattered now was that Mila get out of this alive and unscathed.

Casey finished her transaction and returned to Mila.

“What was that?” Mila hissed.

Casey’s expression was tight. “She’ll let you go back to your ship just as soon as she checks my payment.”

A new guard ran through the door. “Madame. The Advocacy was spotted by our scout. We need to jump. Now.”

“Wait — no.” Mila looked toward the door they’d come in. “Send me back. Send me back now.”

S shot them a glare and gestured to the guard behind Mila. “Take them each to a room until after the jumps.”

Jumps. This was starting to get a lot more complicated.

“Let me go back to my ship!” Mila’s voice rose.

Casey dug her nails into Mila’s hand and leaned close, whispering. “They won’t let you now. Keep it together if you want to survive this.”

Mila lurched to the side, trying to make a desperate run back out to her ship.

The guards closed in on her, grabbed both her arms, and dragged her the other way. She went limp, no longer fighting it as the realization of what had happened sunk in.

They took her up a flight of stairs and opened the first door they came to, pushing her inside.

“Harness up. We’ll be jumping soon,” one of the guards said.

The door slid closed and she heard the lock engage. Mila took a panicked look around the small room, and then sank down in the jump seat. Tears brimmed in her eyes as she buckled in. She’d messed up.

She’d always been able to get out of scraps before. Always. But not this time. She just kept sinking deeper into a pit that appeared to have no bottom.

The ship hummed softly as it powered up, and in mere minutes she felt the woozy sensation of the first jump. Another soon followed, and Mila’s hope died as they travelled further and further away from her ship.

When the Advocacy found the empty Devana . . . they’d know. They’d know she’d helped Casey escape. They’d think she was working with her.

And it would be true.

The stomach-lurching feeling of the third jump let Mila know her old life was over for good. Now she was a criminal . . . on the run. She could try to say Casey had kidnapped her, but why would she have? There was no good way out of this. And Rhys knew the truth; he’d known about their shared past. If the Advocacy pressed him . . .

Would Mila even get off this ship alive?

When the yacht powered down, Mila unharnessed herself and paced the small room.

Hours passed, and a guard brought Mila food and water. The reconstituted food tasted like death, like a last meal before the end, and a terrible one at that. She could barely wrap her mind around what she’d done — how much her life had changed in just a few hours. Then the locks disengaged on her door again, and she turned as it slid open.

Casey slipped through and quickly closed it. “The guards are busy . . . for the moment. This might be our only chance to talk.”

“You lied to me. You knew.”

“No. I didn’t. I’d hoped to get you back to the ship.”

“I can never go back now, Casey. Not ever.”

“Shh. I’m Elaine here.” Casey looked completely calm, unbothered by the fact that Mila’s entire life was hanging in the balance.

Mila rushed Casey and shoved her against the metal wall. “They’re not gonna let me walk out of here, are they? I’m an unknown entity. I was never supposed to be here.”

Casey winced with pain and her forehead creased with worry. “S — Sybil — will make sure she knows who you are before she lets you leave now. And when she finds out you’re a bounty hunter . . .”

“Well, I think I know something about her. There was this woman selling trinkets at the market—”

“A younger sister. You don’t say a word about knowing anything, understand? She’ll kill you if she thinks you know anything about her. She operates under the illusion that we don’t know anything.”

Mila backed away from Casey, feeling dizzy. “You lied to me. You’re selling data—”

“Not bioweapons! When we do jobs, we collect harmless, or even beneficial, research and sell it to fund our cause. But I’m funding my escape with it this time.”

“What is it? What did you just sell?” Mila’s voice rose as she spoke, and she tried to calm herself down, but her mind was racing.

“The formula for a medical treatment that hasn’t been patented yet.”

“How can I believe that?”

“Look, we don’t have time for this.” Casey placed her hands on Mila’s shoulders, forcing her to look her in the eyes. “You know about her family. She’s going to find out about you. There’s no way she’s letting you just go back to your regular life now. You have one choice.”

Mila shrugged off Casey’s hands. “What?”

“You come with me. I’m going to try to convince her to let us disappear together.”

“No!” Mila began to pace the room again. “I can’t just . . . leave the Empire.”

“If you stay — you just freed me and left your ship stranded next to a jump point. They’ll know you helped me. You have no other choice.”

“You think I don’t know what it looks like? You have to help me get off of here. Have them drop me off somewhere so I can . . . somehow make it right.”

“You know too much! About me — about PF — about Sybil.”

Red crowded around the edges of Mila’s vision, and it took everything she had not to wrap her hands around Casey’s neck and squeeze. “I helped you. You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me. You have to help me fix this. Help me get out of here.”

Casey folded her arms across her chest and glanced back toward the door. “I can’t.”

“You. Will.”

“They’ll catch you—”

“And it won’t matter to you either way. You’ll be long gone, hiding in Xi’an territory.”

Casey met Mila’s eyes and sighed. “Fine. Get yourself killed if that’s what you want.” She reached into her suit pocket and pulled out a translucent swipe card.

“Stole it off a guard.” Casey smiled ruefully. “This should get you into the corridor at the end of this one. They have a little 85X there. I know we’re stopping at a planet soon. Backwater, but plenty of places to hide. I’ll distract the guards for you. When I knock twice on your door, wait five minutes, then it’s time for you to go.”

Mila stared down at the card in her hand.

“Thank you again, for helping me. I owe you my life.” Casey wrapped her in a quick hug that Mila didn’t return. “I really am sorry. Try to be safe.” Casey gave her one last sad smile. “If you change your mind . . .”

“No,” Mila said, her voice breaking. “I’m going to fix this.”

The knocks came after Mila had given up on Casey ever following through.

Two knocks.

Mila grabbed her helmet off the floor and hugged it to her chest.

Heart pumping a chaotic rhythm in her chest, Mila waited through five tense minutes, then swiped the card Casey had given her. The door slid open to reveal an empty corridor beyond. She barely breathed as she gingerly stepped into the corridor and looked both ways. She turned right, as Casey had directed her to, and hurried toward the end. It curved right, taking her to a new door.

She said a quick prayer to the Banu god of luck that the room beyond would be empty, then scanned the card.

The door opened into a hangar bay. The 85X sat at the center of it.

An alarm sounded, and red lights began to flash in the bay.

Mila was sweating freely as she latched her helmet on.

“Hey!”

Someone tackled her from behind, shoving her down on the floor. She fought back, twisting in the man’s grasp until she saw him face to face. A guard, the one who had warned Sybil about the Advocacy’s arrival.

Mila slammed a gloved fist into his unprotected face, and he stumbled backward. She desperately climbed forward, trying to get into the 85X cockpit, but the guard followed her.

Depressurize Bay. The small words flashed in the corner of the cockpit’s interface. As the guard grabbed her leg, she hit the button on the screen. A whole new set of alarms joined the ongoing din. The man’s eyes widened, and he scrambled away from her, toward the hangar door. He scanned his key card, trying to make it open, but it was sealed shut. He would die if she didn’t do something.

Mila paused the depressurization and lurched out of the ship. She crashed into the man, seeking the pistol he held in his grip. She slammed an elbow into his gut again, and he released the gun. She picked it up and trained it on him.

“Last chance to get out!” she yelled. He stared at her wild eyed and scanned his card again.

This time the door opened. Several guards waited beyond, but he yelled something to them and they didn’t try to enter.

The door slid shut, and Mila climbed back into the ship, tossing the pistol into the seat beside her.

She brought up the Starmap, her hands shaking with adrenaline, praying that it would display more than a void. They were in orbit over a settled world! She chose a landing site to the west of the closest city. She could abandon the ship there, hide in the wooded hills, wait it out until she was sure Sybil and her guards had given up waiting for her to emerge. She chose her destination, and then completed the prep sequence.

The countdown began. She harnessed herself into the seat as the hangar bay opened, revealing black space behind.

She throttled up and took off, leaving the 890 behind.

Mila headed directly planetside, sparing little attention for the ship at her back. If they shot up the runabout, she would have no more worries herself. There was nothing she could do but speed to her landing site.

She pictured Rhys. His handsome face, his reassuring words, the way he’d held her. That smirk she’d probably never see again unless she got caught or found a way to fix this impossible situation.

As she entered the planet’s atmosphere, she spared the time for a few tears.

A few days ago she’d been hunting the Phantom.

Now she needed to become one.

Five Months Later

Mila wove her way through dark alleyways, keeping her head down, a hood concealing her face. A lock of her newly short-cropped blonde hair fell into her eyes, and she blinked as it irritated them. The green colored contacts she wore felt dry, scratchy. But at least from afar she wouldn’t be recognized.

She glanced back at a huddle of transients gathered round a rusty heater, and turned down the next alley. She’d reached the hostel sector.

It was dangerous being back in Tevistal so soon after the Incident, but she’d run out of options and time. A dozen small-time jobs had funded her existence along the way, but now there were even more bounties on her head.

She’d been hunted for months, had been nearly caught, but so far she’d always gotten away. And this was the one place they’d probably never expect her to return.

Mila gritted her teeth and walked down the dark alley between two hostels. A cracked globe flickered, guiding her to a hostel entrance. She pushed open the door, and the scent of piss wafted over her. It barely registered. This place was only half as filthy as most of the places she’d slept the past few months.

Voices rang through the thin metal walls. Arguments. The sound of two people moaning and grunting. An old vid playing at full blast.

Mila found an unoccupied room and went inside. Dim sensor lights lit up the room. The place had a film of filth coating it, but it would do.

She shut the door behind her and activated the second-hand mobiGlas on her wrist. Her hacking program did a quick job of activating the RoomTab. The lights and power came on in response, and she pulled her mobi away. It would stay on until she ran her program again. No creds needed. Which was good, because she didn’t have many left.

A glance around the now well-lit room brought a flood of memories back. The pain came with it, weighing Mila down. She sank to the dirty mattress.

She and Rhys had tracked the Phantom to a room like this once.

Mila did something she hadn’t done for weeks. She brought up the news search she’d saved to her mobiGlas, to see if anything had changed since she’d last checked.

PHAN PHARMACEUTICAL CEO UNDER INVESTIGATION

She rewatched the vid of Casey’s father being arrested with the sound turned off. Owen Phan’s face was the same regal countenance she remembered from growing up. When Mila had first heard that the truth about the biological weapons had leaked, it had been a relief to learn that Casey had at least been telling the truth about that. And even more importantly, Mila’s mother had been kept completely clear of the breaking scandal. Knowing that Phan wouldn’t be making weapons anymore was the only glimmer of light in these recent dark days.

Almost without thinking, Mila accessed another archived news story.

An image of herself flashed in the air before her. Or at least what Mila used to look like. It was the photo the Advocacy had been using on her bounty.

EVONY SALINAS CHARGED WITH AIDING AND ABETTING “THE PHANTOM”

The article speculated on the nature of the terrorism, on the relationship between Mila’s parents and Phan Pharmaceuticals, and on Mila’s motives. Even with the revelation of the biological weapons it hadn’t changed the fact that the Phantom had wreaked havoc for months. Casey, and by association Mila, were still considered criminals.

The article had included a small photo of Rhys as well. He had been held for questioning, but with no proof of any wrongdoing on his part he had eventually been released.

Mila reread the final line.

Evony Mila Salinas is still at large, with several bounties on her head for crimes ranging from petty theft to terrorism.

She scanned back up to see Rhys’s face one more time, but it was like a knife through her heart. She turned off the mobi.

She needed to get to Xi’an territory fast, and she only knew of one woman who could get her there. Sybil.

But she’d been unable to dig up anything useful on the woman. All she knew was that she was related to that peddler who had sold trinkets in the Tevistal market square on Pilgrim’s Day. So that’s who Mila needed to find. Sybil might have her guards shoot Mila on sight after what she’d done . . . but Sybil had helped Casey — for a price.

And Mila was desperate enough to pay just about any price Sybil asked. She’d learned a few weeks ago that Rhys was hunting her down, trying to bring her in, that her time was running out.

Maybe . . . maybe if he did find her again in Xi’an territory, free of Advocacy influence, she could explain. She could hope for his forgiveness, if nothing more.

But until then, she’d be a Phantom. Doing what she needed to stay free.

THE END

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Hello everyone,

Last weekend, we opened 3.4 on the PTU to all backers, which keeps us on track for delivery of 2018’s last content update. As the year comes to an end, it’s time to look back at what was achieved, from new shows like Calling all Devs, to improved FPS compliments of OCS, the implementation of mining, an already legendary CitizenCon and of course, Hurston. The year was chock full of new features, breakthroughs, and wonders, but now we look forward, to what 2019 will bring.

What was your favorite Star Citizen moment of 2018 and what are you looking forward to most in 2019? Let us know in the comments.

And with that, let’s see what’s going on this week:

Every week on Calling All Devs , designers, engineers, and other developers from our five offices around the world answer backer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted for by YOU. This week, we talk about GrimHEX hangars, the difference between scanners and radar, sharing missions with friends, and more.

Tuesday is lore day! The Lore Team will publish Phantom Bounty Part 4, the thrilling conclusion to this harrowing tale. Check out Part 3 here.

Thursday will welcome another episode of Around the Verse where we’ll take a look at the latest Star Citizen news. Also on Thursday, the Squadron 42 Newsletter will provide you with the latest info on our cinematic single-player adventure. Enlist today, if you haven’t already!

Friday we’ll update the Persistent Universe Roadmap and send out our weekly RSI newsletter. As a side-note, we’re currently planning to update the PU Roadmap with additional columns in the new year.

This will be the last “This Week in Star Citizen” post for 2018, so we want to take the opportunity to thank you all for your continued support and interest in the project.

May the Season bring only happiness and joy to you and your crew, and keep an eye out on Spectrum for some fun in-game activities later this week!

Ulf Kuerschner
Senior Community Manager

The Weekly Community Content Schedule
MONDAY, DECEMBER 17TH, 2018
Calling All Devs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18TH, 2018
Lore – Phantom Bounty Part 4 (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19TH, 2018
-

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20TH, 2018
Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Vault Update
Squadron 42 Newsletter

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21ST, 2018
Roadmap Update
RSI Newsletter

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27TH, 2018
Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

Community MVP: December 17th, 2018

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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Every week, we select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it here. The highlighted content creator will be awarded an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!

Chewing the Scenery: Lorville by Hasgaha

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“Chewing the Scenery” is a video series in which Hasgaha showcases the environments within video games. This time, he takes a meandering, cinematic tour through the massive city of Lorville on the planet Hurston.

Enjoy the full video on the Community Hub.

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In this week’s update we look at armor for female characters and take a tour of the developing Stanton System.

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Hello everyone,

Last week, we took a look at what our teams around the globe have been up to in the Monthly Report for November. We also took a deep dive into a variety of ships(including the Carrack!) on Reverse the Verse. If you missed either of these, pour a glass of Radegast, kick back, and enjoy.

We’d also like to give a shoutout to all of those making the trek to Jumptown on Yela. Whether you’re a good civilian defending controversial trade routes, or a pirate looking for trouble, we’ve loved seeing all of the action and emergent gameplay going down.

And with that, let’s see what’s going on this week:

Every week on Calling All Devs , designers, engineers, and other developers from our five offices around the world answer backer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted for by YOU. This week we talk about NPCs moving around on ships, ship configuration persistence, ship seat heights, and more.

On Tuesday, the lore team will publish another piece previously only seen in Jump Point Magazine. You can check out previously published lore posts here.

Thursday will welcome another episode of Around the Verse where we’ll take a look at the latest Star Citizen news. If you didn’t get enough from Around the Verse, sit back and relax, as Thursday will also bring the latest Squadron 42 newsletter, hot off the press!

As a reminder, Reverse the Verse is now on hiatus for the remainder of the year as we work towards wrapping up 3.4 and preparing for the holidays.

See you in the ‘verse!

Tyler Witkin
Lead Community Manager

The Weekly Community Content Schedule
MONDAY, DECEMBER 10TH, 2018
Calling All Devs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11TH, 2018
Jump Point Lore Piece (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 12TH, 2018
Subscriber’s Monthly Newsletter

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 13TH, 2018
Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Vault Update
Squadron 42 Newsletter

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14TH, 2018
Roadmap Update
RSI Newsletter

Community MVP: December 10th, 2018

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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Every week, we select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it here. The highlighted content creator will be awarded with an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!

Yuletide on Yela by 6Muffin6Man6 and Friends

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6Muffin6Man6 and friends completed the incredible feat of creating a Christmas tree out of landed ships.

Enjoy the gallery on the Community Hub.

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From 890 Jump to Anvil Carrack, from the Vanguard variants to the Hull C and more, John Crewe and Jared Huckaby update on the ships making their way through the ship pipeline in 2019 and beyond. Last show of 2018!

To watch Reverse the Verse LIVE each and every week, tune into http://twitch.tv/starcitizen.

Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…-The-Verse-LIVE

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Zitat von Star Citizen

Welcome to November’s monthly Star Citizen report from Cloud Imperium Games. Last month saw the Intergalactic Aerospace Exposition land on Hurston just in time for our annual Anniversary Special. Devs had fun bringing the expo to life, while continuing to forge ahead, sights set on the upcoming release of Alpha 3.4. Read on for Persistent Universe development updates from all of our global studios.

Star Citizen Monthly Report: November 2018

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AI
Ship AI’s major focus throughout November was optimizing the Tactical Point System. They now have multiple queries bundled together in a batch from different threads, which allow more control over the cost of the overall system. Several optimizations for the character movement system were submitted, which now update all the components in a multithreaded batch approach and utilize the maximum the CPU resources during the game update. A pass for thread safety of several subsystems was performed, including the attention target component and communication system. This is required to eventually move the Subsumption component update to the multithreaded batch update step.

In FPS Combat, the ‘Defend Area’ assignment was introduced; correctly achieving this behavior requires monitoring the mastergraph transitions to evaluate if the recipients of the Subsumption event can actually process it. In the Defend Area example, they might be executing any regular behavior when receiving the assignment. If the behavior can handle the request in a specific way, great. If not, then the mastergraph takes care of selecting one that can. Alongside this, they’re adding new behaviors to improve combat and patrol to respect this assignment.

Support for stealth gameplay was implemented, with new audio and visual stimuli being added to allow players to draw the attention of guards, prepare traps, and open up otherwise blocked paths.

Work also continued on the bartender for Lorville. To achieve several functionalities of his behavior they implemented the first pass of UseChannel routing and are continuing to expand the usable functionalities.

The Usable Builder Tool received a new feature too: it’s now able to correctly preview different characters using different usables so that designers, animators, and programmers can easily test and verify the content as it’s delivered.

Animation
November saw Animation supporting the Feature Team to bring vault, mantle, and jumping functionality in-line with the game’s quality and play expectations. They’re currently testing a process to allow the efficient integration of different weapon classes, such as pistols and shotguns. The team is also implementing carry options for Zero-G EVA and working towards finalizing player interaction (carriables in particular).

The US Animation Team cleaned and solved data from the amazing performance captures done at this year’s CitizenCon in Austin, Texas. Editing and final work will be completed soon. They continued work on the Ship Dealers that will populate the ‘verse and made sure the new mission givers are available as soon as their locations are ready, such as Wallace Klim in Levski, Tecia Pacheco in Area18, and Constantine Hurston in Lorville.

Exploring the issues that result from re-targeting the male animations to the female skeleton, the team determined that the first step is to achieve 1:1 parity between them. This will allow for the replacement of assets with female-specific versions without hindering female player development. Finishing touches are being added to carriable tech, too.

The Combat AI Team is exploring how to use the stocked weapon asset set as a basis to quickly create pistol versions to give the AI Designers more freedom in the type of weapon encounters they create.

The Ship Content Team is finishing off sequenced animation work. This will enable quicker and more efficient implementation of the design and animation sides of new ships. Weapons-wise, they’re working on the Ravager rifle and the Kahix.

Audio
The Audio department focused on the new flight model and the spaceship audio mix. They implemented tech to allow systemic mixing of NLPC ship bases on priority, size, and threat level, which gives a clearer and more focused mix. This, combined with the implementation of the new ship vibration component, has greatly improved the ship audio experience. During implementation, they made an optimization pass to ensure memory and voice limits remain healthy.

Improvements to the weapon experience continued with the consolidation of assets and the simplification of element implementation to ensure improved translation of audio assets from the digital audio workstation (DAW) into the game. There have also been changes to the Foley system to improve the audio feedback of the player’s traversal on different terrain and surface types.

On the music front, the team worked with the PU composer Pedro Camacho to develop and implement new musical cues to support the planet-side locations on Hurston, such as L19, and upcoming expansions.

With Object Container Streaming (OCS) coming online, the Audio Code Team optimized and polished FOIP to ensure reliability.

Backend Services
Backend Services worked to bring the 2948 Anniversary Event to players. The first order of business was creating the service needed to bring forward the correct overlapped object containers for the different days at the convention center. This ensured a seamless transition between manufacturer days and prevented the need to publish a new build per expo day.

Next, they worked to make sure the rental logic behind the expo correctly traded data between the server, client, and database to ensure players could enjoy the ships they rented.

Finally, a login queue was created to help organize and throttle the unprecedented number of players attempting to enter the ‘verse and check-out the expo.

Away from the Anniversary Event, work continued on the new architecture for the Persistence Cache to help increase the scalability of the backend as well as link important services to a new database architecture.

Character Art
Character Art’s focus throughout November was to make all armor and undersuits available for female avatars. They also worked on modeling two of our new mission givers to bring more life to the Persistent Universe.

Additionally, they’re creating a new set of outlaw armor (designation ‘Shipjacker’) that will include armor, an undersuit, and subscriber items.

Community
“The Community Team started the month in the Halloween spirit with two spooky contests in anticipation of the holiday. Players joined the festivities and showcased their talent in a pumpkin carving contest and a FOIP screenshot contest depicting the most terrifying and terrified expressions they had to offer. Spooktacular!

The Mustang Commercial Contest put the community’s filmmaking skills to the test. Our bold cinematographers embraced the maverick spirit of Consolidated Outland to create commercials that Silas Koerner himself would be proud of.

During Thanksgiving, Citizens shared what they were thankful for and participated in two holiday contests in honor of Turkey Day. With these two contests, we are now up to 25 total contests run in 2018, and the team still has more planned to go live before the end of the year.

As Alpha 3.3 made its way to the Persistent Universe, we welcomed the first fully-explorable planet and city with Hurston and Lorville respectively. While everyone was exploring the new environments, the bustling landing zone, and four new moons, the Star Citizen content creators outdid themselves, creating beautiful shots of sunsets on Hurston, days out on the beach next to Lorville, and joyrides to Aberdeen. We are proud and thankful for all the content the community shared on social media, Reddit, and the community hub, and are looking forward to seeing even more. Keep on sharing!

The 2948 Anniversary special kicked off our most epic Free-Fly event to date with all flyable ships and vehicles to try out at no extra cost. The Intergalactic Aerospace Expo came a long way and made its in-game debut with their Hurston-based satellite branch. Exclusive reveals at the expo included Anvil’s ‘light fighter of the future’, the Hawk, and the next evolution of Xi’an tech and design innovation with the Aopoa San’tok.yāi.

Lastly, we also reached a significant funding milestone and want to thank our amazing community who made this possible. The amount is the highest total for any project in the history of crowdfunding and is beyond anything we could have imagined. In a letter from the chairman, Chris Roberts shared his thoughts on the fantastic journey so far and the exciting future that lies ahead. Here’s to tomorrow!”

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Design
Design got the Anniversary Event’s Convention Center up and running for all backers to enjoy.

To help encourage players to browse the inventories at New Deal and Teach’s Ship Shop, the team began implementing a new type of NPC: the Ship Dealer. The aim is to provide a realistic and interesting ship purchasing experience to further liven up the process of acquiring a dream ship.

“We sincerely hope you got a chance to try out and see the different ships at the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo on Hurston!”

Tuning for the Economy continues, with work going into adjusting prices for various services and goods across Stanton. Work has also started towards the design and implementation of a robust and important Economic Editing Tool to help better visualize and tweak the Economy than ever before.

They also tuned Arena Commander’s REC Reward.

DevOps
November is always one of the busiest months for DevOps due to the Anniversary Event, and this month was no exception, with the team scaling the servers to the highest capacity since the beginning of the project.

To ease the overall DevOps workload, the Publishing Team expanded their internal tools, which allowed most of the team to enjoy a well-deserved break for Thanksgiving (even if they did stay very close to their laptops).

Between PTU & Live, they successfully published 30 times throughout November, with some days seeing 3-4 builds.

Engineering
Engineering teams around the globe worked on OCS throughout November. The first iteration of client-side streaming was released in Alpha 3.3, with an ongoing focus on improving asynchronous entity loading and unloading.

The core OCS and network and backend teams had the Object Container Server Streaming summit this month to plan the next iteration of OCS, which will focus on server-side streaming and full persistent servers.

LA-based Engineering collaborated with the Austin Backend Team to build the tech required for in-game ship rentals. It was premiered during the anniversary promotion and forms the foundation for all in-game rentals.

Development on backend tech moved forward towards allowing persistent EZ Habs and enable players to customize and persist their start location. The Vehicle Team continued to work on Ping & Scanning gameplay, this month focusing on ship scanning. Work has also begun on the new DNA component to integrate the R&D technology into the character pipeline.

Turbulent worked closely with the LA Gamecode Team to further improve the group system, spectrum integration, and FOIP & VOIP.

Engine Tools
The Engine Team spent time supporting the Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5 releases, bug fixing, profiling, and optimizing code (especially for Object Container Streaming). Work continued on GPU skinning, adding vertex velocity support (for motion blur, etc.), completed several optimizations to skip zero weights (which improved throughput), prepared background data, and made the first pass on memory layout and LOD support.

For physics optimizations, the execution of ray collision checks and the defragmentation of grids run were made to run concurrently. This achieved a 30-50% speedup for physics planet terrain computation, reduced the number of cell queries on planets, and improved proxy mesh generation of terrain ground volumes.

Terrain rendering improvements were made (glow forward pass) as well as fixes for water volume and ocean rendering. The existing hair shader was improved, and a new depth of field algorithm was created, improving quality, performance, and fixing halos around silhouettes.

They completed additional culling refinements in the zone system to submit fewer objects to the renderer, as well as various low-level optimizations to reduce the load on the render thread. Further enhancements were made to engine-side support for the public telemetry page to allow user-specific optimization hints to be displayed to improve the gameplay experience, and a new tool was developed to easily analyze core dumps of Linux dedicated game servers.

Environment Art
The UK team focused on bug fixing and optimization for the Alpha 3.3 release, mainly for Lorville and Hurston. A focused sprint was completed for the Anniversary Event convention halls, with the aim to provide a versatile and time-economic environment to show off the ships in their best light. Additional Underground Facility interior exteriors and a new Alpha 3.3 splash screen were also made and implemented.

The DE Location Team made great progress on Lorville’s Central Business District (CBD). Here, players can access the Hurston Dynamics Showcase, the flagship store for all weaponry produced by the brand, as well as the Transfers store where players can engage in various trading activities. The CBD has a very different feel to the rest of Lorville and clearly services a different type of clientele. Luxurious materials and modern design set the ambiance for this experience.

The Organics and Planet Team are making great progress on upcoming locations and are currently working on ArcCorp and exploring microTech. Both locations need additional features to be added to the planet tech to make them truly unique, so while it’s still early days, things are steadily moving on.

Facial Animation
The team is actively working on upcoming mission-givers, including Klim, along with ship dealers, bar patrons, and bartenders. They’re also testing the results of the player’s facial animation recordings on the default loadout.

Graphics
This month, the Graphics Team firmly focussed on the release of Alpha 3.3.5 and improving both stability and performance. The PTU was plagued by some quite frequent GPU crashes, but Evocati testing helped them track down the cause and remedy it.

With the release of Lorville, QA saw high video memory usage due to the scale of the environment and number of ships and characters. Due to some bugs, this resulted in serious performance issues as the video driver began to page memory, resulting in noticeable stutters. Fixes were made to the worst offending video memory bugs in Alpha 3.3.5. Looking forward, the team continues to reduce memory usage and optimize the game for the next release.

Issue Council
The Issue Council deployed version 1.1.5 in October. Several issues were fixed including editable fields of the different forms not displaying correctly, versions not ordered from the latest to the oldest, and display names with special characters not showing properly.

Level Design
The Live Team placed and marked-up locations on and around Hurston for mission use. Big improvements to the delivery missions were made – players can now take contracts from companies who operate specific routes and require the player to have a certain level of reputation. The Downed Relay mission (as seen in CitizenCon) now has multiple outcomes, including having other players tasked with destroying the stolen blade before its data is uploaded.

Finally, most of the combat missions found at Crusader are now available at Hurston. Work has begun to define the contractors and progression for them, too.

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Lighting
This month, the Lighting Team worked on improving the headlights across almost all ships available in the PU. Due to plenty of issues regarding visibility while flying ships in dark environments, the headlights were improved to provide more visible light from greater distances. There’s still room for improvement, but in the meantime, it’s a positive change that makes the planetary flying experience more enjoyable.

Additionally, the team focused on bug fixing and optimizing the lighting in Lorville to maintain a high degree of quality while improving framerates and lowering drawcall costs.

They also worked on the lighting for the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo to help show off all the amazing ships being featured in the various halls.

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Narrative
The Narrative Team pushed heavily on Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5 tasks to knock out remaining mission text and standardize in-game descriptions for ship components on the terminals. They also continued working on editorial selects for the lower priority lines for NPCs that were captured back in September.

To cover the new convention center and other contexts, they ran a pickup recording session to add additional Lorville announcement lines.

The team also worked closely with Marketing to support the recent IAE expansion event in Lorville. Not only providing written copy but joining some of the roundtable discussions to provide fictional backstory for the various manufacturers.

Lastly, they worked to schedule tasks for the PU and undertook overall team planning for the upcoming year.

Player Relations
Player Relations busily plugged away at the Alpha 3.3 and the Anniversary Event, working alongside the Evocati on several builds to make sure key components were properly tested.

“As always, we’d like to point all players to our growing Knowledge Base, which now has over 100 articles and saw almost 450,000 visitors this month! We will continue to grow this by adding new ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications.”

Props
The Props Team focused on the stands, booths, and branding for the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo and the Anniversary Event. They recently shifted onto closing out the CBD props in Lorville and are currently creating bespoke furniture to help sell the wealth and decadence of the Hurston Central building.

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QA
On the publishing side, QA busily tested the Alpha 3.3.0 and 3.3.5 builds for publishing to Evocati and Live. On the game side, the focus was on testing Hurston, its four moons, and city Lorville. They also completed a number of QATRs relating to FOIP & VOIP, ship purchasing in the PU, ship rental in Arena Commander, and improvements to Object Container Streaming.

It was business as usual on the leadership side, with coordinated testing priorities between the UK, LA, and DE.

Two new recruits were welcomed to QA; a dedicated tester in Frankfurt to support the AI Team and an additional tester in the UK. They will be primarily focused on providing day-to-day updates on the state of AI and will report all issues directly to the team to be investigated.

QA also made the decision to do away with the general design tests and instead focus on specific sanity/smoke tests for AI and another test suite specifically for the Transit System and locations. The previous design tests were too broad and covered areas that were not always prevalent to the in-house design teams. Refocusing towards specific in-house feature teams has proven that the testing and information provided is much more valuable.

A fair amount of time was spent on major QA test requests for new animation update optimizations, physics terrain patch optimization changes, and general optimization that will further improve performance in the PU.

Frankfurt’s QA branch supported the Planetary Tech Team in investigating an issue on one of Hurston’s moons. Something in its setup was causing the normals on the moon surface to be very intense. This was tracked down to a lighting issue and further steps were taken (with the assistance of the Graphics Team) to enable the surface to get back to, well, normal.

Services
At CitizenCon, the team was present on the show floor to prepare local environments to run the game backend for both the FOIP LAN demonstration area and the main stage demonstration. This local setup included the entire game backend allowing for the demonstration to represent exactly what is being played in the PTU and the Live environment, including the network of social services that power groups, chat, and FOIP.

With the release of Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5, the team mostly focused on observing and scaling the voice and face transmission solution to the increase of backers in the game. DevOp teams mainly worked to ensure that voice channels created by players during one-to-one calls, group channels, and global server channels were properly sharded to new voice servers, as the number of connected players increased.

With the addition of global chat auto-connect in Alpha 3.3.5, the team also added new systems to monitor and move voice channels between servers when the supported load on a given voice server instance is too high.

“The team has been ecstatic about the use of the technology by players and we hope to keep growing its use with gameplay connected features.”

In order to help with the above tasks, the social game services were moved to a Kubernetes-based orchestration solution that allows easier management of voice and service containers. This new backplane supports continuous integration of service changes and will greatly improve the team velocity when deploying updates and builds.

Working in conjunction with the universe team, Game Services began the development of a web-based administration tool to help manage the runtime state of the game world from a macro level. This is still in the very early stages of development but, using this tool, the designers will ultimately have the ability to inspect social objects like groups and their life cycles, ban, chase, and player controls. Integrating the WebGL Starmap engine will also allow the viewing of commodities, player locations, gameplay analytics, and much more.

Ships
This month, the UK Vehicle Team returned to the Origin 890 Jump after wrapping up the Valkyrie.

What will undoubtedly be well-received news amongst the community is that, after long hiatus, work continues on the greatly-anticipated Anvil Carrack. Since the ship was last worked on around 18 months ago, there have been significant improvements to the ship pipeline and workflow. So, when re-reviewing the previous state, the team decided to undertake a second whitebox pass of the interior to bring it closer to its original concept.

In addition to next year’s larger vehicles, progress was made to the Alpha 3.4 ships, including the Origin 600i Touring. The Freelancer DUR, MAX, and MIS are all receiving the final touches by art.

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Ship Art
Lead Vehicle Artist Chris Smith made great progress on the greybox model, interior, and exterior of the 300i rework and began implementing different paint jobs and modeled the modified components for the other three variants. Next, he will move onto an alternative interior to be used in one of them.

3D Modeler Josh Coons recently completed the whitebox model for the Banu Defender and has now moved onto testing some of the modified workflow using Zbrush models, which will be baked down to create the type of detail we are looking for in this ship. He is continually creating new textures and also starting to build up the greybox model with the alternative workflow.

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System Design
The System Design Team worked on integrating updated flight mechanics into enemy ship AI, ensuring that with all the changes, they are still engaging to fight against and don’t become unbalanced. They noticed that the updated flight model currently causes too much unwanted ‘jousting behavior’, so are currently looking into ways to modify it.

Work was done on restructuring dialogue wildlines for the ship/FPS/social AI to unify them within the same overall structure. A large amount of work has been done with the audio & writing teams to ensure the system works properly for all systemic dialogue in the game. They are also working to develop tools to automate the setup of dialogue lines.

More work was completed on designing stealth gameplay elements, which in turn requires the AI perception to be upgraded to cater for peripheral vision, as well as various audio events and stimuli from environmental sources, such as throwing a pebble to distract enemies.

Telemetry
Shortly after CitizenCon, the Public Telemetry page was launched. The data presented here reflects the data CIG receives from clients while playing the game. This data is used to assess and improve performance across a variety of hardware. If logged in while on the telemetry page, players will see their stats, including their computer’s GPU and CPU score and average FPS. The heatmap displays other user’s average FPS and the most popular hardware for each GPU and CPU score. On launch, the telemetry page showed a massive improvement between Alpha 3.2 and 3.3 thanks to OCS.

Turbulent
Throughout November, Turbulent supported CitizenCon, the Alpha 3.3. Flyable Ships, the new Anvil Valkyrie, the release of the Drake Kraken, and preparations for the Anniversary Event.
CitizenCon: CitizenCon 2948 was an amazing event, with Turbulent supporting many components such as the livestream, merchandise, badges, microsite, and the release of new ships from Drake and Anvil!

The Drake Kraken: In October, Turbulent supported the unveiling of Drake’s first capital ship, the Kraken. The Kraken has two multi-purpose hangars, five manned turrets, four remote turrets, a massive cargo capacity, comfortable habs for a full crew, a Dragonfly Bay, and six landing pads. The website showed multiple features such as an interactive cross-section of the ship and a registry for those interested in obtaining one.

The Anvil Valkyrie: Turbulent supported the release of the Valkyrie, the new flyable drop ship from Anvil. The Valkyrie contains multiple side guns and turrets and can deploy up to twenty troops as well as a vehicle into combat. The website displayed features such as in-game footage of the Valkyrie and a CitizenCon-exclusive edition called the Valkyrie Liberator. This was also released on October 10th.

The 3.3 Flyable: With the release of Alpha 3.3, Turbulent supported the availability of the flyable ships on the website. The ships include the Aegis Hammerhead, Tumbril Cyclone, RSI Constellation Phoenix, and the CO Mustang. An exclusive CitizenCon Mustang was also available, called the Mustang Alpha Vindicator.

The 2948 Anniversary Special: The Anniversary Special was launched on Friday, November 23rd. Over the course of the week, a different manufacturer was released each day. On the first day, the Arrow was released, along with the rest of the Anvil ships. RSI day was on the 24th, Origin Jumpworks the 25th, Aegis Dynamics the 26th, Drake Interplanetary the 27th, and the alien ships on the 28th. The new San’tok’yai ship was unveiled by Aopoa too. MISC had its featured day on the 29th, and the new manufacturers on the 30th, including Tumbril, Crusader, CO, Argo, and Kruger. The last days of the Anniversary Special featured discount starter packs.

The Anniversary Quiz: With the help of Player Relations, Turbulent executed a quiz featuring three questions for each manufacturer. A passing score awarded a ‘Ship Master’ Spectrum badge and certificate. By passing the quiz, players were entered into a draw to win an Anvil Arrow.

The IAE Free-Fly Promotion: For the week of November 23rd until December 1st, five different flyable ships were featured each day of the week according to the featured manufacturer. The page contained information about the Desmond Memorial Convention Center in Lorville and linked to the Knowledge Base, which provided detailed instructions on how to get started. The IAE Free-Fly page also instructed new players on how to make an account and get into the ‘verse.

The Aopoa Santok’yāi: Turbulent supported the release of the Santok’yāi, a new Xi’an ship from Aopoa. The Santok’yāi features Yeng’tu Laser Repeaters and the latest Xi’an technology in a light-to-medium fighter chassis.

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UI
The UI Team worked on adding the ability to rent items in Arena Commander, as well as supporting the needs of the Environment Team working on Lorville’s CBD.

Vehicle Features
Based on recent feedback from both internal and external sources, turret improvements have continued throughout November. In addition to bug fixes, there were multiple improvements to turrets including making multi-axis turrets controllable at min/max pitch, fixing the gyro pip offset, and improved aiming methods from a variety of input devices. The foundational mechanics to allow ships to aim at the engines on target ships has also been completed, and the feature itself is nearly ready to be rolled out to the PU, as is scanning nav points for destination info. The rest of the month was rounded out with a clean-up of debris network flow and a variety of vehicle-related crash bugs.

Vehicle Content
Art, Systems Design, and Tech Art worked together to release the Anvil Arrow as part of the November Anniversary Event as well as continuing to work on ships for upcoming releases: The Anvil Hawk is in the release-prep stage with both the Art and System Design Teams, the 300 Series is in greybox with Systems Design, and the Freelancers had entered release-prep with Tech Art.

Additionally, Systems Design and Tech Art worked with the animators on character animation sequencing for vehicles, and Tech Art worked on a thruster pass for the new flight model.

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VFX
The VFX Team continued to polish and optimize the many environmental effects of Hurston and implemented general improvements to the various moons throughout the ‘verse. They also finalized VFX for the Anvil Arrow and Anvil Hawk. The VFX Team spent time optimizing existing assets to help with the overall performance of Alpha 3.3.5.

They also cleaned out all unused VFX texture assets in hopes of reducing the amount of memory required to load all the particle textures.

Now that the base work for Lorville is finished, the Level Design Team are focusing on the CBD. The whitebox is already done, with most of the remaining work involving connecting the trains and ensuring all the logistics work.

New Underground Facilities components were added to the procedural tech. These are built with modularity in mind and can be generated in the same way as Rest Stops. Once the modular library has enough content (rooms, connectors, POIs), it will become much easier to provide more variety.

They also continued working on the procedural tech to make sure that it provides everything needed from a design perspective. This can be difficult at times, as compromises are required; what is the most fun to play is not necessarily what looks the best.

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Weapons
The Weapon Art Team worked on the Multi-Tool rework, Kastak Arms Ravager-212, and the level two and three upgrades for the Hurston Dynamics Laser Repeaters. They also made minor adjustments to the iron sights on a handful of weapons to improve the sight picture and to make them more user-friendly when no optics are attached.

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Conclusion
WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…t-November-2018

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

Meet Constantine Hurston, take a trip to Lyria, and get a look at Lorville’s Central Business District in this week’s update.

Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…round-The-Verse

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

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Hello everyone,

Last week, the 2948 Anniversary special featured our most epic Free Fly event to date with all flyable ships and vehicles available to try. We saw players reenacting Top Gun, staging a Vanduul Attack and creating stunning Arrow formations. We’re still catching up with all the fantastic videos, screenshots, and stories and hope that you had a blast exploring the ‘verse, whether you’re a veteran pilot or a rookie behind the stick. The Intergalactic Aerospace Expo with its Hurston-based satellite branch has now closed its doors, but who knows – it might make a return to the game some day. Let us know in the comments if you enjoyed the Expo.

If you haven’t yet, check out the Q&A’s on both new ships revealed during the Anniversary – Anvils “light fighter of the future,” the Arrow, and the next evolution of Xi’an tech and design innovation, the Aopoa San’tok.yāi. Also: fledgling pilots still have until December 4th to grab everything they need to start their adventure in Star Citizen with Starter Pack specials still on offer.

And with that, let’s see what’s going on this week:

Every week on Calling All Devs , designers, engineers, and other developers from our five offices around the world answer backer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted for by YOU. This week we talk about how long it should take to earn a ship in game, physicalized inventories and more.

On Tuesday, the Lore Team will publish a new episode of OP.NET, the home for non-guild news, tips and reviews – unfiltered and raw. This time around, Host Conva Maynard will talk about guarding ships in Xi’an Space. You can check out previously published lore posts here.

Thursday will welcome another episode of Around the Verse where we’ll take a look at the latest Star Citizen news.

Tune in on Friday at at 9am PST for another episode of Reverse the Verse, broadcast live on our Star Citizen Twitch channel. This week’s episode, “The Shape Of Ships” will feature a general Q&A on all ships Star Citizen, following up on the Anniversary round-table discussions. Post your questions on Spectrum and vote on the ones you want to see addressed most.

See you in the ‘verse!

Ulf Kuerschner
Senior Community Manager

The Weekly Community Content Schedule
MONDAY, DECEMBER 3RD, 2018
Calling All Devs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4TH, 2018
Lore Post – OP.NET (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5TH, 2018
-

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6TH, 2018
Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Vault Update
Monthly Report November

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7TH, 2018
Reverse the Verse (https://www.twitch.tv/starcitizen)
Roadmap Update
RSI Newsletter

Community MVP: December 3rd, 2018

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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Every week, we select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it here. The highlighted content creator will be awarded with an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!

Best of 3.3.6 screenshots by Captain_Raoul

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Captain_Raoul with an incredible screenshot collection he brought back from his adventures in the ‘verse. Well done, Captain!

Enjoy the gallery on the Community Hub.

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/citi…In-Star-Citizen

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

Die Gratis-Woche "Free Fly" für das Weltraumspiel Star Citizen war gleich in mehrerer Hinsicht ein großer Erfolg. Denn abgesehen davon, dass zahlreiche Interessenten ganz unverbindlich in das Spielgeschehen reinschnuppern konnten, sorgte das Event auch…

Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-S…kassen-1270481/

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

Writer’s Note: Phantom Bounty: Part Three was published originally in Jump Point 3.3. Read Part One here and Part Two here.

Mila and Rhys had chased the Phantom for months, had spent nearly every last credit, had put all their hope in finding her and collecting the bounty.

The Phantom stood in front of them at last, cuffed inside their prisoner pod. Mila should have felt elated, but all she felt was shock.

Evony Salinas. Mila had stopped going by Evony a decade ago, yet the Phantom knew her real name. And the Phantom’s face looked just like her former best friend’s — Casey Phan — a girl found murdered ten years ago.

It couldn’t be possible. But it was. The terrorist who had hit all those Phan Pharmaceutical labs was the founder’s own daughter. And she wasn’t dead. She’s alive.

Mila kept her eyes on the Phantom and wavered on her feet. Rhys reached out and grabbed her arm, steadying her.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” Mila whispered.

Casey swallowed and averted her eyes, looking at the wall behind them. “And you’re supposed to be on Terra.”

“You . . . you almost killed me.”

Emotions Mila hadn’t expected flashed across Casey’s face. Anxiety. Regret. “I swear I didn’t know it was you. You shouldn’t have followed me.”

Rhys stepped in front of Mila, blocking her view of Casey, and made a move to shut the pod.

“Stop,” Mila commanded.

Rhys sharply responded, “She’s a terrorist, Mila.”

“I need to talk to her.”

Rhys paused and stepped back, working his jaw. “We can’t stay here. We’re sitting ducks.” He looked at the Phantom. “Did you contact anyone to meet you?”

Casey pressed her lips together and didn’t answer.

Mila clenched her hands into fists. “Everyone thinks you’re dead. How could you . . . and now you’re attacking your father’s labs — killing people?”

Casey’s nostrils flared. “It’s not like that. I’ll tell you. But not with him here.” She pointed to Rhys. “I don’t know him.”

Rhys let out an abrupt laugh. “You tried to kill us three times today. That has to be some kind of record. Now you wanna give Mila some sob story, hope she’ll free you? Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”

Casey went rigid as Rhys started searching her spacesuit for anything she might be hiding.

Conflicting emotions swirled within Mila, anger warring with relief. How the hell could Casey be alive? She’d seen the reports of her murder, she’d attended the funeral. It was basically a state ceremony, with many ranking Terran officials in attendance.

Mila wore a solid black floor-length dress and a widebrimmed Terran hat. She covered her face, crying the whole time as Casey’s father gave the eulogy. Afterward, her own mother stayed by her side every day, helping her to get through the grief. Her mother had always supported her until the day she’d turned her back on her family to become a bounty hunter.

And it had all started with Casey’s death.

Casey Phan was supposed to be dead.

Mila met Casey’s eyes. This . . . this person in front of her couldn’t be her friend. Was it some kind of trick?

Rhys finished searching Casey, found nothing, and slammed a fist into the button on the pod. The door eased shut, locking Casey away again.

When the door beeped, verifying it was secured, Rhys turned to Mila. He ran a hand through his brown hair, clearly trying to make sense of the situation. He shook his head. “Look. We gotta get out of here and back to Tevistal to hand her over to the Advocacy. We’re too exposed right now if she called for back-up.”

Mila nodded. She cast a glance back at the pod and saw the top of Casey’s head through the glass panel. Her head was hanging low, the expression on her face not visible. How could this be happening?

Mila’s stomach churned as she followed Rhys back to the cockpit. “Please. You fly. I’m no good right now.”

Rhys took the pilot’s seat and fired up the engines. He eased them away from the cargo ship and past Casey’s abandoned Cutlass, through the floating detritus of the junkyard.

Mila pulled up the scanner, searching for signs of powered ships, but she found none. The scans were either blocked by the debris, or they were alone out here.

She and Rhys sat in tense silence until they reached the edge of the junkyard. A few ships popped up on their scanner, but all of them were docked at the nearby platform, Septa. None of them were headed their way.

“The Advocacy will want to go back and search her ship.”

“I logged the coordinates,” Mila said.

They pulled into open space, and the revelations of the last few minutes hung heavy in the air between them.

Mila took a deep breath.

“You asked me back on Tevistal . . . you asked why I couldn’t let this bounty go?”

Rhys nodded, but didn’t speak.

Mila sighed and settled back in her seat, trying not to be so aware of Casey, locked in a pod behind them. “Casey and I were really close. We grew up together. My father owned a components manufacturer, and her father owned a biotech firm, and they did business together. Our families spent a lot of time together. I thought I knew her.” Mila’s voice broke, but she forced herself to continue. “When I was sixteen, Casey went missing. They eventually found her body off-world — she’d been murdered. Her father threw everything he had at finding her, then at trying to track down her killer, but they never figured it out. I thought she was kidnapped or lured off planet. I couldn’t believe she’d just take a transport off-world and not even tell me where she was going.”

“So everyone believed she was dead.”

“Yeah. They did. I did.” Mila turned toward Rhys and gripped the armrest tightly. “Casey’s death ten years ago was the reason I went into bounty hunting. I couldn’t get justice for Casey, but I could for others. My family basically disowned me when I left. And when a terrorist started attacking Phan Pharmaceuticals again a few months ago. . . it brought up all those old feelings.” Mila’s eyes burned, and she tried to keep tears from coming, but failed. “Casey’s murderer had gotten away, but now someone else was hurting the Phan family, and I could actually do something about it this time.”

Rhys stopped the ship and let it drift. He took off his harness and leaned toward her to wipe the tears from her cheeks.

“Thank you for telling me.”

Mila unstrapped her harness and got up. Rhys stood with her, wrapping her in a hug, which only made her cry harder. She gave in, letting him hold her for a few moments, then got it together and wiped her eyes.

She stepped away from him and blew out a breath. “I gotta talk to her. I can’t hand her over without finding out the truth. I need to know what happened.”

Rhys narrowed his eyes. “I don’t trust her. She’s dangerous. I need you to remember she’s not the friend you grew up with. She might say anything to gain your sympathy.”

“I know. I know. I just . . .”

“I’ll stay up here. . . I can listen in if you want me to.”

“No. She said she wanted to talk to me alone. Do you trust me?”

Rhys touched her face, wiping away the last of her tears. “You know I do.”

Mila gave him a small smile and went to clean up at the sink to make sure she didn’t look a mess. She couldn’t let Casey see how much of an effect she’d had on her. Rhys was right. Casey was a terrorist now. She’d faked her own death. Those were the actions of a sociopath, at the very least. But she still needed to hear what Casey had to say.

Mila typed in the pod’s code and stepped back as the door swung open. Casey blinked at her blearily and then straightened her shoulders.

“I want to talk,” Mila said.

Casey narrowed her eyes. “Where’s the other guy? I want proof he’s not listening in.”

“He’s not. Take my word for it, or I’m closing this pod. You won’t get another chance to talk.”

The tension hanging in the air was palpable, and a trickle of sweat made its way down Mila’s back.

Finally Casey relented, and she gave a stiff nod.

Mila let out a breath. “Why did you fake your own murder?”

Casey’s eyes softened at something she saw in Mila’s face, which threw Mila off balance again. Could a sociopath show empathy? Or was she faking that, too?

“That’s not what happened,” Casey said. “Trust me . . . it’s eaten away at me that people I loved thought I was dead. But it was better that way. Safer for everyone involved.”

“Explain.”

“Are you taking me to the Advocacy now? How far out are we?”

Mila stepped forward and jabbed a finger into Casey’s chest. Casey flinched back. “No. I’m asking the questions. And you’re answering. What happened to you?”

Casey licked her lips. “Right before I . . . before I disappeared . . . I discovered some things. About what my father’s company was doing. Illegal bio testing on Human subjects. The more I dug the worse it got. He was making bioweapons, Evony.”

“Mila. My name is Mila now. And you’re lying. If your father was into any of that, the UEE would have shut him down years ago.”

Casey barked out a laugh. “There’s so much that goes on under the surface. People get paid off along the way to keep things hidden. ‘Law-abiding’ Citizens deal in just as much dirt as the people you hunt. But I guess you wouldn’t see it that way. I mean, you’re a bounty hunter now. How did that happen?”

Rage flooded Mila. I did this for you. She suddenly couldn’t stand to look at Casey any longer. She lifted a hand to shut the pod.

“Wait,” Casey said. “Okay. You don’t have to believe me, but I’ll tell you everything.”

Mila let her hand fall away from the button. “Fine. Talk.”

“I heard my father on a private comm. . . He said things about experiments, getting rid of the evidence. It scared me. So I snooped through his mobi, found what I had hoped I wouldn’t — terrible, cold reports. Then I had proof. But I didn’t know who to go to.”

“We were close.” Mila’s words came out like an accusation. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was terrified you’d go to your parents. Do you know how much stock they have in Phan Pharmaceuticals? They’d want to cover it up just like my dad did. When he caught me poking around, he got so angry I knew he was guilty. I needed to find a way to stop him . . . but how could I turn my own father in to the UEE?”

“You apparently don’t mind blowing up his facilities and employees.”

“I didn’t . . .” Casey shook her head, looking frustrated. “Just listen. I showed up at a few of those anti-pharm meetings. I met a guy who called himself Desh. Said he and some others were secretly working to stop the pharmaceutical corporations that engaged in dirty work. I confessed I had information about a company — and he promised if I provided proof, he and his friends could make it stop. They said that no one else would get hurt.”

“Seriously? You expect me to believe this? Were you really that stupid?”

Casey’s face screwed up with regret. “I was sixteen.”

“And what happened at these meetings? What happened with Desh?”

“He asked me to bring the proof with him to meet the other members. He and I boarded transports separately and met up off-world. But it all went sideways from there. He took me to a ship waiting at the edge of the system, and that’s where I found out he was part of PF.”

“People First. Yeah, I know them. Bunch of conspiracy theory nut jobs. They weren’t mentioned anywhere in your bounty. You work alone. And they were smalltime. They haven’t been active in years.”

“You’re wrong. They’ve just gotten better funding. And got better at covering their tracks.”

“So what happened? You just . . . faked your own death and joined PF?”

Casey shook her head sadly. “Not exactly. Two Advocacy agents infiltrated us. Desh took them both out, but not before they transmitted an image of us back to Terra. We got out of there, but I couldn’t go back to Terra.”

This had to be an elaborate lie, but how else could she explain how her dead friend had disappeared from Terra as a teenager and turned up as a terrorist ten years later?

“PF took me with them,” Casey continued. “They helped me disappear. They had people still on Terra who told me that my dad covered it all up . . . made it look like I was just an innocent bystander who died during the shootout. He made sure my name wouldn’t be connected with PF. He covered it up with your mother’s help, Ev.”

Mila’s pulse sped up, and she shook her head. “No. No, my mother wouldn’t do that.”

“She did.” Casey’s voice turned bitter. “Remember, my dad was making a run for the Terran Senate that year. He couldn’t have it getting out I was seen with terrorists.”

Mila pressed her lips together and laid a hand on the wall to stay standing. Her mother. A cover-up. She felt suddenly dizzy. Nauseous. Her mother had high-level connections as Chair of the Governors Council Budget Committee. If she was part of a cover-up . . .

“PF protected me,” Casey said again, interrupting Mila’s thoughts. “They gave me a new identity. I soon learned they destroyed facilities where illegal experiments were taking place. They freed test subjects who could be saved. We have benefactors in and out of UEE space that help fund our mission. PF seemed to be doing the right thing.”

“You sound proud of yourself.” Mila’s voice rose. “Proud to be a terrorist. How many people have you killed?”

“I didn’t.” Casey pulled against her restraints like she wanted to move her hands, plead with Mila to believe her. A desperate look crossed her face. “Whatever they say about me isn’t true. I get in, get the goods, destroy the labs, and get out. I’m not a murderer.”

“You almost killed us. You planted a bomb in a hostel.”

A rueful smile cracked through Casey’s desperation. “But was it empty when you showed up?”

Mila narrowed her eyes and didn’t respond.

Casey nodded. “It should have been empty. I paid a guy to warn everyone. It wasn’t my fault if they stayed.”

“So that’s how you sleep at night. You just lie to yourself. Explain away everything bad you do.”

Casey got quiet and averted her eyes. “No. I do what I have to do. Doesn’t everyone?”

“Why are you even telling me all this?”

“You wanted to know.”

“If you think it’s going to make me free you . . . it’s not. The Advocacy will try you for your crimes. You have to pay for your choices.”

Casey’s eyes widened. “Look — the things I’ve done probably have saved millions, maybe billions of lives. Do you know what was in the last lab I hit? They were working on a bioweapon that could take out entire worlds. Entire worlds, Ev. My father has been playing with fire for years, and we finally had the funding and information we needed to hit his labs. If I didn’t do these jobs, some other PF agent would have. And they might have left fewer survivors. He’s my father. His crimes were my responsibility. But. . . that job was the last job I was ever going to do for them. You have to believe me.”

“I don’t. Of course you’d say it was your last job.”

“I was giving it all up. PF doesn’t just let people quit the organization . . . once you’re in, you’re in for life. I was on my way to meet someone who was going to smuggle me into Xi’an territory. If you let me go now, you’ll never hear from me again. But I have to go somewhere they can’t find me either.”

Mila stayed silent for a few, long moments, then finally met Casey’s eyes. “You were my best friend. I would have done anything to help you.”

“You can help me now.”

“No. You’re the Advocacy’s problem now.”

Real fear appeared on Casey’s face. “The Advocacy can’t protect me. The second I’m in custody, I’m a liability to PF. I’m a problem to be taken care of. There’s a reason no one knows much about them. And if they don’t get me, my father will.”

Mila’s chest tightened, and she found herself repeating the words Rhys had said to her back on Tevistal. “There’s always a choice. Always. You made the wrong one. I’ll make sure you’re taken to a secure facility.”

“I have to warn you, then. If I do manage to make it to trial . . . I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure my father is exposed. Your mother covered up my death, so I can’t promise she won’t be a casualty. After that . . . if my father doesn’t kill me, PF will. If you hand me in . . . you’ll be responsible for all of that.”

Mila’s anger flared. “Is that a threat? No. You’re responsible for all of that.” Mila slammed a fist on the pod button and the door swung closed on Casey, beeping when it sealed. Breathing hard, Mila stalked back to the cockpit.

Rhys lifted his brows, waiting for her to speak.

“You were right. She’s a liar. Every word out of her mouth was a lie, and she just wants me to free her.”

Rhys narrowed his eyes, searching Mila’s face, worried about her. He ran a hand along her arm. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Mila said, trying to talk around the giant lump in her throat.

“You just gotta keep remembering . . . that’s not your friend in there. It’s someone else.”

“I know. Let’s just get her back to Tevistal.”

Mila and Rhys strapped back in, and she kept the scanner up as they retraced their course back to the planet they’d just left.

“I’m exhausted.” Mila leaned back in the seat. They hadn’t slept in almost twenty hours.

“As soon as we hand her over we’ll crash.”

Mila murmured a noncommittal reply.

“Do you want to sleep while I fly? You do look like you need it.”

“Oh, thanks. No. I don’t think I could, even if I wanted to.”

“Are you really okay?”

Mila released her long brown hair from its tie and ran her fingers through it. “Honestly? No.”

“I’m ready to hear what she said, whenever you’re ready to share it.”

“Just what you said she would. Claimed she wasn’t a bad terrorist, whatever that means. She says her father is into . . . illegal testing. She says she’s working with PF — the People First crazies.” Mila pressed her lips together. She couldn’t bring herself to say the things that could implicate her own mother.

Rhys worked his jaw. “So Casey’s a front for something bigger, and her dad is just as bad as she is, but no one in the entire UEE has caught on to it in more than a decade.” He shook his head. “Well, the Advocacy will know what to do with her. It’s not our job.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Mila thought of the young girl she’d been friends with. Thin and petite, long black hair always hanging in her intelligent eyes. “I don’t get it.”

“People change.”

“Ever since we were children, though . . . When we were twelve, there was this girl at school, Lia. Really wealthy, who held these ridiculous parties at her mansion. They’d bring in games, expensive prizes, the kinds of rides you’d find at fairs. It was crazy. We were all friends with her . . . until I accidentally insulted her one day at Academy. So I was the only one not invited to this party. Casey announced she was done with Lia in front of everyone, then stayed home the night of the party, watching old vids with me in our crash room. She was always doing stuff like that for the people she cared about. Always so . . . loyal. None of this adds up.”

“There’s never a good enough reason to do what she’s done.”

A long silence stretched on between them, and Mila’s mind struggled to come to terms with the Casey she’d known and the Casey locked up in the pod on Devana.

The story Casey had told . . . about finding the illegal research, about deciding to fix it herself . . . it did line up with the old Casey. It made Mila doubt . . . everything. And the fact that she felt doubt scared her. There was no room for doubt in this job.

“What if Casey’s telling the truth?” she blurted out.

Rhys stiffened in his seat. “Then we let the Advocacy determine that,” he said carefully. He looked toward her, studying her face. “We stick to the mission. The right thing to do is hand her over. If they determine she’s telling the truth, the proper authorities can handle it. You and I will get away from all this . . . get some downtime. That was the plan, right?”

“Right,” Mila answered quickly.

After a few awkward minutes, Rhys cleared his throat. “You know, this is the most you’ve ever told me about your past.”

“You’re a bounty hunter.” Mila said, glad to drop the subject of Casey. “Didn’t you research me before we went into business together?”

Rhys smirked, but it had no real mirth behind it. “Yeah. You did a good job wiping yourself off the map. Evony, huh?”

Mila winced. “Yeah. My family kind of disowned me when I joined the guild. This wasn’t the life they had planned for their only child. I decided to start over, use my middle name.”

“We all have histories . . . and a lot of us choose bounty hunting to leave those behind. I followed my gut about you.” Rhys met her eyes, and she could see the open trust displayed there. “And I know I made the right decision.”

Mila smiled, and they lapsed into silence for the rest of the flight back to Tevistal.

Rhys trusted her.

But could she trust herself?

The pit in Mila’s stomach grew worse as Rhys landed back at the Tevistal docks. He commed with maintenance and used up the last of their creds to get the forward screen patched and the maneuvering thruster replaced.
“I have just enough to hire a hover,” he said to Mila, as he brought up the Advocacy office address and a list of the agents who worked there. “We can’t risk broadcasting the Phantom’s whereabouts. I know this Advocacy agent,” he said, pointing to a name. “I’ve worked with him before, and I trust him. I’ll make contact with him personally so we can hand Casey over. Then we get paid, and we get outta here.”
Mila nodded, and Rhys headed back to their quarters to change into planetside clothes and grab his gear. Mila squeezed her hands tight in her lap and watched as the workers began to patch the cockpit from the outside.

I can do this. I can turn Casey over.

Mila stood up as Rhys headed back toward her.

She lowered the forward ramp for him and looked up at him, at the worry on his face, wondering what her own face looked like. His eyes crinkled around the edges and he leaned down to press his lips to hers. She kissed him back, relishing his warmth, willing Rhys and his loyalty and trust to erase her doubt over Casey.

He wrapped her in a tight hug. She listened to the thump of his heart beneath his shirt, and a new feeling of dread bloomed within her.

She didn’t want to let him go, but he finally pulled away. “I should be back soon with agents. Don’t let anyone inside this ship.”

“I won’t.”

“Everything will be fine.” Rhys kissed her gently again, and then she was watching his back as he headed down the ramp to the docks.

Mila retracted the ramp and went back to the co-pilot’s seat, not allowing herself even to look at the pod holding Casey.

She’d never had such a hard time turning in a criminal before. But then, she’d never personally known a criminal like this. It was good Rhys was handling it. She couldn’t.

He had faith in her, and that meant everything. This was her life now. And she needed to do her job.

But . . .

Mila activated her mobiGlas and accessed the local network. She searched a decade back, looking for old news posts about Owen Phan and Casey Phan’s death.

The first image she pulled up was of Owen Phan during his failed Senate run. Owen and Casey’s mother Lynn stood together at a charity event. And next to them: Mila’s parents. Mila’s heart lurched. Her mother stood between her father and Owen. She pulled up another dozen images, and more than half of them showed her parents with the Phans. If Casey was telling the truth, then Casey’s trial would destroy both their families.

And if it was true, it meant her own mother had lied to her, let her mourn when Casey wasn’t even dead. Mila took a deep breath and pushed down her anger at the thought. She searched for articles on Casey’s death.

Phan Pharmaceutical Heir Found Murdered Off-World

Mila had read this statement dozens of times. Casey had taken a trip on her own. Someone had killed her. Wrong place, wrong time. Murderer never found. Family devastated. No new leads. Case closed.

Mila ran a new query.

Phan Pharmaceutical, Illegal Bioweapons

More than a thousand results appeared. Mila raced through them. Most of them were PR releases from Phan Pharmaceutical themselves, promoting all the hard work they’d done to stop the creation of bioweapons. Spectrum wasn’t getting her anywhere. She was going to have to dive deep into the boards. She switched her profile over to a persona she had built up for just such occasions and began pinging threads.

Within seconds messages appeared.

Illegal test subjects.

Proof of bioweapon development.

Suspected facilities.

Heart in her throat, Mila scanned the documents someone named “DarkStar” had uploaded. The list contained all the facilities the Phantom was reputed to have hit in the past few months. Why hadn’t Mila thought to do this research before? She’d been so focused on tracking down the Phantom, she’d ignored any possibility that Phan Pharmaceuticals might have done something to deserve the attacks.

But there was never a good reason for terrorism. There wasn’t.

Another user had posted documents with the claim that Phan’s research facility on Gen was up to its eyes in psychoactive weapons. It was the third facility the Phantom had attacked.

Mila pulled up the documents. Internal memos with the Phan Pharmaceuticals logo on top. Redacted statements recovered. References made to the ILIOS Project. Mila skimmed them, her heart pounding.

100% fatality rate

Spread quickly through physical contact

Quarantine

Buyers from four worlds

This wasn’t proof. Maybe they were working on a cure for something, not a disease. But what disease still existed that had a 100% fatality rate . . . something people would want to buy a cure for? Mila exited her search and got to her feet. Her hands were shaking as she made her way back to Casey’s pod and typed in the code. It beeped back at her and flashed red.

She tried it again. It denied her access. Again.

Rhys had changed the code on it. He hadn’t trusted her.

The realization was a kick in the gut. She assumed things . . . believed things to be true. She’d thought he trusted her. But she’d built her whole life on lies. And now everything she’d taken as truth was falling apart around her.

Mila swallowed hard and held her mobiGlas up to the panel. She activated the hack program she’d used back at the hostel, and the door swung open.

Casey blinked at her. “The Advocacy here?”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth about the bioweapons? Do you have proof?”

Casey’s eyes widened. “I destroy everything when I go in. That’s the point.”

“I can’t —”

“Evony. I knew you. You knew me. Am I lying to you?” Her eyes were wide, pleading. Mila shook her head. “I don’t know . . . I . . .”

She met Casey’s eyes and tried to see the girl she used to know. Mila couldn’t be responsible for her childhood friend’s murder. Not after she’d already grieved once. And she couldn’t risk Casey bringing down the whole Salinas family with her. Because something in her gut told her that her mother might well have done whatever it took to help the Phan family succeed. Her mother was perfectly capable of manipulating reality to fit with her goals.

Mila groaned. “If I let you go, you’ll leave? You’ll leave and never come back?”

A light sprang into Casey’s eyes. “If you can help me get to the meeting with my patron, she’ll get me into Xi’an territory. You’ll never see or hear from me again. I swear it.”

“I don’t want Rhys involved in this . . . I’ll say . . . I’ll say you overpowered me, stole the ship. They can find me later.”

“Yes. We’ll keep him out of it. I promise.”

“You better not make me regret this.” Mila used her mobi to release the cuffs from the interior bar.

Mila clenched her jaw tight as she loosened Casey’s cuffs. If she was wrong about this, Casey could try to overpower her right now and escape. But the blows never came.

Instead, Casey threw her arms around Mila, surprising her with a tight hug. “You won’t regret this.” She stepped back and massaged her red wrists. “Now tell me what I need to do.”

“I’ll fly us out of here,” Mila said. “You navigate us to your meeting point.”

They hurried to the cockpit, and Mila barely breathed, still expecting a betrayal, waiting to see if she’d made a mistake. But Casey didn’t turn on her. Not yet, anyway.

Right after they’d strapped into their seats, the comm crackled. “Mila,” Rhys’s voice came through. “Ten minutes out by hover.”

Mila jabbed a finger into the comm. “Received. Everything’s . . . good.”

“See you soon,” Rhys said.

Dread threatened to engulf Mila, but she tried to ignore the feelings as she took the controls. In the seat beside her, Casey pulled up the comms and requested emergency clearance to take off.

If they made it off-world, Rhys would never, ever forgive her. But it was too late. She’d made her decision, and now Casey Phan, the Phantom, sat beside her, ready to escape UEE space once and for all.

Clearance came in, and Mila fired up the engines.

“Thank you, Ev. I mean it. I don’t deserve your trust after . . .”

Mila just shook her head. “No. You don’t.”

“Mila.” Rhys’s panicked voice came over the comm. “Mila, I have you in sight. Why are the engines fired up? What’s going on?”

Mila activated the comm, and winced against a jolt of pain in her shoulder. The numbing agent was fading, the burn from her pistol wound returning. Casey had shot her, and here she was freeing her. Mila stared at the comm and tried to think of what she could say to Rhys. But there was nothing to say.

She’d have to lie to him if she got out of this alive. Whatever they’d had together . . . it was over now, burned by her decision. And the less he knew, the better off he’d be.

I’m so sorry, Rhys.

She removed her finger from the comm without saying a word and lifted Devana into the sky.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Hello everyone,

Last week we held two contests to highlight Citizens coming together and celebrating Thanksgiving. Having received almost 800 submissions across both contests combined, we certainly have a lot to be thankful for. Congratulations to the winners! Enjoy their entries here and here.

We’re currently deep into our anniversary celebration at this year’s Intergalactic Aerospace Expo. We’ve seen a massive amount of images, videos, and stories detailing your recent adventures in the ‘verse, and they’ve been circulating through our offices globally. We really enjoy seeing the ‘verse from your perspective, so keep them coming.

If you’re looking more information on the Anniversary Special, the Free-Fly event, or the IAE, make sure to check out our anniversary page where you can find all the details about this year’s promotion, including a detailed guide to the in-game festivities happening on Hurston.

And with that, let’s see what’s going on this week:

On Tuesday, the Lore Team will publish “Phantom Bounty Pt.3.” Hang onto your butts as this thrilling tale continues to unfold, and check out previously published lore posts here.

Calling All Devs, Around the Verse, and Reverse the Verse will not have new episodes airing this week, as we’re still in full Anniversary mode. Check out daily videos highlighting Star Citizen’s diverse selection of ships, and for more info on our Anniversary Free-Fly event, check out the promotion page.

See you in the ‘verse!

Tyler Witkin
Lead Community Manager

The Weekly Community Content Schedule
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – Aegis (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – Drake (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Lore Post: Serialized Fiction – Phantom Bounty Pt.3 (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – Exotics & Imports (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – MISC (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Vault Update

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – Manufacturers Spotlight & Starter Packs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Roadmap Update
RSI Newsletter

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1ST, 2018
Anniversary Special – For The Fledgling Pilot – Starter Packs

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2ND, 2018
Anniversary Special – For The Fledgling Pilot – Starter Packs

Community MVP: November 26th, 2018

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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Every week, we select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it here. The highlighted content creator will be awarded with an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!

Small Guns of UEE Part 1 by Frustmaster

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Frustmaster has captured stunning visuals highlighting the FPS weapons currently available in the ‘verse.

Enjoy the full video on the Community Hub.

Alles anzeigen

Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/citi…In-Star-Citizen

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

2948 Anniversary Manufacturer Specials

Watch videos featuring all of the shipbuilders from this year’s anniversary sale

Join Chris and Sandi as they introduce each day of the 2948 Anniversary Event and celebrate each manufacturer with Jared as he talks all-things-shipbuilding with the teams themselves.
We’ll update this page each day with a new manufacturer video, so keep checking back to stay up to date with all the details.

23rd November: Anvil Aerospace
24th November: Robert Space Industries (RSI)
25th November: Origin Jumpworks
26th November: Aegis Dynamics
27th November: Drake Interplanetary
28th November: Aopoa, Banu, Esperia, Tumbril Land Systems,
29th November: Musashi Industrial & Starflight Concern (MISC)
30th November: Argo Aeronautics, Consolidated Outland, Kruger Intergalactic*

Visit our main 2948 Anniversary Sale page to see the ships and find out how to take them for a test fly.

Alles anzeigen

Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…cturer-Specials

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

2948 Anniversary Manufacturer Specials

Watch videos featuring all of the shipbuilders from this year’s anniversary sale

Join Chris and Sandi as they introduce each day of the 2948 Anniversary Event and celebrate each manufacturer with Jared as he talks all-things-shipbuilding with the teams themselves.
We’ll update this page each day with a new manufacturer video, so keep checking back to stay up to date with all the details.

23rd November: Anvil Aerospace
24th November: Robert Space Industries (RSI)
25th November: Origin Jumpworks
26th November: Aegis Dynamics
27th November: Drake Interplanetary
28th November: Aopoa, Banu, Esperia, Tumbril Land Systems,
29th November: Musashi Industrial & Starflight Concern (MISC)
30th November: Argo Aeronautics, Consolidated Outland, Kruger Intergalactic*

Visit our main 2948 Anniversary Sale page to see the ships and find out how to take them for a test fly.

Alles anzeigen

Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…cturer-Specials

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

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Hello everyone,

On Saturday we reached a major funding milestone, and we want to thank our amazing community who made this possible. In a letter from the chairman, Chris Roberts shares his thoughts on the fantastic journey so far and the exciting future that lies ahead.

No matter if 2018 or 2948: this week people come together to celebrate Thanksgiving. Whether they’re hunkering down with friends or quantum traveling to be with family, Thanksgiving is all about being thankful and celebrating the holiday together with loved ones. It doesn’t matter if it’s a simple Big Benny’s noodle box, a fully dressed space turkey, or enjoying a nice Pips or Radegast with the crew. We asked you to share this wonderful experience and show the ‘verse what you’re thankful for. Participate in not one, but two contests in honor of Thanksgiving and with a bit of luck, become the proud owner of a brand-new Banu Defender, Khartu-Al, or Nox.

And while you’re taking those beautiful screenshots, don’t forget that the countdown to the 2948 Anniversary Special has begun. This Friday kicks off our most epic Free-Fly event to date, and with it our annual November ship promotion. All the flyable ships and every operable vehicle will be at your fingertips! This is your chance to try out the vessel you’ve had an eye on. It’s never been easier, and we’re sure you’ll find a helpful hand within our community should you need it. Find out more about the promotion and take to skies with our free-fly details page.

And with that, let’s see what’s going on this week:

On Calling All Devs every week, designers, engineers, and other developers from our five offices around the world answer backer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted for by YOU. This week we talk about inherited momentum, physicalized inventories, the new telemetry page, and more!

On Tuesday, the Lore Team will publish “Something Every Tuesday”, the weekly show hosted by Esen Landari. “Tune in” for great late night entertainment and check out previously published lore posts here.

Thursday won’t see an Around the Verse this week, as our North American offices will be celebrating Thanksgiving. The show will be back on December 6th.

No Reverse the Verse this Friday as we’ll be in full Anniversary mode, celebrating with a Free-Fly that’ll let you try every flyable ship and vehicle in game for free! Find out more on our promotion page. It’ll be worth to have an eye on our YouTube channel as we’ll have accompanying shows on each day of our promotion.

A happy Thanksgiving to you and your crew!

Ulf Kuerschner
Senior Community Manager

The Weekly Community Content Schedule
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19TH, 2018
Calling All Devs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20TH, 2018
Weekly Lore Post (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 21ST, 2018
-

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 22ND, 2018
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Announcement: Thanksgiving Contest Winners
Vault Update

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23RD, 2018
Anniversary Special – Anvil Aerospace (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Roadmap Update
RSI Newsletter

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – Roberts Space Industries (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – Origin Jumpworks (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

Community MVP: November 19th, 2018

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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Every week, we select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it here. The highlighted content creator will be awarded with an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!

Rotation of Hurston by Diabolus

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Diabolus documented the awe-inspiring rotation of Hurston by compressing two and a half in-game hours into this 5-minute video.

Enjoy the video on the Community Hub.

Alles anzeigen

Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/citi…In-Star-Citizen

NewsBot

Zitat von Star Citizen

Letter from the Chairman

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Dear Citizens,

Two Hundred Million Dollars.

Wow.

The amount is the highest total for any project in the history of crowdfunding and is beyond anything I could have imagined in my wildest dreams.

While the number is impressive, that is not what sets Star Citizen and Squadron 42 apart.

The true celebration is one of how a community came together to enable a shared dream to come to life. How gamers from all over the world came together to finance one of the biggest and most ambitious projects ever embarked on. There is no publisher. No big conglomerate. This is all grassroots, funded by gamers for gamers.

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To highlight just how global the support is, the person that took us past this milestone, Algared, hails from New South Wales in Australia and has been a backer since 2014. We have backers from 171 countries, from some of the smallest like San Marino or the Maldives to the largest like India and China. We cover the globe, pole to pole from Antarctica to Svalbard and Jan Mayen. Considering there are only 193 countries in the world, that’s an amazing number and shows how universal the appeal of Star Citizen is.

And it’s more than just the funding, it’s been six years of ground breaking open development, where all of you have been actively involved in what we are building.

You have watched us grow from a handful of people to a global staff of over 500, across 5 studios, 4 time zones and 3 countries. Some of the best talent in the industry is working on Star Citizen and Squadron 42, most of who are gamers that are inspired by your passion to push the boundaries of what is possible.

We give you multiple updates every week and have been since the inception of the project. This year we rolled out a live roadmap for Star Citizen’s development that is linked to our internal task and scheduling system and shows the planned features and content for the next four upcoming releases of Star Citizen Alpha. This December, we will also add the roadmap for Squadron 42’s completion.

Speaking on behalf of the team, we are always amazed and humbled by the talent, imagination, creativity and passion that we see from the community. The beautiful screen shots and videos, the streamers that push the boundaries of what the game can do even in Alpha, the detailed proposals and feedback on how to make things better and the patient bug hunting so many of you do.

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To reduce Star Citizen to just be about the amount raised is to do a disservice to all this. No other game shares as much information on a weekly basis, and no other game I know of is as focused on listening to and working with its community to make the best game possible. When I look around and see other games, even ones from major publishers, copying our playbook, I know we have had a positive influence on the gaming industry.

How Star Citizen is made, in public, warts and all, is part of what makes it special. It should be a no-brainer to cheer on a grassroots funded game that is literally shooting for the stars. No one is attempting to do what we are doing, in the manner we are doing it, nor being as open about as we are. Different and new can be scary, but it can also be exhilarating and rewarding. These uncharted frontiers of game development and funding, mirror the draw of the game itself; the lure of distant planets to explore, realized to an unprecedented detail and scale.

This is why I believe Star Citizen has resonated with so many; we’re breaking both real and virtual barriers and boldly going where no gamer and game has gone before. And we couldn’t be doing it without all of you, our partners in this journey and the best community in gaming!

This milestone is coming at a very exciting time for the project having just released Star Citizen Alpha 3.3 with Object Container Streaming (OCS) and Client Bind Culling, which makes a huge difference in client performance and memory usage. Face over IP (FOIP) is in the community’s hands and is proving to be a game changer. No other game has the ability to drive your avatar’s face and look via a webcam, as well as to place your voice diegetically inside the game. The possibilities for social interactions inside the world of Star Citizen now mirror what you can do in the real world. Lastly, with ship purchasing live in 3.3, we have a full game loop with basic progression, where you have a reason to haul cargo, take missions or mine.

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This week marks the start of our 2948 Anniversary Event, which celebrates the end of the original crowdfunding campaign back in November 2012. This year we are particularly excited by our Free Fly event where we are opening the opportunity to try out the 80 flyable ships and vehicles in game.

Star Citizen Alpha 3.3.5, which brings a lot more content, including the planet of Hurston, it’s moons and the major landing zone Lorville, is currently in PTU and should be Live in the next few days.

We are getting closer all the time to having a living, breathing persistent universe and as we close out this year, I look at the technology we must complete to achieve the vision and realize we are nearer to the end than the start.

This knowledge, aided by the continued support and excitement we feel from all of you propels us forward with enthusiasm and a thirst for seeing the universe of Star Citizen become a home for gamers everywhere.

Thank you, each and every one of you, for believing in the vision, supporting its development with unwavering commitment and making gaming history.

See you in the ‘Verse!

— Chris Roberts

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…om-The-Chairman

Squadron 42 Monthly Report: December 2018

This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We’re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to, and plan on following this process for future Squadron 42 Monthly Reports.

The Road to Glory

AI

Animation

Audio

Character Art

Cinematics

Engine Tools

Engineering

Environment Art

Gameplay Story

Graphics

Level Design

Narrative

Props

System Design

Tech Animation

Tech Art

UI

Vehicle Features

VFX

Weapons

Covert Intel

Conclusion

WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…

Star Citizen Alpha 3.4 Available!

Alpha 3.4

3.4 Flyable Ships

Bug Reporting

Breaking news on Squadron 42, 3.4 and more, in this week’s update.

Letter from the Chairman

Hello everyone,

Writer’s Note: Phantom Bounty: Part Four was published originally in Jump Point 3.4. Read Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here.

THE END

And with that, let’s see what’s going on this week:

MONDAY, DECEMBER 17TH, 2018 Calling All Devs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18TH, 2018 Lore – Phantom Bounty Part 4 (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19TH, 2018 -

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20TH, 2018 Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/) Vault Update Squadron 42 Newsletter

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21ST, 2018 Roadmap Update RSI Newsletter

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27TH, 2018 Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

Chewing the Scenery: Lorville by Hasgaha

In this week’s update we look at armor for female characters and take a tour of the developing Stanton System.

And with that, let’s see what’s going on this week:

MONDAY, DECEMBER 10TH, 2018 Calling All Devs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11TH, 2018 Jump Point Lore Piece (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 12TH, 2018 Subscriber’s Monthly Newsletter

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 13TH, 2018 Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/) Vault Update Squadron 42 Newsletter

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14TH, 2018 Roadmap Update RSI Newsletter

Yuletide on Yela by 6Muffin6Man6 and Friends

From 890 Jump to Anvil Carrack, from the Vanguard variants to the Hull C and more, John Crewe and Jared Huckaby update on the ships making their way through the ship pipeline in 2019 and beyond. Last show of 2018!

To watch Reverse the Verse LIVE each and every week, tune into http://twitch.tv/starcitizen.

Star Citizen Monthly Report: November 2018

AI

Animation

Audio

Backend Services

Character Art

Community

Design

DevOps

Engineering

Engine Tools

Environment Art

Facial Animation

Graphics

Issue Council

Level Design

Lighting

Narrative

Player Relations

Props

QA

Services

Ships

Ship Art

System Design

Telemetry

Turbulent

MONDAY, DECEMBER 17TH, 2018
Calling All Devs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18TH, 2018
Lore – Phantom Bounty Part 4 (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19TH, 2018
-

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20TH, 2018
Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Vault Update
Squadron 42 Newsletter

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21ST, 2018
Roadmap Update
RSI Newsletter

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27TH, 2018
Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

MONDAY, DECEMBER 10TH, 2018
Calling All Devs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11TH, 2018
Jump Point Lore Piece (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 12TH, 2018
Subscriber’s Monthly Newsletter

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 13TH, 2018
Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Vault Update
Squadron 42 Newsletter

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14TH, 2018
Roadmap Update
RSI Newsletter

MONDAY, DECEMBER 3RD, 2018
Calling All Devs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4TH, 2018
Lore Post – OP.NET (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5TH, 2018
-

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6TH, 2018
Around the Verse (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Vault Update
Monthly Report November

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7TH, 2018
Reverse the Verse (https://www.twitch.tv/starcitizen)
Roadmap Update
RSI Newsletter

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – Aegis (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – Drake (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Lore Post: Serialized Fiction – Phantom Bounty Pt.3 (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – Exotics & Imports (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – MISC (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Vault Update

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30TH, 2018
Anniversary Special – Manufacturers Spotlight & Starter Packs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)
Roadmap Update
RSI Newsletter

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1ST, 2018
Anniversary Special – For The Fledgling Pilot – Starter Packs

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2ND, 2018
Anniversary Special – For The Fledgling Pilot – Starter Packs

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19TH, 2018
Calling All Devs (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20TH, 2018
Weekly Lore Post (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 21ST, 2018
-

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 22ND, 2018
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Announcement: Thanksgiving Contest Winners
Vault Update