In dieser Spezialausgabe von Around the Verse geht es um die verschiedenen Alien-Sprachen in Star Citizen. Zu Wort kommt Der Sprachwissenschaftler und Xenolinguist Britton Watkins, der bei Cloud Imperium Games dafür sorgt, dass sich das Gebrabbel von…
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…rachen-1218159/
In der neuen Ausgabe von "Around the Verse" erfahren wir mehr über die Alien-Sprachen in Star Citizen und wie diese überhaupt ihren Weg ins Spiel finden. Federführend hierfür ist der Sprachwissenschaftler und Xenolinguist Britton Watkins verantwortlich,…
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…-Video-1218168/
Brought to you by Pips. Experience 'Life Untapped'
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.January 10, 2935 SET
Despite its discovery over five centuries ago, the Nexus System has maintained a reputation for being untamed territory, a distinction that has persisted to this day. The two most notable events to occur in the system this century not only have criminal connotations but are also connected.
The first incident was Kellar’s Run in 2931. Dean Kellar’s multi-system tussle with UEE law enforcement famously ended in the Nexus System. What had started as a simple dogfight had spiraled across multiple systems and involved dozens of ships of criminals, police and even civilians. The government’s inability to contain the incident brought into focus just how little control the Empire had over the Nexus System. Within months, the UEE Senate approved a measure to bring law and order back to the system.
One of the UEE’s first orders of business was reclaiming Nexus III. Across the naturally habitable planet, outlaw factions had moved into facilities abandoned by the Hathor Group. When the UEE assault began, feuding outlaw crews put their differences aside to defend their planet. The Horizon Crew became the de facto ringleaders and led this patchwork defense force in a spirited fight. Eventually, they were overmatched by the UEE military. Outlaws that didn’t flee were either captured or killed resisting.
The criminal diaspora spread to the dark corners of the Nexus System or slipped into one of the neighboring unclaimed systems. The Horizon Crew attempted to set up operations elsewhere but were rebuffed by larger syndicates controlling those sectors of space. That left them with only one acceptable option: fight to reclaim their turf in Nexus. Three years after Kellar’s run, on January 10, 2935, Nexus’s second notable event of the 30th century occurred: the Horizon Crew perpetrated the infamous Walzer Massacre.
Operation (OP) Station Demien was built in the 25th century to be an operations hub, transfer point and temporary housing location for government workers trying to terraform the smog planet of Nexus II. After the experimental terraforming techniques failed, the UEE eventually sold the entire system to the Hathor Group, which then used the station as a security outpost. Beginning in 2672, when the Hathor Group abandoned the system, various squatters and outlaw packs rotated through the station for the next few centuries. After the UEE pushed into the system, OP Station Demien became one of the first ‘secure’ stations in the extended police action. The station housed supplies and military families waiting for an official residence on Lago (Nexus IV). Yet, the station’s remote location and soft security made it an ideal target for the Horizon Crew’s ruthless plan.
January 10, 2935, started like any other day for those aboard OP Station Demien. Security personnel conducted their routine patrols around the station, but (based on security accounts), everything was quiet. Haulers offloaded supplies and stayed to enjoy a hot meal outside of their ship. Station staff restocked vending machines and reshuffled cargo containers for pick up. Little did they know, a stealth dropship silently drew nearer.
Meanwhile, in the temporary housing habs, the family of Advocacy Agent Emily Walzer received good news. A permanent residence on Lago had been secured for them, and a military transport on a supply run would bring them in the following day. Francis Walzer and his three children had been waiting at OP Station Demien for days. Though they knew the system was still dangerous, sweetheart land deals on Lago offered to government officials and their families were too good to pass up. Now that their lot had been secured, the family could all be together for the first time since Agent Emily Walzer transferred to Lago the previous year.
Following the call with his wife, Francis Walzer sent his son, Arjun, to grab a few bottles of Pips while he read to twins Joyce and Joanne. Arjun rushed out of the hab, as if going faster also accelerated time. Though only fourteen, Arjun wanted to join the Advocacy like his mother. Friends and family described him as observant and endless inquisitive, so the fact that he was the first civilian aboard the station to notice that things weren’t quite right seems fitting. At some point in his journey to the Pips machine, he became aware that the hallways were eerily quiet and that select security doors had been closed and elevators deactivated. Not long after, Arjun spotted the now-famous bloody handprint.
Ten minutes earlier, the station’s security officers had stepped away from their posts for a shift change. It was during that vulnerable window that a small squad of well-armed outlaws took the security team by surprise. Security footage showed that the speed and precision of the attack was such that none of the security officers even had a chance to raise their weapon.
With the station’s security apparatus under their control, additional Horizon Crew ships landed. Assault teams spread across the station, systematically moving from room to room and killing anyone they encountered. Many victims were found executed, a single shot in the back of the head, never knowing what hit them.
Supposedly, the Horizon Crew’s plan was to secretly take over OP Station Demien, fortify and secure it and then use it at a new center for their operations in the Nexus System. Essential to the plan’s success was ensuring that word of their assault didn’t leave the station. It would afford them the time to entrench and notify others that the station was now under their control. It almost happened too, if it hadn’t been for Arjun Walzer and that bloody handprint.
Over 20 different retellings of the Walzer massacre have appeared on the spectrum since this fateful day. Each one uses the iconic image of the bloody handprint that reportedly begins Arjun’s comm to his mother. Incredibly, Arjun stayed on the comm with his mother for nearly 50 minutes. With her guidance, he documented the horrors the Horizon Crew inflicted on the station and evaded the assailants. Arjun’s brave efforts continued until an outlaw noticed an unknown signal coming from the station and decided to hunt it down. Although the final moments of that fateful comm are known only by those who have seen it, there is one word consistently used to describe it: devastating.
Sadly, Arjun’s tragic demise was far from unique, as no one on OP Station Demien during the assault would survive it. Yet, thanks to Arjun’s bravery, local law enforcement officials received word of the assault and launched their counterattack before the Horizon Crew could fully enact their security plan for the entire station. A local militia was first on the scene but had little warning of what awaited them. Within moments of exiting their ships, most militia members found themselves caught in a kill zone. The outlaws’ strategically advantageous position proved to be too much for inexperienced local law enforcement to overcome, making it apparent that the UEE Marines were needed.
The Marine assault to retake OP Station Demien lasted six hours. The battle-hardened Horizon Crew fought for every last inch of space and surface. With nowhere else to go, the Crew knew their plan would either work or be their ultimate demise. Thanks to the Marines, it proved to be the latter. After three years of perceived progress against outlaw elements in the Nexus System, the Walzer Massacre, as it came to be called, was a stark reminder that there was much work still to be done.
Despite its impact on the UEE at the time, the Walzer Massacre is now only the second most famous thing associated with OP Station Demien. Today, it’s better known as a location in the popular video game Star Marine and the recent vid Star Marine 2: BloodLock. This distinction isn’t without controversy, as some believe InterDimension Software intentionally chose to base their game level on the station to stir controversy and receive free publicity for the title.
Regardless of its portrayal in popular culture, OP Station Demien still stands as a symbol of the battle to tame the Nexus System, and the events of January 10th, 2935, will remain an important chapter in the history of the system.
Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spec…Walzer-Massacre
Cloud Imperium Games wird Cheater im Weltraum-MMO Star Citizen nicht tolerieren. Wer cheatet, der fliegt und zwar permanent. Es wird dann auch keine Rückerstattung des Geldes geben, welches der Betrüger schon in das Onlinespiel investiert hat. Doch…
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…attung-1217883/
Greetings Citizens
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.First off, HAPPY NEW YEAR!
We returned to offices last week to resume the process of bringing Star Citizen and Squadron 42 to life, with stories of holiday cheer and more than a few personal adventures. With every New Year comes the inevitable resolutions, and this year the Community Team aims to continue improving the content we release to you each and every week.
What this means right off the bat is an evolution of the “Community Manager’s Log and Schedule” that went up at the beginning of the week into a front-page post, “This Week in Star Citizen.” As always, it’ll be a chance to give you some of the highlights to look out for in the week ahead, but we’ll also use it to highlight specific content you may have missed out on in the past, as well as bring a much deserved spotlight to the work our Citizens do to enhance the overall Star Citizen experience.
In addition to the change in our Monday posts, we’ll be pushing the continuing evolution in our video content as we move through 2017, including popular hits like Around the Verse, Bugsmashers and Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as well as debuting some new additions to those stalwarts. We’ll discuss one of those additions farther down below, but be certain you come back here in the coming weeks to find out more.
Each Tuesday, the Lore Team releases another installment in one of their many continuing series. These lore posts have been a tradition since Star Citizen was first announced, and if you haven’t checked out some of the older series, like Cassandra’s Tears, you can find all the previous entries here.
On Wednesdays, we alternate between the death and destruction of bugs everywhere with episodes of our edutainment series, Bugsmashers! and The Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where members of the CIG Lore Team explore the design, story and science of one of Star Citizen’s planetary systems. For this week, it’s Associate Writer Adam Wieser with a story of exploration and expansion with the Ark Starmap as his guide.
If you haven’t seen the Ark Starmap in action, you can check it out for yourself here.
Around the Verse, our flagship weekly program comes to us every Thursday, and this week we return from hiatus with more behind-the-scenes goodness. If you’re looking for all the latest development news on Star Citizen, you don’t want to miss out on Around the Verse, every week on our YouTube channel.
EDIT 2017.01.10 – This week’s ATV will be a “special edition” featurette.
We will return to your regularly scheduled Around the Verses next week.That brings us to Friday. The end of the traditional work week, and if you’re anything like me, you like to kick back and relax a bit playing some video games, and that’s just what we’re gonna do, only we’re gonna Star Citizen with YOU. Join Community Managers Jared Huckaby and Tyler Witkin on Happy Hour Friday as they play Star Citizen with the fans LIVE on Twitch with a special guest streamer from the community, and get your chance to win a free Star Citizen game package and ship! But you have to be watching to claim your prize. Tune in at 10am PST, 6pm UTC at http://twitch.tv/starcitizen and don’t miss out!
With that, I hope we’ll see you on Friday!
Jared Huckaby
“Disco Lando”
Community ManagerThe Weekly Community Content Schedule
TUESDAY, JANUARY 10TH, 2017
Weekly Lore Post (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch)WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11TH, 2017
Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)THURSDAY, JANUARY 12TH, 2017
Around the Verse: Special Edition Featurette (https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/)FRIDAY, JANUARY 13TH, 2017
Happy Hour Friday @ 10am PST / 6pm UTC (http://twitch.tv/starcitizen)
RSI NewsletterCommunity Spotlight: January 9th, 2017 – Storytellers
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Those of you that have been following the project for awhile might remember the old Community Spotlight program, where we highlight several of our Community Content Creators who bring their own unique additions to the Star Citizen experience. We enjoyed this opportunity to share these with you each and every week, and so one of our New Year’s Resolutions is to bring this fine tradition back included with every This Week in Star Citizen post.
This week’s theme is “Storytellers,” those fan-fiction creations that see to further flesh out the potential Star Citizen universe. From prose to webcomics to video-series, storytelling is at the very heart of the Star Citizen experience, and what we have for you this week is just a small sampling of many of the tremendous creations throughout the years, from the very old, to one that just began yesterday!
So take a look, and don’t forget to check the Community Hub for all the latest contributions and upvote your favorites. You just might see them here in the near future.
Combined Arms
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Under the leadership of Captain Kenny, an Outlaw Coalition seizes control of the planet ArcCorp. UEE Marine and Naval forces must unite in a desperate attempt to prevent innumerable casualties.
The Fleet Arrives is Part I of a three-part film series directed by Terallian, and backed by the immensely talented team, Little Armada.
You can check out his post on the Community Hub here, with additional links so you don’t miss out on future episodes.
The Citizens
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.“The Citizens” is a brand-new webcomic series dedicated to showing the humorous side of Star Citizen’s universe.
The Citizens is produced entirely by Star Citizen Rurquiza using screenshots captured with our new “Director Mode” recently added in Star Citizen Alpha 2.6, and we suspect, a decent amount of post-production after the fact.
You can follow the continuing adventures of “The Citizens” at http://www.thecitizenscomic.com/
Hunter
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Of course, we can’t forget the Star Citizen webcomic classics, like Hunter, the fan-fiction adventures created by Star Citizen Adrian Nitisor.
Hunter has been in publication since April of 2015, and you can find all issues available for download at http://hunter.thecomic.ninja/
There is also a special video trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEaItVUHxbo
TOG in Space
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Finally for this week, we go way, way back into the Storytellers archive for TOG in Space, a work of Star Citizen Fan Fiction that ran on our forums from June 2013 to January 2015.
Created by Star Citizen cmopatrick, the adventures that began on a shipping platform in the Baker System and expanded into a 400+ page PDF document before all was said and done!
You can check it out in the original forum post here.
If you’re a fan of fan fiction, I’d encourage you to check out one of the most dedicated legacy contributions from our community content creators since this project began.
Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/citi…In-Star-Citizen
Cloud Imperium Games zeigt ein aktualisiertes Vorstellungsvideo zu Star Citizen, in dem aktuelle Spielszenen gezeigt werden. Mastermind Chris Roberts stellt im Video die "epische First Person Experience" vor und betont die 1,6 Millionen Spieler starke…
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…ellung-1217263/
Letztes Jahr wurde mit Star Marine das neueste Modul für das kommende Weltraum-MMO Star Citizen veröffentlicht und ermöglicht schnelle Multiplayer-Gefechte. Wir haben uns Star Marine angesehen und uns in den Conquest-Modus gestürzt. Was dabei herauskam,…
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…player-1217555/
Nachdem es bereits Cheater in der Alpha-Version des kommenden Weltraum-MMOs Star Citizen gibt, hat die Community eine Umfrage gestartet und fragt die Fans, wie mit Cheatern umgegangen werden soll. Dabei ist die Frage, ob sofort gegen Cheater vorgegangen…
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…mfrage-1217277/
Star Marine, das FPS-Modul für Star Citizen, ist jetzt für alle Backer spielbar. Der knackig geschnittene Launch-Trailer gibt einen Ausblick auf die Shooter-Gefechte. Zum Einsatz kommt dabei übrigens bereits Amazons Lumberyard-Engine (basierend auf der…
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…railer-1216846/
Chris Roberts und sein Team von Cloud Imperium Games machen den Unterstützern von Star Citizen ein ganz besonderes Weihnachtsgeschenk: Etwas später als ursprünglich geplant, aber wie versprochen noch in diesem Jahr, geht Alpha 2.6 mit Star Marine an den…
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…echsel-1216848/
Greetings Citizens,
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 is now available for all backers! Alpha 2.6 includes the first iteration of Star Marine, our dedicated FPS module, as well as significant updates to the rest of the Star Citizen experience. Star Marine offers two game modes that will give you a taste of first person combat in the ’verse while a new Pirate Swarm game mode has been added to Arena Commander and a grand total of eight new ships are available in the PU. The patch also includes a major spaceflight balance pass, a brand new menu system, as well as dozens of bug fixes, quality of life improvements and other changes. The Alpha 2.6 patch is now available for download via the Star Citizen launcher.
You can read the complete Patch Notes here.
Star Marine
Join the Fight…
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Star Marine is here! Star Citizen’s first-person combat simulator lets backers engage in pitched FPS battles complete with multiple game modes, leaderboards and an all-new user interface. The initial launch of Star Marine includes two maps, OP Station Demien and Echo Eleven, as well as two game modes. Elimination is a free-for-all everyone-for-themselves fight where players duke it out for the highest kill score. Last Stand offers a chance for players to team up and battle for dominance over several Control Points in a fight where proper teamwork will determine victory.
Star Marine features numerous updates to Star Citizen’s FPS systems including grenades, vaulting, and combat emotes. The Player Health System has been updated so that you can now bleed out, when injured your health pool decreases over time until it reaches a fatal limit or the player heals. Competitive leaderboards have also been
included, as well as a major UI update to the lobby. Star Marine is
accessible to all backers with Star Citizen packages.New Features:
- Star Marine’s initial release features two maps: OP Station Demien and Echo Eleven.
- Star Marine has two available game modes for 2.6. Elimination, an every-man-for themselves mode where you duke it out for the highest kill-score. Last Stand, where Outlaws and Marines battle for control of four key computer access points to earn points.
- Grenades are also available in Star Marine from the ammo crates.
Arena Commander
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Epic Space Battles…
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Star Marine isn’t the only major update in Star Citizen Alpha 2.6. The Arena Commander ‘dogfighting module’ has been updated and expanded with a special focus on improvements to overall flight balance. Three multi-crew ships have also been added to Arena Commander’s private matches: the Retaliator, the Caterpillar and the Constellation Andromeda.Thanks to an incredible testing effort by our internal Quality Assurance teams and the Evocati backer group, we’ve come up with some flight balance changes that we think improve the overall experience. We’re eager to hear what you think, so please test out your favorite ship and then sound off on the forums.
A new game mode, Pirate Swarm, has also been added to Arena Commander, allowing players to fend off increasingly difficult waves of the notorious Nova Rider outlaw pack. To celebrate this new mode, we are offering two new ‘bounty missions’ with this patch: defeating the updated Vanduul Swarm and the new Pirate Swarm modes will earn you an account badge. Receiving the Vanduul Swarm badge will once again give players access to purchase a Glaive from a limited stock of 1,500 ships, while the Pirate Swarm badge will give access to
purchase a unique pirate-skinned Caterpillar that will be available in the
store for a two week limited-run.New Features
- Battle increasingly difficult waves of outlaws in the Pirate Swarm game mode for both Drone Sim and Spectrum matchups.
- Enemies in specific game modes (Vanduul Swarm, Pirate Swarm, Squadron Battle, Battle Royale) now drop pickup items including Afterburner fuel, missiles, ammo or repairs.
- We have also made the following ships available in Arena Commander, though they are restricted to Private Matches and Single Player games: Constellation Andromeda, Retaliator, and the Caterpillar.
New Ships, New Mechanics
Fantastic Ships and How to Fly Them
In 2.6, we’ve taken a long look at the internal QA testing as well as feedback from the community about their gameplay experience and taken a new approach to the flight model in general. This update will introduce this new approach along with a myriad of other updates and revisions to help balance the various ships and components.
New Features
- 8 new ships and variants are hangar and flight ready in 2.6.
- Massive overhaul of ship flight mechanics.
- Complete rebalance of SCM speeds and ship handling for all ships.
- Afterburner and Boost functionality has been completely revised. The goal is that Afterburner becomes the method to engage/disengage combat as well as gives the choice between outright speed or better handling.
- We’ve also reinvented our Fuel System. All ships have had a pass on their thruster fuel consumption values, intake regeneration rates and fuel tank capacities.
- Complete rebalance of all shields, all missiles and missile racks
and countermeasure ammo for all ships.Out of the Cocoon…
The Drake Caterpillar is flyable in Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 joining the MISC Starfarer and the Aegis Starfarer Gemini in Star Citizen’s fleet of large multi-crew ships. Intended to form the lead ship in raiding groups, the Caterpillar is a flagship any outlaw or ‘legitimate businessperson’ can be proud of. Future patches will add additional functionality, including the detachment feature for the Command Module and new upgrades for the Caterpillar’s segments and mounts.
You can learn more about the Drake Caterpillar here.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Hark, the Herald’s Engines Sing…
The Drake Herald is flight ready in Alpha 2.6. The Herald joins an elite group of fast ships which includes the M50, 350R and Mustang Gamma. QA reports that navigating the Murray Cup map in Arena Commander using the Herald is a true challenge … are you pilot enough? Additional functionality relating to the Herald, including systems related to data and hacking, will be introduced in future Persistent Universe patches.
You can learn more about the Herald here.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Sheer Luxury…
The Origin 85X is a snub and a half! This luxury touring spacecraft was originally created to launch from the Origin 890 JUMP and is now flight ready for all backers.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.New Ship Variants Flight Ready
The Spice of Life…
In addition to the Caterpillar, Herald and 85X, Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 adds a total of five ship variants to the lineup! These include the Vanguard Hoplite landing craft and the four variants created for Star Citizen’s 4th anniversary: the Hornet Wildfire, Sabre Comet, Gladius Valiant and Avenger Titan Renegade.
New Weapons
Equipment that Won’t MISS…
The Items 2.0 rollout continues with Star Citizen 2.6, with a special focus this month on missiles! The patch adds ten missile types, fifteen new missile racks and three guns to finish out the Behring MXA series.
You can check out the variety of new missile racks here.
You can find many of the new missiles and guns below.
Pathfinder Proximity
Size 4 IR Missile
Pioneer Proximity
Size 1 EM Missile
Marksman Proximity
Size 1 FAF IR Missile
Thunderbolt Proximity
Size 3 EM Missile
Arrester Proximity
Size 3 CS Missile
Tempest Proximity
Size 2 TL CS Missile
Ignite Strike
Size 2 FAF IR Missile
Spark Proximity
Size 1 DF Missile
Viper Strike
Size 3 IR Missile
Rattler Cluster
Size 2 TL IR Missile
Reaper Strike
Size 5 EM Missile
Valkyrie Strike
Size 5 IR Missile
Raptor Strike
Size 4 EM Missile
Assailant Strike
Size 4 CS Missile
Dominator Strike
Size 2 TL EM Missile
Argos Strike
Size 9 CS Missile
Seeker Strike
Size 9 EM Missile
Typhoon Strike
Size 9 IR Missile
Stalker Strike
Size 5 CS Missile
Strikeforce Strike
Size 2 FAF CS Missile
Taskforce Strike
Size 1 TL EM MissileFurther Improvements
What Else is New?
There are plenty of other additions and new features that Alpha 2.6 brings along with it, from numerous under the hood adjustments to more noticeable quality of life improvements.
Persistent Universe
- Ol ‘38 Bar added to Grim HEX landing zone.
- Crusader has several new locations to visit and a new ICC Probe mission.
- The Yela Asteroid belt has received some updates, with a much denser field and more varied salvage locations.
Lobby Refactor
- Our new front end user interface is now implemented, with updated graphics and new features.
- All new loadout customization section for Arena Commander that allows players to edit their ship components for Arena Commander matches through the game interface without the use of Port Modification. This changes will also be retained between play sessions.
- Updated Leaderboards for Star Marine and Arena Commander on the website now rank players in each game utilizing actual UEE ranks.
Third-Person Camera System
- The third-person cameras for Vehicle and On-Foot have been much improved in 2.6. Players can now select lens size and offset the camera to create cinematic and dynamic framing.
Health System Updates
- Bleeding has been added to the game, in both the Persistent Universe and Star Marine. This debuff stacks (additively) with itself and will decrease your total health pool each second it ticks down until healed.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Thank You, Citizens!
Patches like Alpha 2.6 can only happen thanks to the thousands of Evocati and PTU testers who put early builds through their paces. And that says nothing of the countless other community members whose passion for Star Citizen inspires the team every day. This project would not be possible without the support of backers around the world. Thank you for everything.
Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…arine-Available
MISC Razor Q&A
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Greetings Citizens,
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers. Let’s get right to it.
Previous Star Citizen racing ships have been designed with a dual role in mind or as adaptations of existing ships (the Mustang Gamma and 350R). The Razor was intended to be a racer from the skids up. Like the M50 interceptor, the Razor’s natural abilities will make it effective for speed-related missions off the racetrack … but unlike the M50, that was a completely secondary concern.
Special thanks to John Crewe and Jonathan Jacevicius for taking the time to answer these questions for us.
Questions & Answers
Ships inside of other ships. What ships do you think the Razor can be successfully launched and maintained from?
Questions like these are difficult to answer definitively until both the larger and the smaller ships are fully built and implemented, but it’d be safe to say any ship that can take an M50 will be able to take a Razor comfortably.
How do you envision the Razor being used outside of racing?
The Razor has a small set of offensive weaponry so whilst it can be used for combat at a push, it is not designed for it and in protracted engagements will fall prey to dedicated combat ships. Its speed and endurance (for a racer) would allow it to work in an interceptor role like the M50.
Why would we choose this ship over an M50 or 350R? Why would we choose those ships over the Razor?
Designed to be an endurance racer rather than a drag or F1 style racer the Razor will be able to last longer in races before the pilot has to start considering their fuel levels, whilst the pure performance isn’t as good as the M50/350R in a straightline or maneuverability it will still be able to keep up.
Can the razor be equipped with a Jump Drive?
It is currently planned to be capable of having a Jump Drive like other ships who have Quantum Drives.
How does the Razor’s fuel collection system compare to that of the Mustang Omega? How do you imagine this difference manifesting itself in the PU?
The fuel collection system is much more efficient than the Omega, resulting in the ability to regenerate more fuel per second than other racing ships. Unlike other ships the Razor essentially has its intakes spread across the surface of the ship so does not require the ship to be moving in the direction the intakes are facing to regenerate fuel effectively.
Are there any variants planned?
There are no variants planned at the moment although during concept we trialed a few alternative paint jobs that may be available in the future.
The Razor has a small powerpack compared to the M50 with the same size engines, will this mean the Razor will have more efficient engines compared to the M50? And will there be any other differences between the two in terms of thrust to weight ratio and acceleration?
The Xian influenced thrusters on the Razor provide a more efficient thrust output for the power plant size than the relatively “traditional” thrusters on the M50, combined with the lightweight hull this allows a similar level of performance.
How do you imagine the durability to be? It seems like after so much weight-shaving, it might be more easily damaged compared to other ships in it’s class.
The Razor is very much the structurally weakest of the dedicated racing ships, aside from perhaps the Archimedes and will be very susceptible to damage causing serious performance degradation, especially the fuel regeneration ability. This is an important trade-off for it’s other advantages.
Does the wind tunnel testing profile mean that airfoils will work and we can expect lift, weight, thrust and drag to be simulated in the flight characteristics of each ship when in atmospheric conditions? If so, will there be a new flight model or IFCS mode switch to handle the transition from Space to Atmosphere and different variations in gravity?
IFCS automatically adjusts the flight handling when transitioning between Space and Atmosphere, there is no need to manually transition between modes as it all done for you.
We currently simulate drag and gravity in atmosphere and this is calculated on a per ship basis, so ships like the Razor will handle better in atmosphere than others due to their shape but in the Razors case will potentially be more susceptible to wind/turbulence do to its low mass.
Concept sale
About the Sale
The Razor is being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar, fight in Arena Commander or fly in the Alpha. The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add a Razor poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Razor mini ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Life Time Insurance or these extras.
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
Additionally, please note that all decorative ‘flare’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. Also, while the Razor will be entering the ship pipeline now, it will ultimately be released after other concept ships have been completed. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches.
Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…-MISC-Razor-Q-A
Hat die Krise rund um das Entwicklerstudio Crytek Auswirkungen auf das Weltraum-MMO Star Citizen? Immerhin nutzt es auch die Cryengine. Doch laut Cloud Imperium Games sollen sich die Fans keine Sorgen machen. Das Studio arbeite unabhängig von Crytek.
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…perium-1216620/
Zum Jahresende zeigen die Entwickler von Star Citizen einen Einblick in die Alpha 2.6, die es bereits auf den öffentlichen Testservern gibt. Im kommentiertem Gameplay-Video gibt es Raumgefechte zu sehen. Zwei Teams starten und bekämpfen sich dann in…
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…lay-26-1216233/
Cloud Imperium Games hat die Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 im PTU (Public Test Universe) ausgerollt. Ein Gameplay-Trailer veranschaulicht neben dem aktuellen Entwicklungsstand auch die Neuerungen. Das Hauptaugenmerk liegt dabei auf dem lang erwarteten FPS…
Quelle: http://www.pcgames.de/Star-Citizen-P…-Modul-1216253/
Monthly Studio Report: January 2017
Greetings Citizens!
Welcome to 2017 (or should we say 2947?) Since our last report, we’ve published a major patch (Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 with Star Marine) and have continued to make great progress towards our next updates. The launch of Star Marine was a major milestone for Star Citizen, and thanks to our dedicated community we have plenty of feedback on the FPS updates to work from. Before we move on to 2.6.1 (which is now available for testing on the PTU!) and beyond, however, let’s take a look back at the month that was January 2017 in Star Citizen’s development.
CIG Los Angeles
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Cloud Imperium Los Angeles
Engineering
A new year marked by new challenges, new ideas and a whole lot of progress. We have been hard at work on our modular character customization screen, a system built on the item framework which will let players equip their characters however they choose. In addition, the LA Engineering team spent January making real progress towards the core systems that will allow us to have solar system sized maps and all the complicated components that come with it. To enable this, we had to reimagine entities including fundamental components such as lights, continue work on an intelligent radar system, and revisit how we build level hierarchies. It’s still some ways off, but we can see the principles in practice. January also saw the first technical application of node-based controller managers – this system opens the door to improved networking of item components and is the first real step towards multi-crew ship gameplay. Not flashy enough? How about explosions! We added a new damage controller that will bring things like explosive props and destroyable objects to the Item System framework soon.
Tech Design
This month our Tech Designers have been hard at work on new ships, Item 2.0 support, and prototyping. As for ships, the Buccaneer and Cutlass Black have hit the greybox phase. The Aurora update is going smoothly and really looking good. Calix prototyped how players could interact with the world and items, while Kirk did some work with our studios across the pond on general ship balance, in-game pricing, and underlining systems.
Art
The LA Ship Art team of Elwin Bachiller, Daniel Kamentsky and Byungjin Hyun dove right into the Drake Buccaneer (which has wrapped up in Greybox Art and moved onto Final Art) as well as a big update to the RSI Aurora. On the Concept Art side, in addition to supporting the Drake Buccaneer, Justin Wentz has been very busy creating concept art for a new Anvil ship.
This month, the Character Art team created new armor for the Persistent Universe. Most notably, the Explorer Suit, which will be used for (you guessed it!) exploring our vast universe! Another new addition is the Heavy Marine armor, which will be available soon in Star Marine. We’ve also continued working on creating more clothes for our shops and building outfits for new NPCs that will soon be seen on our various planets.
Tech Content
The Technical Content Team consists of two teams: Technical Art and Technical Animation. Technical Content is a global team with staff in all studios performing various roles.
Sean Tracy has spent the last month roadmapping for the rest of the year, working with 3lateral and other outsourcers on some R+D projects that will be revealed soon, as well as training and supporting the Technical Art and Technical Animation teams.
On the Technical Art front, Atri Dave has been working with our FPS weapon team to optimize weapons, ensure grips are universal (to males and females) as well as doing some R+D with our animation programmers for a more advanced version of foot anchoring that adapts leg IK and ground alignment based on whether characters are on their heels or on the balls of their feet. Robert Dickerson has been building up a Substance Painter pipeline for the various content teams. Alex Remotti recently joined the team and within his first couple weeks has already made an enormous impact by taking ownership over the procedurally generated environments for planets, space stations and other objects in the universe. He’s already integrated the initial system into the planet editor which allows us to spawn outposts/buildings using the splatter maps from the ecosystems. Matthew Intrieri and Patrick Salerno have been making important updates to systems and art for the Super Hornet, Mustang and many other ships, as well as planning out the rest of the year in terms of “paying off” some tech debt that’s accrued on some of the older ships. Forrest Stephan has been working on S42 features as well as reviewing props and weapons for performance optimizations.
On the Technical Animation side, it’s been no less busy! Matthias Jaeger has been working on improving and implementing tools improvements for animators. These include space switching (IK/FK switching tools), prop rigging, health tests, bone influence reduction tools, and more. Rob Howes, the lead technical animator in the department, has been busy supporting cinematics and animation whilst leading the technical animation team. He’s prepared a roadmap for the rest of the year as well as doing R+D on distributed batching solutions for animation builds. Further he’s continued to iterate with animation on some issues surrounding using a separate female skeleton. Vineet Chander has done massive batches of updates to our facial and head assets, of which there are over 120! Sometimes relatively minor issues are discovered, for example the eyelids for most faces were a bit “sleepy” looking and he’s made changes so that this is longer the case. Adam Sirrelle has developed some important tools including automated LOD creation of the facial assets. Additionally, Adam has created an extra tool for the developers that allow them to much more easily manage the creation of DBA’s (Database of Animations) which are massively optimized containers for animation data. John Riggs is working on updates to the female rig, updates to the hands for better gripping of weapons, and rolling out some skinning tools for the rest of the team. Gaige Hallman has done the lion’s share of work when it comes to zoning and ensuring the modularity of the characters and the skinning that goes with that, while also working on zone culling and difficult aspect of modularity that occur around the neck and head of characters. Mark McCall is Tech Content’s resident bugsmashing ninja. While sometimes spending weeks fixing bug after bug, Mark still manages to enact major changes, such as unifying the data structure for eyes and teeth on characters as well as creating tools surrounding hair/scalp rigging. Last but not least, Erik Link has implemented facial idles on the pilots for 2.6.1 and chases up animators and content creators when there is asset build errors. He’s been instrumental in getting our asset build errors down to 0 for 2.6.0
Narrative
The Narrative team has been continuing to meet with designers at the various studios to chip away at narrative needs for 3.0, like fleshing out the mission stories we’ll be able to generate for players and looking at the various storytelling possibilities for the various environments. We’ve also embarked on a significant task of starting to build a database of text needs for Squadron 42 which will outline any terminals, Galactapedia entries, etc. that need to be in-game. There have been a handful of documents written up for additional set dressing for the levels of Star Marine; fun little ways to make Echo 11 more period-accurate or OP Station Demien reflective of the massacre that the level is attempting to recreate. Those conversations with art and design have led to the creation of a multi-page document on Snacks!
We’ve also been having weekly discussions with Britton, our esteemed xenolinguist, who’s continuing to build out the Xi’an language. These conversations have led to some deeper dives into the Xi’an society, so hopefully we’ll be able to reveal some of that to you soon.
Quality Assurance
LA QA spent most of the month aiding the LA Engineering and Tech Content teams conducting sweeps on the new frontend, ship self-destruction, damage states, missile functionality and recent changes to the character loadouts, as well as early iterations of Item 2.0. In addition, the team aided the Community team in capturing in-game footage for a number of segments, and also set up a Let’s Talk About thread to gather feedback on the Mustang series of ships.
CIG Austin
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Cloud Imperium Austin
Design
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The majority of the ATX Design Team’s time the past couple months has been spent defining details for PU “Shop Archetypes” (some examples include Clothing Shop, Bar, Security Kiosk, Hospital, etc.) and creating design documents outlining details that are specific to each archetype. Each type of shop will have universal requirements that will apply across every shop of a specific type and this will help us save time in the long run when we then drill down into specific shop locations for upcoming landing zones and space stations. For example, every clothing shop is going to have clothing racks, mannequins, and stands to showcase the shop inventory and each display needs to follow a specific metric.
We’ve also been busy building the pillars of what will become our first iteration of the PU Economy by establishing various details concerning in-game commodity types, trade routes within the Stanton System, and white/black markets.
Lastly, we got final approval on the GDD for the “Shopping Kiosk” feature and have broken down high level design requirements for UI Team and Game Code Team. This has been a long-gestating feature so we’re happy to take it into the next stage of development.
Art
Lighting Artist Emre Switzer wrapped up his work on lighting the Star Marine maps for 2.6.0 release and has now turned his attention to supporting Squadron 42 in lighting some of their environments.
Chris Smith and Josh Coons continue to make progress on their respective ships. Josh is in full swing on the Greybox Phase for the new Cutlass Black. Chris finished up his updates on the Super Hornet and has now turned his attention to a fantastic new vehicle that we’re super excited to be working on.
Animation
Bryan Brewer and the PU Animation Team continue to make progress on Usable Interaction Animations to support Squadron 42. Most recently we’ve gotten Pushups, Stretches, Leaning on a Table (various angles), and female versions of all the work zone animations complete. We’ve also done a polish pass over some of the Usables to make them acceptable for use by the player in first-person.
Jay Brushwood and the Ship Animation Team have completed their work on the ship enter/exit combat speed animations. They are currently in review with Animation Director Steve Bender and we’re awaiting final sign off. While we wait, we have turned our attention to implementing animations on upcoming ships such as the Prospector and the Buccaneer.
Backend Services
The Backend Team has been hard at work on a massive project to refactor our entire backend infrastructure to a new architecture we’re calling Diffusion. Diffusion will be a truly cloud-oriented service architecture that will help improve high scalability and availability for our services. It will be powered by a top level “coordination” layer written in a proprietary language developed by our Lead Server Engineer, Jason Ely.
In addition to developing Diffusion, the Backend Team has been supporting UI Team in implementing the new in-game Leaderboards.
Quality Assurance
In January, QA began immediately fielding test requests from development which included network message queue, serialized variables, particle preloading, megamap testing and AI balance tests. QA also very much focused on reporting issues with the Game-Dev stream to ensure it is stable so that Squadron 42 and 3.0 development may continue unabated. Some other things on QA’s plate for January were training new specialists, updating internal documentation, QA tools development and new hire interviews.
Player Relations
January wrapped up a very busy period for the Player Relations team. We worked over the holiday period to make sure that we kept up with our backers’ support urgent requests, and used much of the month to catch up on the rest. To put in perspective, we were not caught up until April of last year from the busy holiday period… this year we’ve accomplished that in January!
Part of this is due to bridging our US and UK teams together, which will ultimately result in faster response times and more visibility to players. A big part of this involves Spectrum, which we will be excited to roll out to you on the main site soon. We really think you will love the entire rework of our forums and chat systems, and we think you will really appreciate our plans for building a better presence with you in chat and on the forums.
IT/Operations
It’s the beginning of the year so IT gets busy with a great deal of internal housekeeping chores like inventories, license renewals, and general cleanup and organizational tasks. One of our larger projects has been focused on expanding the bandwidth between offices to keep up with our increasing daily file transfer and build replication load. We’re also working closely with the DevOps team to supply hardware and infrastructure to support the growth of the build system as well as the continued work on the patch reduction project.
LiveOps/DevOps
The team has been working hard on multi-region support, the bulk of our efforts going toward the network and server side of our services. We are very happy to report that this work will pay dividends very soon in game and there will be more detailed information on this soon as well. We’ve also been working on our internal tools including the build system, all of which share the same goals of performance and stability improvements while keeping costs down.
Foundry 42 UK
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Foundry 42 UK
Graphics
The Graphics Team has been predominantly focusing on various lighting improvements such as shadow quality and performance within interiors. The GPU cube-map capturing is almost complete and we’re starting to write systems that maximize this tech so we can achieve truly dynamic lighting on planets and space stations. Considering how so much of our concept art makes heavy use of rectangular lights, we’ve started work on area lights. While this may sound simple, area lights are actually an active area of research for many game studios and are incredibly difficult to get right (both in terms of looks and performance). Lastly, we’re in the early stages of planning for a new and vastly more efficient particle system that eventually will replace the current one.
Programming
In the ongoing release work, we’ve been getting the leaderboards in and the new “Mega Map” implemented. Under the hood on the network side will be the proper networked serialised variables and the message queue rewrite. Other general work includes the FPS actor code refactor to make it more reliable and robust, the mission system, item pickup and put down improvements, and 3D minimap, amongst other things.
VFX
Over this past month, we’ve been doing some internal data clean-up using the Asset Manager, which culls and consolidates particle/material texture libraries, working on improving particle streaming to allow for better dynamic loading (basically freeing up memory resources) and pipeline documentation updates. There have also been high level key feature planning breakdowns of key features like Atmospheric Flight Model Effects (AFFX) such as engine trails, contrails, entry/exit and Screen-Based Area-of-Interest which will trigger screen-based effects based on camera speed and/or proximity to a specified area. Plus, we’ve been experimenting with new assets to blow stuff up.
Quality Assurance
The QA team has hardly let up this New Year. We’ve been continuing on Squadron 42 testing, extensively testing weapon balance changes and Star Marine bug fixes. We launched an investigation into the prevalent lag issue during Last Stand battles on Echo 11 and held a feedback session about gamepad controls. Most exciting though has been the first steps into the new “Mega Map.”
As always big thanks to all the backers, especially the Evocati and those who frequent the PTU. Your help is always invaluable and very much appreciated!
Art
We kicked off the new year by putting some new to be announced ships into concept and we are about to wrap up on a new Anvil design.
In other ship news, the Reclaimer is already deep into production with dedicated teams focusing on the exterior and interior. On the outside, the exterior mesh has gone through a cleanup pass and work has started on shaders. External parts such as thrusters are also close to complete. On the interior, a modular kit has been assembled for the habitation areas and the first room is nearing completion.
The Prospector team has been polishing the main LOD geometry for both the interior and exterior while cleaning up various sections to pass along to the other teams, so they can begin making it flight ready.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Work’s also moving forward on the MISC Razor. The artists have been adapting the concept mesh to work within the constraints set by animation which has resulted in a much sleeker more technical design whilst trying to maintain the key design elements of the original concept- the aggressive ‘Formula 1’ feel.
Onto some big news, the team’s been doing a technical and sanity pass over the S42 interior sections. Tackling collision and LODs have been the primary focus to make sure it’s in a workable state for the designers. During this review, we’re going over various elements: cleaning up and polishing pieces, refining and adding further details that we felt was lacking, and making changes to meshes that needed it. We also spent some time going over the materials, making adjustments and improvements where possible and adding blends to the primary materials of the ship.
Our props team continued working on the medium ship components and dressing sets such as tools, medical props and some assets needed for the ship interiors for S42.
Destructible props were introduced in 2.6.0 which meant we needed to create destroyed versions of a chunk of assets. This was the first iteration so was kept to the more obvious assets. Moving forward, destruction will be seen on a much larger scale and include a wider variety of prop types.
For our environments, we left some of the team polishing the 2.6.0 levels in preparation for the 2.6.1 release. This included adding more narrative assets that add a bit more history and character to the levels.
On the SQ42 front, the Shubin base is having a major push visually at the moment, since it’s a massive part of the story, we’re making sure it’s the hero it deserves to be.
We are also allocating more resource to work on the growing universe. Soon we’ll have four concept artists working out moons, nebulas and space stations, no small task! Work has begun on the first three surface outposts. These modular asset sets can be configured in multiple ways to give variation to the smaller settlements that will be scattered across the planet surfaces.
We’re looking at improving our planet’s material systems to give a better overall read all the way from space down to a meter-scale surface area. We’re doing a lot of R&D into how we dynamically and realistically scatter assets (rocks, vegetation etc.) onto the surface of a planet in a way that retains our visual fidelity and realism goals.
Conversely, we are spending some R&D time into what we want to achieve visually from space! Despite being composed of nothing, it’s very surprising how much there is to test and discuss with how we want the void between stars to feel and change as the player makes his way around a system.
Audio
Like many of the departments, the Audio used the New Year as an opportunity to go back and do some housecleaning. We reviewed all the ships to make sure that the audio for the older ships are up to the standard of the newer ships, cleaned up some bug fixes/polish for the upcoming 2.6.1 release and continued to support the community team and work on promotional materials.
On a technical front, we’ve also continued to revise and improve our dialogue pipeline and audio propagation system. A first pass at a Mix System was completed and we’re thrilled to announce that S42 will have a full music logic set in place and we’ve continued working on building ambience for some of the locations for the single player. There have been multiple improvements implemented in Star Marine from weapon sounds to dialogue which you will be able to hear soon.
UI
This month, the UI team has been primarily focused on improving and expanding the new front-end that was released in 2.6 with in-game leaderboards and a new pause menu, as well as performing various bug fixes.
We have also begun planning and scheduling for large scale UI features that we’d like to include in upcoming releases. For instance, we have been working closely with design in order to define the user-experience for purchasing & selling through the kiosk interfaces.
Animation
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The animation team has expanded this month. We’re very excited to welcome two new additions to the team and are ready to drop them in the deep end. We’ve gotten some fantastic feedback on 2.6 and have set to bug fixing and improving animations for the next patch. We’ve been improving fps assets across the board and making grenade throws more responsive.
In other ongoing tasks, we’ve made improvements on weapon animations, specifically reload animations and have begun to previz and iterate on feedback for new weapons coming down the pipeline. We’ve also been making progress on improving prone locomotion assets and providing assistance to the ATX PU team to get female mocap data implemented to the usable animations for Subsumption.
Design
The S42 Design team have been preparing for the incoming new Mission System that will replace large elements of the levels that had previously been implemented with Flowgraph. It will be a far more robust system for us that will limit any possible inconsistencies with designer setup. Also, as the Object Container Streaming System progresses, we are making sure that we maximise performance by splitting up the other chapters in the game into logical object containers.
The Live team have been very busy with bug fixes and implementing a scoring rebalance for Arena Commander and Star Marine. There have also been some AI improvements for Space Flight that have been implemented and continued work on detailing the Stanton map.
The Tech team are still very busy moving ships functionality into the new Item 2.0 system in preparation for a whole host of new gameplay opportunities.
The Systems Designers have been working on adding a lot more detail to the framework of the multi-crew Seat Actions in preparation for meeting with Chris in early Feb.
Foundry 42 DE
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Foundry 42 DE
AI
For AI, 2017 started with a one-week summit in the Los Angeles studio: we went through several topics that will be important for the improvements we want to do during the new year.
In the past few weeks, we’ve been getting the core functionalities of Subsumption into the Subsumption Mission System. The goal is to give designers the tools to create a larger variety of missions as quickly as possible. To achieve that, we have been implementing a way to reuse a piece of logic through the creation of “functions.” Functions can either have a “global” or “local” (to one activity or one mission) scope and they dynamically generate a task that can be used as a regular Subsumption task.
Going through the Crusader missions and rebuilding them in this new tool allowed us to identify and reorganize the functionalities that are currently required by designers to create their own logic. Just to give you some idea of the work done, here’s a description of some of the functionalities we recently worked on:
- Added a task to enable/disable markers in the environment for the mission owner
- Ability to spawn dynamic Action Areas in the environment and react to the events they generate
- Support for the InteractiveObjects to correctly handle the callbacks sent to the mission system
- Added support for tracking dynamic spawning of the entity and the ownership of the requests. This will allow us to allow entities to despawn only other entities they owned. Also it makes much easier for a mission to clean up the resources created.
- We improved the debug draw functionalities of Subsumption and the mission system and also added network support for the mission log (This is a sort of personal storage for the logs of each mission)
- We created a SimpleAudioComponent that allows the mission system to communicate directly with the mission owner’s client
- We added a functionality to allow the spawning system to filter and limit the spawning of entities to specified Action Areas
- We added the basic support to spawn Subsumption Platform/Layers (We will give you more details about this in the upcoming weeks)
For the character AI, we have continued the work for finalizing the changes in the Cover System and the Posture Manager to allow those systems data to be correctly exported inside Object Containers and used at runtime in non z-up environment. We’ve also been prototyping AI Characters reacting to players bumping into them by making sure that the movement code understands when progress over the movement cannot be achieved due to the player interrupting the character movement. We also continued our refactoring of the spaceships flight control, we are moving towards removing some layers of complexity and make more direct use of the IFCS from the AI perspective. This will allow us to benefit from any improvements made for the player in a much more straightforward way.
Quality Assurance
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.DE QA like to refer to the month of January as the “catch-up” month and used this time to tackle various test requests that required additional information as well as clearing out any Editor regression from Game-Dev that at the time was of a lower priority than regression in 2.6. We also spent a majority of January revamping our existing Editor checklists and documentation, as well as providing additional Editor training for testers in our UK office.
Additionally, we reviewed Star Marine feedback from our community and acted upon this feedback with test cases to provide additional information for our design team. The QA team also decided to review our existing sanity checks with Production and decide which were still useful to the team and which checks could be removed completely. We also used this opportunity to go over new bug tracking procedures with Production, so that we were all on the same page regarding labels that are used in our daily QA filters. Ivo Herzeg also kept us busy with changes made to the 1st person camera system, in which we were required to test all game modes. DE QA closed out the month with testing for Chris Bolte in order to track down a ZoneSystem crash that was plaguing our community in the latest 2.6 live release. We managed to finally reproduce this issue with 9 testers total (2 from DE and 7 from UK), which allowed Chris to narrow it down to being a logic error. Additional debugging was added to our Game-Dev branch and we will be attempting another playtest to reproduce this issue on Game-Dev, so that it can be finally fixed once and for all.
Cinematics
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Part of the Cinematics team is currently in a sprint to push towards a “final” look and feel for the conversation system that is used for talks between the player and NPCs (which the S42 campaign features a lot of).
This includes topics like:
- UI text placement and animation for dialogue choices
- Solving issues of: If, how and when to slow a player down running towards an NPC.
- How to make “gentle” collisions between physics capsules when the player violates personal space by getting too close.
- How to adjust recorded performances and manipulate the actor’s Look or even Body pose to match for a changing player position. (we call that performance transformation)
- Dynamic camera effects that kick in when the conversation is initialized both in a change of FOV and Depth of Field blur increasing.
We want our conversations to feel “filmic” while still allowing the player freedom. Invoking a “cinematic” feel first and foremost means changing the lens to values that are more akin to how a film camera would depict a character. The engines FOV traditionally is calculated with a vertical FOV value. The current in-game on-foot FOV is at 55 which is equivalent to an extreme wide angle lens of approximately ~13mm (using 35mm film equivalent ARRI master prime lenses as a comparison). That kind of lens is bordering on fisheye lens territory. If the player gets close to a character using this kind of FOV it distorts faces, so what we are doing is gradually changing the FOV over a certain time down to 30 which is equivalent to a ~25mm wide angle portrait lens. We are finding this is a nice compromise of the faces revealing all of the awesome scanned detail by appearing big on screen while still allowing for a sense of orientation in regards to the background (if player decides to move during a conversation).
Engine
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Work has started on our internal Solar system editor (SolEd), with a “top/down” universe view. We found that a custom editor extension became necessary due the massive scale of our solar system. It’s now possible to drag and drop Object Containers containing planets, space station etc., and see in real-time planets and objects moving while zooming all the way from a galaxy view down to grains of dirt on a planet. Ongoing work continues on procedural objects distribution on planets, scattering of large rocks on moon’s surfaces, initial passes of objects and vegetation blending with the planet terrain surface, improvements on particles distribution and vegetation / wind on a planetary scale. Initial passes on spawning Object Containers like small outposts on the planet surface, and initial work on adapting them to the environment with adjusting their parts to the terrain and blending the colors to make them more visually integrated like they were actually placed by Humans in the environment wrapped this month. And additional improvements have been added for large scale planet rendering like glossy surfaces and more artists controlled parameters.
There also has been effort towards reintroducing static code analysis as a mandatory part of the TryBuild system, Zone system fixes / optimizations, ongoing work on the new pak system for the patcher updates, and fixes and support for 2.6.1.
Tech Art
The Technical artists in Frankfurt have been busy supporting FPS features and weapons for 2.6. They improved the weapon IK grip setup, now almost all weapons are using the runtime IK grip which helps us to change left hand poses per weapon while keeping base animation the same. They also created new cVars for previsualizing and testing new weapons in the engine with all their functionality. On the Engine side, we are participating in R&D efforts to improve foot planting in game and we’ve already started seeing good results.
Design
The Level Design team in Frankfurt is prototyping the modularity systems for Satellites, Surface Outposts and Space Station Interiors which is almost complete. Currently, the Environment Art team is providing us with greybox versions of the components that we will use to assemble the modular locations.
With our locations, the main goal is always to use them to complement upcoming systems, provide a base for future game play, as well as add to the feeling of a living, functional and realistic universe. This doesn’t always mean that the gameplay related to a location will be available when we release the station template, rather we try to ensure that once said system/gameplay becomes available we already have the location required. For this reason (and as seen on previous ATVs) we are continuing our work on the Truck Stop, Refinery and Cargo Station, the first design phase of these is complete and they have now been handed over to the Environment Art team.
The System Design guys have been refactoring our usable system to allow both AI and players to make use of the same objects at the same time (such as AI and player sitting at the same table, interacting with each other). We’re also adding support for multiple actions to be performed while inside a usable and smoothly transitioning between these actions (character sitting at a table can be eating, talking, scratching his nose, sleeping with his head on the table etc.)
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The Oxygen, Breathing & Stamina systems have started being implemented and soon we will have players begin to carry their own oxygen supplies or risk turning blue in the face. The system should handle everything from how the oxygen tank delivers breathable air to the helmet, to how the player breathes said air and how his body converts that into actual usable stamina. At the same time, all actions are being converted to consume this stamina, so you will want to keep your character supplied with oxygen if you want them to be capable of performing various actions.
Landing and Take-off systems are also going into implementation mode as we are unifying Squadron 42 and PU mechanics. The system should easily handle everything from the more basic taking off in the PU to the fully cinematic experiences needed in S42. Basically we’re implementing an air traffic control system that allows players to queue for landing permissions and makes sure that people don’t block landing sites for everyone else.
Small additions were also made to the Mercenary and Bounty Hunter career designs and the systems needed for these. Customs are also receiving some design love as we are start to gate what the player can bring in legally and how smuggling things in high security areas works.
VFX
The Frankfurt VFX team has been continuing to work with the programming team on the tools required to spawn various particles across the planets. One of the more recent additions has been the implementation of planetary wind. Due to the spherical nature of the planets, the wind had to be completely rewritten to work correctly across the surface of a planet. This will help to make the environments feel more alive, from blowing around smoke and dust to rustling the leaves on the vegetation.
Environmental Art
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The environment team here in Frankfurt has grown again with two new people joining the team this month. With the increased amount of environment artists, we’re able to put even more effort into our procedural planet tech. We’ve been recently building great looking assets for individual moons, as well as refining our procedural tech and tools for moons, full planets, and full systems. One key element of the planetary tech that we’ve been focusing on is the procedural scattering system, which will allow us to procedurally scatter rocks, plants, trees and other elements across planets based on artist defined rules. While the tech is still in development, the first automated results are already promising and are improving every day.
Turbulent
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Turbulent
Spectrum Alpha
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.We are working hard towards Spectrum’s initial public alpha release alongside SC 2.6.1. We can’t wait for you guys to get your hands on it with your Orgs. In its first incarnation, expect the web version of public and private chat, forums, search functionality as well as member presence and a decent mobile experience.
The Evocati and volunteer testers have been invaluable in providing initial feedback and bug reports (yeah, yeah we have those too!) on the PTU since December. Our weekly build process and direct contact with users have really helped us focus on the features and bug fixes that matter the most to those who use the tools. Once it is released to live, we will be continuously working to build out and improve Spectrum with your feedback.
After the live release and stabilization phase, we plan on adding more community customization features and create dedicated mobile applications so Spectrum can follow you everywhere you go.
We will share more details about our roadmap once we get this first major release out of the way!
Sales
Coming off the holiday break, two promo competitions were introduced, a revamped Vanduul Swarm and the all new Pirate Swarm. These modes tested players’ skills to the limit and if they were able to complete all waves of the challenge, they were awarded an aggressor badge to display their accomplishment. For a limited time, these successful pilots were also given the ability to purchase the Vanduul Glaive upon completing Vanduul Swarm and the new Pirate Caterpillar upon completing the Pirate Swarm.
To close out the month, the sleek Dragonfly Posters and the comfortable Squadron 42 Hoodies were put back on the merchandise store, but get them soon before they are gone!
Community
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Community
Broadcasts
January saw a number of changes to our community content. Around the Verse continues to be refined as we explore new ways to showcase progress without monopolizing too much of our developer’s time. Our January Subscriber’s Town Hall featured Chris Roberts, Erin Roberts, Tony Zurovec and Todd Papy. It was a rare opportunity to have all these important leads sitting and chatting in the same place. We also launched two new shows. Star Citizen Happy Hour is a way to involve fan broadcasters and CIG developers in a gameplay session and casual hangout with the community. Then there’s our other new show focused on YOU. Citizens of the Stars highlights the amazing contributions you make to the Star Citizen experience. It also features ‘Quantum Questions,’ in which CIG developers answer your questions… as many as they can in two minutes! If there’s one constant in our broadcast output, it’s change. We’ll continue to iterate throughout the rest of 2017 and beyond in an effort to bring you the best and most relevant content possible.
Events
Community Managers Jared Huckaby and Tyler Witkin went to PAX South and attended the local Bar Citizen event in San Antonio. Opportunities to hang out and meet the backers are one of the best parts of our job, and the folks who turned out for this event were a stellar group, as usual. Remember that Bar Citizen events are 100% fan organized. You can see if there’s one in your area and maybe even find help planning one at the fan website barcitizen.sc.
This Week in Star Citizen
The old Community Manager’s Log and Schedule has evolved into a new, weekly front page post called This Week in Star Citizen. The post highlights what’s happening each week, and provides a look at some of the content you may have missed from the Star Citizen community.
Finally, testing continues on Spectrum, the upcoming replacement to our current forum and chat systems. You can join the testing now at http://ptu.cloudimperiumgames.com/spectrum with new builds going out each week. We’re excited to roll out the first official iteration of Spectrum in the near future. We’ll continue to add intended features and iterate on it based on your feedback throughout the remainder of the year.
Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…y-Studio-Report
Monthly Studio Report: November 2016
Greetings Citizens!
November 2016 was one for the record books! We celebrated our fourth anniversary with a special ‘air show’-themed livestream featuring the return of everyone’s favorite Galactic Gear (now Galactic Tour!) host. We launched the long-awaited Prowler boarding ship and made great progress all around… which you can track in more detail than ever thanks to the weekly production reports we now share with the community.
Work continued on Star Citizen Alpha 2.6, 3.0 and Squadron 42 this month, with a focus on getting Star Marine ready for launch. We’ve been having an incredible time watching it come together, and we’re excited to let the Star Citizen community exerience the pitched FPS battles our Quality Assurance teams have been putting through their paces. Now let’s take a look back at the month that was November, 2016.
CIG Los Angeles
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Cloud Imperium Los Angeles
Engineering
With the push for 2.6, the team made huge progress on the vehicle system and flight control, while laying the groundwork for further development of the item system. Improved first-person radar mechanics should allow for new gameplay, and the first version of our atmospheric volume system was rolled out. Work continued on systems that support and control interactions, and tools for designers to flesh out the gigantic universe of Star Citizen.
Tech Design
Our tech design team continues to plug away supporting the engineers in their endeavor to get Item2.0 up and out the door. We also started putting some new ships through the pipeline. We can’t say which yet, but in the meantime, we’re very excited to finally release Drake’s Caterpillar and Herald. Last but not least we’ve been all hands on deck getting SC alpha 2.6.0 ready for public consumption as well as working with the various teams to put on a fun live stream.
Art
The Art Teams have been dividing their efforts between Star Marine, Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe. The Ship Team put the finishing touches on the Caterpillar and also moved onto the Drake Buccaneer making progress on the whitebox and now greybox of that ship. The Character Art Team worked on planetary fauna to add to the vast landscapes of our many planets as well as updating and working on humanoids by improving textures on the Outlaw and Marine BDUs, and have also created several new clothing items that you’ll soon see in the shops in the Persistent Universe. Both teams still have much more to do, so keep your eyes peeled for new additions!
Tech Content
The team was intensely focused on cleaning up the animation streaming system and unified the character head assets. Character Items were revisited and improved, setting the stage for the inventory system yet to come, and new scripts and pipeline tools will allow for artists and designers to bring even more to the ‘verse in coming builds. For the first time, asset and profiling fixes lead to zero asset build errors in the game.
Narrative
In the wake of last month’s motion capture shoot, the team worked with the editor to review the footage to put together selected footage for Chris to review. In anticipation of the November Live Stream, everyone pulled together to help script some of the events and segments while continuing to tackle any lingering 2.6 needs, the vast catalogue of items that are being created and chipping away at 3.0.
Will and Adam faced each other in the Electronic Access Invitational, causing much division and tension in the writer pit. Although the competition was resolved, hopefully they will start speaking soon.
Quality Assurance
LAQA’s primary focus was on supporting local developers, and providing QA support and participating in the November Live Stream event. This involved a number of Star Marine and Arena Commander playtests. The team also took looks at the latest Afterburner and flight balance changes, as well as new missile systems that John Pritchett was working on. The team also enjoyed taking early looks at the new slate of ships for SC alpha 2.6.0: the Caterpillar, the Herald and even an extra-early look at the 85X.
LAQA also welcomed to the team a new tester: Andrew Hernando. Andrew joins us from Turtle Rock Studios, and he jumped in the deep end very quickly to get up to speed on the full scope of Star Citizen.
CIG Austin
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Cloud Imperium Austin
November has been a big month for Star Citizen. We have ramped up major testing on Alpha 2.6 and started adding Evocati playtesters as well. We provided a lot of technical support for the Anniversary Livestream and a ton of Player Relations and Platform support for the Anniversary sale which was a huge success! We’re looking towards the release of 2.6 now and the end of the calendar year, so here are some detailed updates from each team.
Design
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The Austin Design Team has been looking ahead to 3.0.0. for the majority of November. Lead Tech Designer Rob Reininger took a trip out to LA to touch base with several of the Execs and Directors on various topics. He discussed the Shop Entity setup with Chris Roberts and Paul Reindell, presented the latest iteration on the Shopping Kiosk designs to Chris, and reviewed upcoming design requests for the Character Team with Josh Herman. He got some great feedback and has been doing another iteration on the Shopping Kiosk, working with the UI Team to get some good mockups.
We’re experimenting with “Shop Archetypes” for the better part of a month now. These archetypes are basically establishing fundamental parameters that every shop within a certain “type” will follow. Parameters include specific metrics that need to be followed, types of NPCs, prop requests, animation requests, and any gameplay considerations that need to be taken into account. The first batch of Shop Archetypes we’ve been addressing are “Bar,” “Clothing Shop,” “Security” and “Personal Weapons Shop.” There are several questions surrounding these various archetypes, so we’ve been having regular syncs with Tony Z and Todd Papy to answer these questions.
Designer Pete Mackay has been focused on the economy as it relates to 3.0. He’s been tweaking his Price Fixer tool, which takes varying gameplay aspects into account to generate value for items and components. These values will help to inform final in-game pricing for items and ships. Pete has also been defining various aspects of the “Commodities” list, distribution of said commodities, and how this informs the establishment of trade routes within the Stanton System.
Art
Ship artists Chris Smith and Josh Coons are chugging away on their respective ships. Chris Smith is putting the final touches on the Hornet refactor and Josh is in the middle of Greybox pass for the Drake Cutlass refactor. Chris and Josh also took some time this month to create variants on the Hornet and Herald, the Wildfire and racing variants respectively. Emre Switzer has been hard at work at lighting the Star Marine maps, OP Station Demien Station and Echo Eleven.
Animation
The PU Animation Team has been supporting Squadron 42 by implementing animations for the various Usables that have been set up in the Idris by Design. Bryan Brewer and David Peng worked on the Idris Deck Crew sequence, splitting up the various roles within the Deck Crew to be operated completely as AI. This is a very complex sequence that required a lot of back-and-forth with Design and it is looking really awesome. David and Vanessa have since been incorporating what we’re calling “lego piece transition” animations into the existing animation sets. These lego pieces were captured at Imaginarium Studios and, once stitched in to various animations, will allow AI characters to interact with Usables at more angles than they could previously. Right now we’re specifically working on stitching these into the Mess Hall and Sitting Console animation sets.
The Ship Animation Team wrapped up work on the Drake Caterpillar and Origin 85X this month in preparation for the 2.6 release. Jay Brushwood has since moved on to improving the GForces animations in the various cockpit types, taking into account improvements in other tech like Eye Stabilization to get them feeling really nice. Daniel Craig finished implementing all of the updated enter/exit combat speed animations this month as well.
Backend Services
The Backend Team spent the month delving into various areas of the project. Tom Sawyer has been fixing up bugs to help smooth out our lobby/matchmaking services. He is also supporting the UI Team in implementing the new Frontend Refactor of the Lobby, Matchmaking, and Leaderboard screens. Tom also created a new Leaderboard Service that grabs info from the website leaderboards and posts them in the new in-game Leaderboards.
Lastly, Ian Guthrie at Wyrmbyte helped implement some new admin commands that will help our LiveOps and Customer Support teams better navigate servers and identify problems. Ian is always a huge help and we’re grateful for all he has done on this project.
Quality Assurance
The first half of the month testing focused on Star Marine and Arena Commander to ensure they were ready for the November Live Stream. The second half of the month, the focus has been testing 2.6.0 and supporting multiple deployments to Evocati. We worked closely with Turbulent in a series of destructive tests of the new Spectrum website. Michael Blackard, Elijah Montenegro and Dash Wilkinson were tasked to assist the Animation department with special projects. This month we also welcomed Justin ‘Jub’ Bauer to the team.
Player Relations
If Player Relations is unfamiliar to you, it’s because it’s just been created! CIG Player Relations encompasses three areas: Game Support, E-Commerce Support (formerly Customer Service) and Community Support, with Will Leverett as Director of Player Relations overseeing the global department out of Austin, Texas, and Ray Roocroft managing the UK team.
We’ve worked hard to combine our US and UK support teams into a single organization that can mobilize to expedite support for the backers, and there was no better example than the work that the team did each and every day of the November Anniversary Live Stream and Sale. Special kudos go to Kraiklyn and CDanks for doubling up on live stream support.
We spent the later part of the month preparing 2.6.0 to go to the Evocati, and a very special thanks goes to Proxus, Mac, and George for their efforts in managing the test environments. They’ve spent countless nights and weekends working on Star Marine with our volunteer testers, and we’re excited that we’re getting close to pushing the build out to a wider audience.
IT/Operations
Network Services Manager Paul Vaden and IT Director Mike Jones spent time in LA with IT Manager Dennis Daniel in order to prepare for the November Live Stream event. For this live stream event, the IT team coordinated to build and deploy 12 gaming class systems that were used in the head to head matchups between Team Anvil and Team Aegis. Additionally, the IT team built a new live streaming solution capable of switching and mixing all players into the live stream plus cameras. Overall, it was an incredibly rewarding project, but the real credit goes to the video production team for pulling off a great show.
LiveOps/DevOps
2.6 was a huge focus this month as we prepare all our servers and publishing systems for Star Marine. While we completed several publishes to the Evocati, we deployed countless publishes internally for the QA teams across all studios to test on. With any major release there is a good amount of configuration and tuning that goes on behind the scenes. We really enjoy the early testing phases for this work. Special call out to Ahmed and his team, Andy, Nathan, and Jeffrey who have been putting in so much work on the publishing pipeline in order to streamline our internal publishes for flawless rapid deployment. This will be critical in the coming weeks as we roll out 2.6 to wider and wider groups.
Foundry 42 UK
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Foundry 42 UK
Art
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The big focus this month had to be the Prowler. It was a complex ship and we had a lot to deliver but the team did a great job. We didn’t get to rest on our laurels, though, as we had work to do on the 85X, MISC racing ship and Caterpillar promo. Work has begun on the Vanduul Stinger and the ship team has kicked off a major lighting pass on the Idris to make sure that our characters look amazing in the ship’s interior environment. Finally, several more rooms have been checked off the Javelin, leaving only a few left until the interior is complete.
We have three FPS weapons in concept. Plus, we have done a ton of previous work for more Klaus and Werner energy weapons. We have also done additional work with the Knightbridge Arms ship weapon family and fleshing out modular barrels.
In addition, we’ve been pushing heavily to close out 2.6, particularly the Star Marine maps OP Station Demien and Echo Eleven. As you can see, we’ve also continued to push along the visual development of our ‘surface outpost’ set as well as our planetary surface assets for the vertical slice level.
The team Behaviour focused on adding life to the three epic planets they’re working on. Each planet has now evolved from whiteboxed to textured and modelled environments. Although it may seem a lot of work is done, but more intensive work will be needed on the texture and composition to hit the look and feel we’re hoping to bring to the fans.
For Hurston, we focused on two areas, the interior streets and vista shots of the planet. For the interior streets, we wanted to create an oppressive feel for the general populace, so we added obstructed skylines, narrow alleys covered with machinery, ever present security checkpoints, and expressionless statues looking down towards the streets.
For MicroTech, we reduced the size and scale of our plan and focused on one dome only in an effort to make the planet a more feasible endeavor, while maximizing the visuals.
For Crusader, we worked especially hard in utilizing the building silhouettes and gaps between buildings to present breathtaking vista shots on the skylines. We also spent time on the background buildings of the map to complement the planetary vista, which offers a nice balance between the natural environment and human technology.
VFX
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.This month, the VFX team finished a full pass on two of the new ships going into 2.6 including the 85X and the Caterpillar. For Star Marine, we completed a final optimization pass for the Demien and Echo Eleven maps including destructible props and surface type impacts, implemented a new VFX pass on the energy shotgun (changing the rounds from electricity to plasma) and did an initial pass on dead player fadeout VFX.
We did a huge clean-up of ship and fps weapons, implementing a new projectile shader created by the Graphics team and improved missile effects to tie in better with the new missile assets. In a bit of administrative work, we also cleaned up our library of generic particles. It’s always nice to do a little spring-cleaning to makes sure the team can find elements quickly.
Design
Most of the S42 designers have been working out of our Frankfurt office throughout November in an effort to work as efficiently as possible with the system designers that are helping with the Subsumption implementation. Obviously, the tech is still being developed, but the process is really paying off and we are starting to get behavior types into the game. The Vertical Slice level is still enabling us to prove out gameplay mechanics that will allow designers to polish up the graybox missions and the intense focus on small details is making a big difference across the board.
The guys working on 2.6 are fixing bugs and last second polish actions that will hopefully make it into your hands very soon.
Audio
This month the Audio department, like the rest of the team, was pretty heavily focused on Star Marine and other 2.6 needs. For 2.6 we finished up audio for the Caterpillar and 85X which included everything from thrusters and moving parts to extensive work on the internal ambience around the ship. For Star Marine, we created and implemented ambient and environment sounds for the levels, weapon sounds, player sounds and ambient music. Extensive work was also done to include announcers for the teams.
We also continued working on Squadron 42 which included (without getting into specifics): developing our outsourced editorial pipeline to handle the massive amount of dialogue that’s been recorded, optimizing the AI battle chatter code, working on the ambient and cinematic music.
For the PU and Arena Commander, we did an overhaul on the Announcer and Ship Computer Systems, including the implementation of a Ship Computer Verbosity setting into the options menu, and fixed some issues where sound was dropping out during Quantum travel and during some weapon fire.
UI
Since last month, the UI team has been continuing work on the implementation of the new front-end menus and Electronic Access lobbies. The entire front-end flow is now mostly in a functional state, and the artists have been working on furthering the visual polish and animations for each screen. We’ve also been working on both the Star Marine and Arena Commander loadout interfaces – for ship customization, we’ve got 3D holo-objects rendering in the UI with smooth rotation and zooming. The work we are doing here will also eventually serve as the base system for the revamped in-world holotable interface.
Since the live stream, we’ve also made additional headway with regard to the Star Marine game HUD – which includes better AR callouts for friendly players, offscreen icon boundaries, as well as improved rendering of the 2D UI. We have also designed 3D icons for in-game pickup items in Arena Commander. We have also started working on insignia designs for Star Marine and Arena Commander leaderboard rankings.
Programming
Again working hard on all the features and polish for 2.6 and on the FPS for the Star Marine games. In Arena Commander we’ve now implemented the missile and ammo pickups. We also continued work on the new camera system including the new spectator cam mode.
The team is also working hard on the Arena Commander mega map. Most of the work required for the dynamic gamerules has been completed, and now it’s at the testing stage to find what still isn’t working and fix it up. The lobby refactor means we can now connect and disconnect to a server without having to completely load and unload a whole map, which we hope will make a big and positive difference for you while creating and joining Arena Commander matches.
On the networking side we’re making great progress with the message queue rewrite, serialised components, the lobby refactor and entity bind culling.
Graphics
The depth of field effect is getting a complete overhaul to vastly improve its speed (up to 10x faster in some cases). We’re fine tuning the shadow system to achieve greater shadow resolution and many more shadows through the introduction of static shadow maps for the environments, with the focus being on achieving cinematic quality lighting on SQ42 in-game rather than just in hand crafted cut-scenes. We’ve also started on a major upgrade of the bounced light system (global illumination) with the first step being the GPU acceleration of reflection/cube-map captures to remove the previous offline/CPU system.
Animation
We have been mostly supporting the upcoming Star Marine release. There has also been continued work on AI combat animation assets so that the design and programming teams can get core functionality implemented and ready for the next round of animation iteration.
All existing base weapons have been through a second animation pass. Reloads are improved, as well as hand positioning and various other tweaks. There has been some further work done on previz for the next round of weapons that are due to come down the pipeline. Legacy weapons have been spruced up for the initial Star Marine release with improved hand positioning and firing animations.
The prone animation set is being looked at with a view to implementing some big improvements. Core poses will be updated and transitions to and from different stances are prepped and ready to be worked on.
We have a new animator based in the Frankfurt studio that is mainly going to be working with the design and code team on getting AI functionality looking and feeling good. There has been progress made on player combat signals as well as AI reactions to danger / sounds.
Quality Assurance
To help with 2.6.0 feature testing and preparation for the live stream, we split our team into three groups, with Liam leading the Squadron 42 testing, Mike leading Arena Commander and Crusader testing and Nathan leading Star Marine testing, with the help of our FPS specialist Mark Tobin. The testing required a lot of cross studio communication and team building as we worked on filling servers to ensure we had a steady platform to push to the Evocati shortly after the live stream. For the live stream itself our efforts came together, testing the new flight balances put in by the tech team and the new ships, we had several dry runs of what we showed to ensure it all went off without a hitch.
Foundry 42 DE
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Foundry 42 DE
Cinematics
For the SQ42 campaign we’re continuing work on video comms and several conversational scenes, cleaning and editing the required animations as well as setting up and lighting them. We also experimented with a camera/character based lighting rig, as we’ll have the challenge that some conversations can happen in very dark alcoves/corridors or other non-controlled situations where we might want more filmic light shining on the scene.
We also completed the 10 separate “Galactic Tour” segments for the Anniversary Live Stream. Those featured already established lore character Jax McCleary visiting the 2946 Intergalactic Aerospace Expo. Jax used a modified Tier 2 character head and, as time was critical, only had some basic animation cleanup done for body and face. For the Expo, we built the ex-Navy airbase and hangars that got converted into show floor halls. Different ship manufacturers got a 3D version of their logo, including Drake, Aegis, Anvil and RSI.
VFX
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.During the past month, the Frankfurt VFX work has been focused on polishing effects for the 2.6 release. These included full environmental VFX passes on several of the levels as well as some effects created specifically for the FPS aspect of the game, like several new variations of blood impacts for when the player is shot, screen effects for player damage that are triggered via flowgraph and a new MK4 frag grenade explosion.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Quality Assurance
DEQA’s main focus for November was Star Marine, Squadron 42, as well as testing new engine-side features. Chris Speak and Glenn Kneale spent a majority of the month working on Star Marine ad-hoc testing and regression, with Glenn also tackling Squadron 42 testing and AI sync meetings. We also participated in multiple playtests not only once but sometimes three or four times per day, ranging from dev playtests to cross studio playtests with our offices in UK, ATX, and LA. Chris also worked on creating various test levels for the dev team to use for their own feature testing. Melissa Estrada has been working closely with Chris Bolte to test his newly developed integrated page heap for our Game Dev builds that will allow us to capture more robust crash core dumps for our engineers. These core dumps will provide much more information for an engineer to use when resolving low reproduction crashes, which is a win-win for bug smashing and for improving overall gameplay. Chris Bolte made this process much simpler, so that anyone in QA will be able to provide these core dumps when requested for a specific crash. Melissa also spent time learning and testing Sascha Hoba’s planet editor together with Pascal Muller, in order to formulate a new checklist that will specifically check the planet editor’s core functionality to ensure that it continues to be in working order for our environment artists.
Environmental Art
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.This month the DE Environment team grew by a few people, so the senior staff spent time getting them acquainted to our internal processes. The existing team is primarily focused on procedural planets tasks: defining and creating bespoke ecosystems like canyons and mining pits, improving the blending of the terrain materials to get more detail, and iterating on the tools to make the workflow more efficient. They also worked on various megastructures for a SQ42 level, including modelling, UV mapping and making prefabs out of the components for the designers to place.
Tech Art
Like many other departments, Tech Art spent the month supporting 2.6 as well as S42. The team worked with Designers and updated a large amount of animation for FPS, especially improving select, deselect, and reloads. They updated and re-exported numerous weapons and gadgets to accommodate the new left hand grip pose, which is now functioning using runtime IK. We also completed our new weapon pre-visualization pipeline which enables our modelling department to test their WIP weapons directly in a game, this allows them to quickly review and identify any potential issue a weapon may have.
Engineering
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The engine team has almost too much to post, which is a good thing, so let’s start with the high-level stuff. We made some general improvements on Physics, Shader system, Texture Array Streaming, Animation Ragdoll and Terrain/Ecosystems. One of the tools allowed artists to punch holes into planet terrain for smoother embedding of large mass structures which will come in handy for landing areas. We also switched to a multi-threaded memory allocator which will not only increase efficiency, but unify the use across the engine, game, tools and editor.
We improved the reprojection based occlusion systems by cleaning up the previously existing code and converting it to pure SSE2 SIMD (allows us later to select the best SIMD variant supported on the user’s CPU). While doing so, we also fixed some aliasing problems inside the occlusion code which results in a more stable frame during movement. Then we spent some time doing a massive clean-up of our Zone transition code. Over the time this part had become very complex, but we managed to get the complexity down again which made our zone transitions more stable. Before the update, the client code had to find out if an object had changed zones, which was very fragile. Now the code is explicit, so that all objects change zones as an automatic operation. In addition, this is also synced with physics which should fix (or at least improve a lot) the cases of players being teleported to space when entering/leaving ships.
We also improved our low level memory redirection functionality; we managed to get rid of some layers making the code more understandable. Building on this clean-up, we changed our core system allocators, so far we had used a custom allocator for small allocations and the OS allocator for larger ones. Problem was that this design is several years old. In practice, this means that the OS allocator can now perform small allocations as well as our allocator, but instead of going OS allocator only, we went with JeMalloc. This is the system allocator used by FreeBSD and backed by Facebook. JeMalloc follows a more modern design so that it scales very well with multiple threads, something which is important for us and will be more important as we parallelize more and more code.
We also continued working on our Area system. Areas are a special mark-up used by the game designers to give rooms or areas some specific context. The engine can report when entities enter or leave such an area. We have now extended this system to track the overlapping status of all entities within all areas. To implement this in a way that it works with our massive scale (in number of entities and areas), we moved the old system directly into the zone system, which allows us to reuse spatial information for a much more efficient algorithm.
Weapons
Over the last month, the FPS weapon artists polished weapons and gadgets for upcoming releases, built prototypes for a whole range of new Kastak Arms guns, and spent some time making modular irons sights for the P8 weapon family. We completed the first pass art for the new re-worked ATT-4 laser rifle, and started the same process for the Arrowhead sniper rifle. The ship weapon team has been blocking out a new range of ship weapons based on the updated Knightbridge Arms manufacturer style which will include a more modular design.
Level Design
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The Level Design team in Frankfurt is hard at work on the locations required for 3.0, this involves building out space station archetypes and satellite variants as well as a few surface outposts. We are also looking into supporting the art team on the larger planetary landing zones, as well as progressing on a modular approach for our locations. Satellites and surface outposts are shaping up nicely and have been passed onto the art team.
System Design
This month system design was busy setting up usable records for Squadron 42, which will lay the groundwork for cinematic scenes and player interactions, adding background conversations between AI and in general making AI feel a lot more alive and natural in their environment. At the same time, we worked on finalizing the Mercenary and Bounty Hunter careers for 3.0 and breaking these careers into their component systems. We also made progress on the AI skills and stats system which should allow each AI to have an individual personality, individual needs and wants. Generally based on these skills and stats, an AI will change the priority of their Subsumption behaviors. For example, if an AI is ordered to fix your ship, he might not do that if he needs to go to the toilet or if he is too tired. It will also encourage the players to crew their ships with AI who have a variety of skills for every situation, and set up teams based on how all of these guys complement each other for the task at hand.
AI
We made great progress on AI this past month. At the beginning of the month we completed the first pass on Mission Functions and Mission Callbacks. A mission in Subsumption will first start with an Init function and will end with Uninit to allow designers to both prepare and clean-up their logic. Let’s assume we create a new test mission where we want to spawn Captain White in the Bridge, the Init function will look like this.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Functions for a Mission can either be called by the AI code (like the Init above), or can be dynamically created by designers, and they can be imagined as mission local functions. As you can see in the picture the Captain White character is now stored into the “CaptainWhite” variable, that is the NPC type, which carries information about what the game code can communicate to the Mission System in regards to the element that it stores. An NPC variable can, for example, call back the mission system when the NPC health changes, when the NPC dies, when he gets healed and so on. If we want to react to situations in which the health of Captain White is changed, then we can add a mission callback, as in the following picture.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The more callbacks that are exposed from the game code, the more events a designer can react to and create his own logic. Also the Subsumption Mission system (as Subsumption in general) allows game programmers to define any type in the game code, allowing the system to be easily extended without any need to modify the core code. Callbacks can also be specified as global, for example, we can have specific logic when any NPC dies during a mission. Those are what we call “Global Callbacks”.
For Subsumption, we also made new improvements to the Combat behaviors. Combat is a very different element for the NPC behaviors, since it requires a lot of coordination between the characters and specific analysis. We created a new Combat activity (based on the work we have done in the previous months), so that the designers can utilize it for any case in which a hostile is detected by an NPC character. The first combat reaction is something that happens when an NPC thinks he saw something dangerous: his behavior will change based on how sure he is that the thing he saw is an actual danger for himself. For example, an NPC that see the player at a far distance, won’t react immediately to the threat, he will try to look in the direction of the player and understand if what he sees can be a threat, and if so he can communicate to the other member of his group and then start to attack the enemy. This is the state that allows the player to decide his approach, he is almost detected, but he can still try to hide, approach from a different angle or, for example, try to take down the enemy before he informs his friends.
For combat and non-combat environments we have introduced an “Emotion component” to allow the ability to control facial animations based on the emotion of the NPC. We also worked on improving the animation flows to allow proper blending between states and make sure the characters feel more fluid during the gameplay. We also did some work on ground turrets to make sure that they can easily be controlled by the AI and execute proper behaviors. In addition to all the above, we made progress on improving stability and fixing existing bugs.
Turbulent
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Turbulent
For those of you who are new to Star Citizen, Spectrum is an integrated communication platform that includes forum, chat, private messaging, and notifications. Future versions will include additional features like voice chat and in-game overlay.
We were excited to release Spectrum (alpha v.0.1) to members of the Evocati test group. Having the “Avocados” test the communication platform and give feedback to us has been invaluable. We are planning to expand the testing group to include more and more backers, finally culminating in a full release on the site for all backers in the new year.
This past November has been an incredibly busy month when it comes to ships and ship sales. At the end of the month the Anniversary sale was kicked off with the Galactic Tour series, which featured a new manufacturer each day, offering up their ships for sale. During the sale we saw not only older ships making a comeback, but new ships as well, including four new variants, the 85X and the sleek Tevarin dropship, the Prowler! The Anniversary sale was capped off by the return of all manufacturers and ships to the sales floor for a two-day Grand Finale.
The Wrap-Up
Looking Ahead
That’s it for November, 2016! Watch this space for additional updates, and please continue to check our production reports for the status of Alpha 2.6 and Star Marine. We’re also ending our broadcast year with a holiday livestream later today; tune in to help us bid adieu to 2016!
Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…y-Studio-Report
Introducing the Caterpillar
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.First introduced in 2871, Drake Interplanetary’s Caterpillar has long proven to be a reliable, cost-effective multi-role vessel, capable of being outfitted for everything from mercantile operations to combat support. Long hailed as a hard-fought alternative to the ubiquitous Hull series, the Caterpillar is a freighter that doesn’t skimp on weaponry or customization.
The 2946 Caterpillar takes modular to a new extreme, featuring both a fully customizable set of cargo segments and the line’s signature off-center detachable command module. It’s this versatility that endeared it to smaller hauling outfits Whether you are looking for a defensible transport or a spacecraft that can be upgraded piece-by-piece instead of replaced, the Caterpillar is your best choice.
A Controversial Choice?
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Ever since the infamous Kesslering Heist of 2903, the Caterpillar has attracted another, more dangerous reputation: getaway vehicle. Although Drake Interplanetary representatives have consistently decried the association of the ships with criminal elements, the latest TSAS Crime Stats suggests a different story. In one of their many surveys, culled from statistics pulled from around the UEE, the Caterpillar is near the top of “ships used in the commission of a crime,” taking part in everything from illegal salvage to smuggling to assaults. It has the dubious distinction as the highest ranked cargo ship on the list, beating out Freelancer, Hull or Starfarer transports.
The Caterpillar’s size allows it to easily transport goods stolen in space and its modularity allows it to carry unusual weapons and ultralight support ships, making it an ideal ‘raid leader,’ but it’s most remarkable quality is how unremarkable it is. Thanks to their affordable price range, Caterpillars are an ideal ship for everyone from independent haulers to part of a fleet, meaning that Caterpillars can be found at every Human port in the galaxy. The fact that they’re so common makes it easy for criminals to hide in plain sight.
Flyable in 2.6
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.With the latest PU update, the Drake Caterpillar will join the MISC Starfarer and Aegis’ Starfarer Gemini in Star Citizen’s fleet of large multi-crew ships. Intended to form the lead ship in raiding groups, the Caterpillar is a flagship any outlaw or legitimate businessperson can be proud of.
The Caterpillar will remain on sale for one week following the release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.6. Future patches will add additional functionality, including the detachment feature for the Command Module. New upgrades for the Caterpillar’s segments and other mounts will be available in future patches.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Definition of Reliable!
Learn more about the Caterpillar with this booklet.
Read the brochureor
DownloadConcept sale
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. All ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
The Caterpillar will be available ‘flight ready’ when Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 launches. Additional modules, variants and/or upgrades will be available in the future.
Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…AKE-Caterpillar
Let’s Communicate
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Don’t let the utilitarian lines or the vertical silhouette fool you. The Herald is one half pure speed and one half cutting edge high tech computer system, which makes it Drake’s inaugural information runner.
While the Herald looks more like an angry beetle than a sleek racing ship, it’s very, very fast. In fact, Drake has designed a spacecraft that’s almost more engine than ship. Pilots report that running a Herald at full speed is a little like strapping yourself to a thruster. Unlike traditional racers, the Herald values speed over maneuverability because it’s designed to intercept, protect and transport sensitive information as effectively as possible.
While producing a high-tech courier ship might seem unusual for Drake, rest assured the Herald has a place alongside the Caterpillar, Cutlass, Buccaneer and Dragonfly. Although intended for use strictly as a fast data runner ship, the extensive computer systems aboard the Herald are often adapted for darker purposes.
About the Herald
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The Drake Herald joins an elite group of fast ships which includes the M50, 350R and Mustang Gamma. QA reports that navigating the Murray Cup map in Arena Commander using the Herald is a true challenge … are you pilot enough?
The Drake Herald will be introduced as flight ready in Star Citizen’s next patch, Alpha 2.6. The Herald will be on sale for one week following the release of patch 2.6 allowing potential couriers to pick up this fast starship. Additional functionality relating to the Herald, including systems related to data and hacking, will be introduced in future Persistent Universe patches.
A booklet from FTL Courier Services, one of the companies proudly using the Herald in the ‘verse, is available below for your enjoyment. Whether you’re interested in picking up a Herald or not, we hope you’ll enjoy this deeper look at the Star Citizen world.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Securing Your Communication!
Learn more about the Herald with this FTL brochure.
Read the brochureor
DownloadAbout the Sale
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. All ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
The Herald will be available ‘flight ready’ when Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 launches. Additional modules, variants and/or upgrades will be available in the future.
Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…38-DRAKE-Herald
‘Tis The Season!
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.Happy Holidays, Star Citizens! We’re grateful for the incredible support you’ve given us throughout 2016 and we encourage you to tune in to our annual Holiday Livestream on Friday December 16th at 11:00am PST to help us end the year with a little celebration. We will be playing Star Citizen Alpha 2.6, talking with Chris Roberts and other members of the development team, sharing a new ship design and more.
Ship Sales
We are kicking off the final Star Citizen sale of the year with Alpha 2.6 flight ready ships, a brand new concept racer, some limited edition packs, a new t-shirt and a few other choice items! You can even share the love with discount starter packs available in limited numbers every day. Finally, on Boxing Day (December 26) a wide variety of spacecraft (mirroring the final day of the Anniversary Sale) will be available for purchase so backers can end the year with the fleet they want the most!
Welcome new Citizens!
Give the gift of the ‘verse this holiday season! Every day, we’re making a limited number of discount starter packages available to introduce new pilots to our world. A new allotment of Aurora and Mustang starter packages will be available in this space every day through December 26th starting at 11:00 AM PST. And remember: you will never need to buy anything else to enjoy playing Star Citizen.
New Ships in the Verse
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The MISC Razor
The MISC Razor is Star Citizen’s final concept ship of 2016. The Razor joins the M50, Mustang Gamma, Mustang Omega and 350R in competing for the Murray Cup. We’ve built the Razor to introduce more diversity into the race mode, which will expand in future patches into the persistent universe. You can check out the information page at the link below, which includes a full-color brochure about this fast new spaceship. The Razor concept will be available through December 26.
New Kids on the Block
Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 will introduce a fleet of new spacecraft: the four variants created for this year’s anniversary event, the Vanguard Hoplite, the Drake Herald, the Drake Caterpillar and the luxurious Origin 85X. These ships will be on sale starting today and running through the week following 2.6’s release. You can learn more about the Herald and Caterpillar with special in-universe brochures and other content available through the links below.
Ship Packs
Want to build up your fleet? We’ve made a selection of new discount packs available, plus some fan favorites back by popular demand! Whether you want to pick up the original Star Citizen lineup or your own dedicated racing team, there’s something for everyone.
The Drake expansion
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The Caterpillar
Drake Interplanetary’s Caterpillar has long proven to be a reliable, cost-effective multi-role vessel, capable of being outfitted for everything from mercantile operations to combat support. The Caterpillar will premiere in Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 where it will be one of the largest flight-ready ships currently available.
Externer Inhalt robertsspaceindustries.comInhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.The Herald
The Drake Herald is a dedicated ‘information runner,’ which means that it’s a system of high tech computers attached to massive thrusters. Designed to safely move sensitive data across the vast distances of space, the Herald also has the ability to broadcast and collect information on the spectrum. Herald owners are strongly reminded to only intercept data that belongs to them.
Polaris Shirt & Merch Sale
You asked for it, so we made it real! The RSI Polaris t-shirt, originally created as lore for the Polaris corvette brochure, is now available for pre-order! Other 2016 merchandise is available at a special discount; this is your last chance to pick up these designs. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Please note that merchandise will not arrive in time for the Christmas holiday.
Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…liday-Sale-2016
