Um alle Funktionen des Forums nutzen zu können, sollten Sie sich registrieren. Wenn Sie schon regstriert sind, sollten Sie sich anmelden.
Datenschutzerklärung: Hier
Einstellungsmöglichkeiten zur Privatsphäre finden Sie in Ihren Einstellungen.
Einen maschinenlesbaren Export Ihrer Daten können Sie in Ihrem Profil anfordern. Hier
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Hello,
I’d like to start this week’s blog post by thanking everyone, who shared their feedback in regards to our Alpha 3.1 release. With your help, we released a new client patch by the end of last week, implementing sought-after changes to insurance timers and the expedite fees. More info and the complete patch notes can be found here. Keep sharing your experience from the ‘Verse and let us know what you think in our feedback forum on Spectrum!
In the wake of last month’s backer survey, we also reworked our Roadmap. We condensed all mining-related tasks for 3.2 into one card, moved Salvaging, Refuel & Repair to 3.3, and added the top survey results for the upcoming release. While focusing on quality of life improvements and performance, we will continue to rework our roadmap as a living and breathing representation of the development process. So expect to see even more changes in the coming weeks. And if you haven’t yet, make sure to check out our Monthly Studio Report to see what our studios across the globe have been working on!
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
We’re kicking off the week with another episode of Calling All Devs today. This time, we discuss explosive decompression, count engines on the Freelancer MAX and talk about having your own apartment in ArcCorp. You can watch the episode here.
On Tuesday, the Lore Team will publish their weekly lore post. Are you looking for full immersion in our universe? Check out previously published lore posts here.
Wednesday: BUGSMASHERS! Mark Abent returns, hammer in hand, ready to smash. Catch the latest episode when it airs on our YouTube channel.
On Thursday, we’ll welcome an all-new episode of Around the Verse with the latest info from the Development team. This original episode is shaping up to be a sophisticated one!
The week will be wrapped up on Friday, with Content Manager Jared Huckaby hosting another episode of Reverse the Verse LIVE. Keep an eye out in the General section of Spectrum for the question gathering post early this week and then tune in on Twitch.tv/StarCitizen at 9am PDT / 4pm UTC for a special RTV with members of the ship team.
That’s all for this week, citizens. We’ll see you in the ‘Verse!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
Welcome to March’s Monthly Studio Report with updates from all our studios to provide insight into what they’ve been working on. This month, the team delivered Alpha 3.1, the first quarterly release of 2018, continued development of Squadron 42, and much more. With that said, let’s get to it.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
CLOUD IMPERIUM: LOS ANGELES
VEHICLE FEATURES
The US Vehicle Feature Team, which includes team members from Tech Design, Engineering and QA, accomplished a lot this past month. They made some vehicle-related performance improvements, such as with the Vehicle Item Thruster and Landing/Spawning Components. From there, they looked into the previous progress made on the Scanning feature. This included some further investigations, planning, and initial tasks to get this large feature moving towards delivery, and the team is eager to press forward on the feature. Finally, a large percentage of the team’s time was spent fixing over 50 bugs, including several game crash issues, in our SC Alpha 3.1 branch.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
VEHICLE PIPELINE
The Los Angeles portion of the US Vehicle Pipeline, which includes team members from Art, Tech Design and Tech Art, had a busy March. Working together with other teams outside of LA, such as Animation, VFX, SFX and UI, they launched two new vehicles: the Anvil Terrapin and the Tumbril Cyclone. The Art Team completed their pass prior to March, but continued to provide needed adjustments as other teams wrapped up these two vehicles for the SC Alpha 3.1 release, with all teams working through bugs right up to the release.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Tech Art, being a shared resource, worked on some additional vehicles for the 3.1 release: the MISC Razor and the Aegis Reclaimer. Tech Art not only handled the ship damage, but also the rigging, animation and hook-up for landing gear compression. They can’t wait for players to experience landing the Reclaimer in the ’verse.
Meanwhile, Art and Tech Design moved forward on vehicles that will be released after 3.1. Art made advances on both the Anvil Hurricane and the updated Consolidated Outland Mustang. Tech Design worked on design briefs for some vehicles that will be slated for future release.
GAMEPLAY FEATURES
The Gameplay Feature Team continued to polish the Character Customizer, with the ordering of options, minor UI tweaks, the introduction of idle animations to give characters a more lifelike representation, and the implementation of preview sprites for customization options available in the initial roll out. This should allow players some personal expression so they don’t look too similar to others, while more advanced tech is being developed to realize the rich vision CIG has for this feature.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
After polishing the Character Customizer, the team shifted their focus to cleaning up bugs around core experiences initially released for SC Alpha 3.0., beginning with UI and reliability bugs in the insurance claim flow for vehicles. There was general ship improvement in missiles and countermeasures, including 3D radar UI for missiles and proper locking functionality when switching between targets. Issues with ship repair at Cry-Astro were also addressed. The team ensured weapons and attachments were being fully restored to repaired vehicles and that the proper aUEC was withdrawn. Finally, some light and cargo-related issues recently introduced were addressed to restore previous functionality.
NARRATIVE
The Narrative Team handled a wide variety of tasks. They delivered lore content to the site every Tuesday, including part one of the new serialized short story One Good Deed about a Vulcan pilot that runs into trouble during a refueling operation. Subscribers got access to a new portfolio focused on the history of Dumper’s Depot. Time was also spent on this month’s issue of Jump Point, delivering content for marketing materials, and filming a new batch of Loremaker’s episodes.
Besides the usual workload, the team turned their attention to building out the narrative surrounding Hurston and the Lorville landing zone. They used the location to set up highly detailed templates that track specifics of a landing zone and its surrounding biomes. As part of this, a Plant and Flora page was designed to catalogue all the different space plant varieties, their placement in-game, and more. One of those plants, the Emperor’s Bloom, even received a brief Galactapedia write-up in March’s Jump Point.
Narrative also began revamping the system for generic NPCs to help breath more life into a location. They also focused on the Xi’an by creating a document that outlines their habitation spaces. Finally, they wrote numerous descriptions for various weapons and special weapons skins.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The Character Team worked on a multitude of assets across both Star Citizen and Squadron 42. The Legacy armor variants for Outlaws and Marines are close to being finalized, while the Hurston and Olisar Clothing Collections continue to be developed and should get into the ’verse soon.
A lot of work went into the principle characters, outfits, and weapons that will appear in Squadron 42, including the fleshing out of various alien species. In addition to all these assets, the team fixed several bugs across different character related features.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The team wrapped up the last Service Beacon features for the 3.1 release. The final touches included the ability for players to see the required reputation for each Beacon, and their own reputation values, so they can better understand the specifics. Everyone is extremely excited to see how fans receive this, since a lot of games don’t allow for player-created content.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The shopping service was unified under one umbrella, instead of tracking each server’s economic status. Now, all game servers will pull the pricing information from a single source. This was always the original intention, and it fixes a few commodity trading exploits. With this unification, the team also restructured commodities to better represent the flow of goods. Outposts are now the main “producers” of goods, and stations are now the major “consumers” of goods. This presents a complication though, instead of balancing the game for a single server of 50 people, the team must now balance it for the concurrent player base. This will require a few iterations, since designers need to see the amount of goods being traded by a larger segment of the population. The team is looking forward to the first batch of analytics so they can hone this system for you.
On the character front, the Hawkers are back up and running. While there wasn’t the bandwidth to clean up additional animations, designers did hook up the original animations from the demo where they were originally shown off.
They also converted a lot of basic flair items to the Item 2.0 system. Previously, they were using a lot of prefab spawning, but that system has been deprecated for the new object container system. There are known issues with some of the more complex objects, such as the liquor cabinet and the Jukebox, but there should be a vast improvement in the number of flair items working in the hangars.
Finally, the team fixed quite a few trivial issues, and overall, are happy with the Alpha 3.1 build. They hope you’re happy with the progress and look forward to giving you more in 3.2.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The Constellation Phoenix continues through the high poly modeling phase. The current focus is on the Aquarium (interior set pieces) and other corners of the interior, which are being brought up to almost final detail stage. This work includes POMs (parallax occlusion maps) and decals. There has also been work done on ‘fancy’ custom textures to give the interior a luxurious feel.
The F8 Lightning is currently in the final, high poly (detail) phase that applies the POMs, decals, and final geo tweaks. There was also another pass on the ship lighting (exterior and interior) and materials. Finally, the team addressed ship related bugs for the release of 3.1.0.
BACKEND SERVICES
This month, the Server Engineering Team supported 3.1, assisting in work required for the Service Beacon. They also made an extension to Diffusion, which makes some communications between services during startup more reliable.
The team discovered performance issues in the one of the back-end caches responsible for holding player inventory (ships, personal items, etc.). They applied optimizations that will greatly increase the responsiveness of those services, and have also been working with the Platform Team to complete the API between Diffusion and Platform services, allowing for easy and seamless communication.
Finally, they finished “Diffusionizing” the game client. Previously, the game client could only communicate with the services via a legacy communication system, which was very rigid and not so easy to extend. Now that it is using Diffusion APIs, the game client will not only be able to more easily communicate with the back end, but all services can communicate with any game client in ways they were never able to before.
ANIMATION
ATX PU Animation focused on finishing two mission givers, Luca Brunt and Wallace Klim, and started on a third mission giver, Recco Battaglia. They are working closely with the Facial Animation Team and providing weekly progress updates to ensure the quality is up to snuff. These animations will next go to Design where they will be hooked into the AI system so players can interact with these characters for new mission content. They are also processing data for mission givers and cinematics, and are working to make sure that the quality control of the data is as close to 1-to-1 as possible. The team is having a blast playing with data from actors Mark Hamill and Gillian Anderson.
The ATX Ship Animation Team created new enter/exit animations for the Aegis Reclaimer. There was a strong push to complete the ships featured in the Alpha 3.1 release, as well as various bug fixes for the game. In addition, they made a new Dual Throttle Cockpit Type that will be showcased in an upcoming release.
OPERATIONS
March was an exciting month for the DevOps Teams. BuildOps made dramatic advances in the stability and performance of the build system with times being again cut in half in certain areas of the build pipeline. Internal build quantity and delivery numbers doubled during the month in support of the 3.1 quarterly release. Publishing Ops worked around the clock most days to identify and deliver the painstakingly detailed performance analytics needed by the dev teams, along with multiple daily internal and external publishes, including Evocati and PTU. It has been highly rewarding to see the dramatic impact of performance work by the dev teams.
March was all about 3.1. At the time of writing, the team has tested over 30 builds as an Evocati or PTU candidate. Each build requires checking of core functionality, the environment, and the launcher to make sure everything is ready to go before backers get access. Each build signed-off for PTU requires additional support after it goes to the environment. They monitor stability, provide reports of new crashes, capture performance data, and hand off everything to the Engineers and Producers to examine the next morning. The day after a publish, UK and ATX QA go over the top bug reports coming from players (via Game Support and Issue Council). They track new issues players are seeing, what is already ticketed, and what new bugs need to be investigated. As you can imagine, it’s a tremendous amount of work for each publish and the team pulled long hours to support the schedule.
Between publishes, there’s also been extensive test passes on actor synchronization, network message conversion, Ship AI, Shopkeeper animations, loadout improvements for Star Marine, outpost updates for the moons, service beacons, and new weapon skins. Ship testers were kept extremely busy as the Reclaimer, Cyclone, Terrapin, Razor variants, and the Nox Kue all come online to test. With the developer sprint teams going full-tilt, testing also started on potential 3.2 content, like the lean system and FPS Combat AI.
The Player Relations Team was all hands-on deck, coordinating with several other teams to get 3.1 through PTU to Live! The 3.1 testing cycle was the first in the new quarterly release schedule, and the team could not have done it without the heroic efforts of the Evocati and PTU testers. While work on features continued, Player Relations primarily focused on troubleshooting particularly nasty server and client crashes and working with DevOps and QA each night to sort them out.
With 3.1 now Live, the team would like to remind and encourage everyone to use the Issue Council to help triage and rate bugs and functionality. They will use that data to prioritize future updates. Plus, Issue Council participation makes players eligible to get into earlier PTU waves.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The Ship Art Team continued their work on the game’s ever-expanding fleet. The interior of the Aegis Hammerhead is mostly set out except for the crew dorm and kitchen. Currently, the cargo bay and bridge are receiving a detail pass.
The Eclipse, another Aegis ship, is in full production with the current focus being the exterior. The team is reinforcing its stealthy appearance by tightening the pom (panel-line details), enhancing the materials, and making sure all the moving parts are operational.
AUDIO
The weapon audio system underwent a substantial refactor. Work began on designing full NLPC weapon perspective sets, along with specific sounds for various distances. An environmental weapon report, or tail layer, was added for all weapons on planetside locations to better reflect the environmental response of weapon fire.
Recently, the Audio Team took part in a sound effects recording session at Oscillate Studios, focusing on vibrating various metallic objects using transducers that respond to low frequency sounds. The metals were stimulated via synthesized tones from a MIDI keyboard that played with the pitch to impart different resonances and sympathetic rattles to a diverse range of scrap metal objects. The session’s primary focus was to create source material for ships. This was partly inspired by the sound production on the film ‘Interstellar,’ which used large scale subwoofers to resonate aircraft fuselages, modeling the behavior of spaceships under duress, simulating atmospheric entry and strong gravitational fields, and so on.
GRAPHICS
The Graphics Team implemented some major performance savings when rendering characters. All characters are split up into many different meshes, not only for swapping out clothing and armor, but also to hide individual portions of an object to avoid interpenetrating geometry. Shaders, textures, and geometry have been organized to render multiple adjacent meshes in one go, which vastly reduces the CPU cost of submitting the work to the GPU and maintains flexibility.
The team improved the quality and legibility of various UI screens with two new shader effects for the render-to-texture system. The first is an edge-highlighting effect for ship targeting displays, and the second is a drop shadow effect to help text and icons stand out against bright backgrounds.
UI
The UI Team researched ways to improve performance by analyzing where the CPU spends its time. Optimizations made to the code of the ECG graph on the visor significantly reduced the CPU cost without effecting visual quality. The ECG graph has a buffer for the heartbeat values. With every update, the game added a new value onto the front of the buffer and removed the oldest from the back, which caused an expensive memory shifting. To prevent this, the team now uses a circular buffer that stores an index to the oldest location in the buffer. When the index reaches the end of the buffer it loops back to the start in cyclical fashion. This is more efficient because memory is only written to rather than being moved around.
Alongside the UI Visual Team, the EU-1 Gameplay Team has had UI involvement with the team focusing on polishing up the VMA and PMA mobiGlas apps. For these two apps, a strong focus has been put on improving the overall user-experience by fixing bugs present in the current iteration, as well as overhauling the mobiGlas layout in general to make more use of screen real estate and breaking the menu layout into a more intuitive structure. On the engineering side, the Star Marine Loadout Customization screen in the Front End has been converted to use the PMA code. This will make fixing issues on this screen much easier, as the PMA replaces the custom code that was previously released.
The second optimization applied to the ECG was to stop redrawing the whole graph each frame. Instead, it now adds the new value to the right-hand side and moves the whole graph along to the left. It uses a clip-window to ensure only the essential parts are drawn, and the graphic data is recycled in a similar fashion to the circular buffer.
GAMEPLAY STORY
AThe Gameplay Story Team organized all the required scenes in Shotgun. Currently, they are working with Design to get the first few scenes implemented in-game and up to standard.
ENVIRONMENT
Work is underway on the next generation of space stations. This begins with Rest Stops that are created semi-procedurally, allowing the team to easily populate the PU with many variations. To accomplish this feat, they have focused on developing the tools and workflow needed to achieve it.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The first iteration of the Rest Stop will feature three main location components. The first being an exterior that presents a unique silhouette to maximize readability from a distance. The team also can vary layout and architecture to allow for individual personality and variety between stations. Diverse building materials, color schemes, and ad placement mean that a great number of visual possibilities are achievable through the modular construction of these stations. That means the team can automate layout generation while maintaining artistic control.
Hangars are the second component. Rest Stops will be the first station type to fully utilize the ‘Common Element’ type of hangar, which can be used in every utilitarian hangar in the game. Even though the ‘Common Element’ hangar will share the same core design functionality, they are built to allow for the mixing and matching of walls, entrances, exits and service modules to achieve varied looks across locations.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The third location component is the interior. The development of a procedural layout tool to generate these Rest Stops has been a big, and admittedly challenging, project. Work has advanced to where many layouts can automatically be generated using the tool and a set library of room and connector prefabs. Maintaining visual consistency and coherence, while still making each location appear different, remains an artistic challenge for the tool and team. Like the exterior, the trick is to randomize many of the smaller choices, like prop placement and lighting, rather than alter the larger room forms. This method allows the team to maintain artistic control over the main spaces flow and form.
PROPS
The Prop Team made improvements to the entity system within data forge. The change allows for one entity to contain both gameplay features and visual keys, while being set-up and controlled using one system. This means a set-up entity dropped it into any level will retain all working functionality. This makes syncing easier between animation and material effects, such as glows or UI elements. This has significantly reduced the number of lights needed to fake glowing materials or flashing lights during different stages of animation.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Another task had the team revising metrics and template assets for usables and interactive props. This makes them easier to understand and allows for improved scalability and functionality support. Building on these tech improvements, they can now create destructible props that mesh swap and update environmental effects, such as lights, VFX, and audio accordingly. These tech developments are still in the early stages, and laying the foundation for future releases.
A new set of “low-tech” medical props are being built out, alongside new medical dressings. Both are planned for use throughout the PU as common medical elements. Finally, the team worked on the sub-items that will be used to customize the performance of ship components. They are also making sure that there is a wide variety of visuals to support the gameplay when the feature comes online.
DESIGN
The Missions Team is in the early stages of replacing the existing AI with an upgraded version. They have been focused on balancing and implementing wildlines for the AI controlled characters. Wildlines are pieces of dialogue that play systemically when the AI receives a trigger, such as damage. The lines personalize each player’s experience, as the AI will communicate with players differently depending on their relationship and history.
As the AI continues to develop, the team also took the opportunity to reassess Arena Commander’s Vanduul and Pirate Swarm game modes. They rebalanced both with the focus on delivering a satisfying experience, rather than an extremely difficulty one. Another exciting creation is a prototype scramble race event, which can occur in space or planetside. These death races have opponents battling to collect randomly generated checkpoints and, more importantly, to stay alive. The races rely heavily on dialogue, so there’s a recording session planned to capture the necessary clips. Finally, the team has been rebalancing the reputation progression system. This was done because it became apparent that accruing a negative reputation was too easy and attaining a positive one too challenging.
VFX
The VFX department collaborated with Graphics to improve the GPU particle system. VFX Artists are implementing lean production techniques to prioritize features that will provide maximum impact. Examples would be improved Spawn Inheritance and Curl Noise. Both features create better, cheaper electrical and plasma effects for things like the Coil interior and EMP weapons.
They also worked through a large “snag list” for the Alpha 3.1 release. Tasks tackled included toning down the dust mote opacity in certain environments that underwent lighting updates, and re-adding planet/moon effects to work with the planetary tech improvements.
TECH DESIGN
Tech Design finalized Alpha 3.1 work by implementing and tuning new weapons like the Gallenson Tactical Systems ballistic gatling, Preacher Armament distortion scattergun, and Amon & Reese Co. laser cannon. They also supported the conversion of existing gear to Weapon 2.0.
The team also focused on rebalancing. A lot was covered, including distortion weapons, after fixes allowed them to affect items instead of just shields. Countermeasures were made more effective post Item 2.0 implementation. Iterations of flight balance continued with a focus on atmospheric landing turbulence. Shield setback and regeneration rates were also rebalanced.
At the other end of the pipeline, they worked with Art on exciting new ship concepts. These designs will be revealed throughout the year during Ship Shape segments in Around the Verse.
DERBY ANIMATION
The Derby office continued to expand its operations and prepare for motion capture shoots to further refine the player and AI movement sets. It was a pleasure to welcome several valued backers during the recent Imperator Subscribers event, where developers demonstrated core elements of their workflow, including facial animation, motion capture, and technical animation. The tour also offered the opportunity to scan three more faces that you can look forward to seeing in the ’verse.
Progress was made on R&D for the Vanduul face rig and internal facial rig technologies, along with iterations to female rigs in Maya. The new 1:1 conversion updates to the rig will break a lot of animations that use props so the team has been developing an automated solution to fix the animation files without an Animator having to manually go through and re-work everything.
Finally, the Facial Animation Team was busy finalizing animations on various PU shopkeepers, bartenders, and mission givers. This includes blending all the animations from the same facial poses, so they all play seamlessly from one to another.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
FOUNDRY 42: DE
ENVIRONMENT ART
The Environment Art Team recently wrapped up polishing the existing moons in the persistent universe. Cellin, Yela, Daymar and Delamar all received a visual update that will further enrich the experience at each location for the 3.1 release. With the update of the existing locations completed, the team is shifting focus to Hurston. Hurston will benefit massively from new planet tech updates, and further additions to the planet tech are on the roadmap for the coming weeks. The numerous updates will help make Hurston a unique experience, pushing biomes further than what players have seen so far on the existing moons. The team is also close to wrapping up the whitebox stage of the Lorville landing zone. Layout and locations have been approved by all departments involved, and the team is preparing to start full production to bring the city to its next stage.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
ENGINE
The Engine Team regularly works on both long-term items as well as low level bugs and performance, and this month was no exception. They refined the auto performance capture code and tools used to track heavy stalls on both client and server. The tools automatically take performance captures if the frame rate falls below a given threshold for a specified amount of time. They then analyze the captures and optimize code, content, and level set up if necessary.
They made further progress on the performance telemetry system that will submit data so the team can analyze what typically happens on servers and clients, what actions cause performance slowdowns, etc. The data should allow them to tweak the game and improve the overall player experience. They also continued to work on reducing the initial startup time of the game. They found a lot of inefficient data parsing meant that the game would launch slowly, especially during the first startup on HDDs after the computer had been booted up.
The Engine Team worked on optimizations of the physics terrain mesh generation, and optimized data layout and SSE instructions to improve computation speed. They reworked API for component updates to provide more flexibility and opportunity for further code optimizations, batching of updates, etc. The team handled rendering improvements for the vegetation shader. Good progress was made on skin rendering improvements, which included work on rendering eyes, teeth and tongues. An investigation into pushing the quality and fidelity of facial animations was kicked off. Plus, they continued code size and build time investigations. It’s an ongoing effort to uncover the reasons for increased code size and compile times to see what can be reduced. This is an ongoing task and the findings will be applied globally.
TECH ART
The Tech Art Team built a new tool called cigXfer. It helps artists transfer skin data on various meshes, as well as on LOD meshes, without any assistance from a tech artist. This significantly speeds up the art update process, enabling artists to be more self-sufficient. They also implemented a large amount of animations that will be used for Squadron 42 cinematics.
They collaborated with the Weapons Team to complete the previsualization rig and game entity for the Kastak Arms Scalpel sniper rifle. Work was done on a run time physic simulation for a portion of the handle of the combat knife. Research and development was done to refine the alignment of the camera with the sight of a weapon while leaning. They developed content with an additional bone titled “ADS_align” to help achieve the desired results. They are currently testing the new approach on the Klaus & Werner Gallant rifle, and once verified it will be replicated to additional weapons.
The team worked with Art and Tech Design to produce Centurion and Imperator weapon skins for the Gemini LH86 pistol, Kastak Arms Devastator shotgun, and Klaus & Werner Arrowhead sniper rifle. They also continued R&D and implementation of the tools required for the next iteration of the Character Customizer. They primarily focused on consolidating how hundreds of head and head attachment assets (i.e. hair, beards or helmets) are being authored in Maya and then exported into the engine. Since every attachment is supposed to work with every possible head shape, even procedurally generated ones, they had to ensure the head topology remained 100% consistent during export.
LEVEL DESIGN
The PU Level Design Team had several locations to design, and tech needed for future content building to work on. Lorville, a flagship landing zones, received quite a bit of attention, and is being used as a test bed for numerous systems and Common Elements. These systems include Security, Smuggling, Transit, Air Traffic Control, Hangars, etc. The Common Elements work in tandem with these systems and serve as their representation in the game world: for example, a Security Office and guards for Security, Customs for Smuggling, Train Stations for Transit, and a Spaceport for the Air Traffic Controller and Hangars. To connect everything there needs to be transitional spaces, arrival areas, and terminals to make it feel believable, while being diligent about not inflating the playable space too much. Here are some examples of these transitional spaces:
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
They also continued work on the Procedural Tool for generating interior spaces. This tool is essential for Level Design to efficiently deliver the amount of content needed for generic locations like Rest Stops, Refineries, Cargo Depots etc. The tool is still in progress and will require more iterations and additions before it’s ready, which is a natural part of the R&D process. Here are examples of two generated layouts seen top down as a comparison:
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
CINEMATICS
The Cinematics Team supported Squadron 42 level design efforts that previously had a lower priority. For these chapters, they blocked out and completed quick previs animation exports where level sections are still in the whitebox phase. For locations that are further along, like the Idris (Stanton) and the Bengal carrier, they did performance capture animation exports aligned to geometry and a defined scene root for all actors in the scene. This is an ongoing effort, as each chapter has a huge number of narrative scenes ranging from comms calls, conversations, walk & talk greetings, NPC chatter, and more complex scenes with multiple key characters in full-on filmic cinematics. In addition to the previs exports, they also focused on a handful of scenes featuring Gillian Anderson as Captain Rachel Maclaren. With the Vanduul Kingship bridge almost finished, they did a first camera pass on the cinematic Vanduul character sequences required for the story. This work coincides with a concentrated push for the Vanduul across different departments. Currently, Tech Animation is working on the Vanduul face rig, Character Art and Animation tackling costumes, key poses & silhouettes, and the Weapons Team focusing on Vanduul weaponry.
An important part of cinematics work is to regularly sync with ship and environment artists. The teams discuss issues with the default metrics dictated for mechanisms like doors, displays, chairs and the existing geometry, or address problems that arise when performance capture deviates slightly from metrics or meshes. Most of these metrics were in place for the main shoot, but occasional tweaks or updates must be made to either meshes or the animation. It always requires the teams to carefully weigh what requires the least amount of rework and impact. Cinematics also supported Graphics Engineering to upgrade the human skin shading. They built a test lighting setup that mimicked reference photographs and replicated a PCAP head-camera setup in the engine. Results of this R&D and shading work will be seen in the coming months.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The DE Lighting Team supported the 3.1 patch. Their recent focus was finalizing a new lighting pass on the Echo 11, as changes to the lighting tools and technology have left the Star Marine maps visually out of sync. They’ve also helped the planet team with minor tweaks and polish to the atmospheres and color grading for Crusader’s three moons and Delamar. In addition, they assisted with several 3.1 goals, such as the new mobiGlas PMA/VMA character and item rendering, the Character Customizer, and general optimizations.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The DE VFX Team worked with UK programmers to further improve various tools, such as curl noise. This is a 3D noise field that perturbs the particles as they travel through the field, which creates some very unique and volumetric looking effects. They’ve also been fleshing out the Vanduul tech style, experimenting with the curl noise in combination with vector fields to create a visual style that sets the Vanduul apart.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The DE Weapons Team finished the first art pass for the Kastak Arms Scalpel sniper rifle, and completed the Centurion and Imperator subscriber flair skins for a few weapons.
SYSTEM DESIGN
The DE System Design Team moved forward with the mining system. Their first goal is to get mining functional for planet/moon surfaces, so the Prospector will be fully operational. They will move on to additional mining types once that is completed. Mining is still being prototyped but the current results are promising from a gameplay and visual perspective. They are currently able to shatter mineable rocks, and are working on the harvesting functionality that will transfer resources from those smaller pieces into the Prospector’s mining containers. Once completed, they will integrate mining with other systems like radar and scanning, which will be used to find mineable deposits and analyze their contents.
Progress was made on FPS Combat AI. After solving low cover, they implemented high cover for Human AI, and focused on making the timings and transitions as snappy as possible. Now, they are slowly moving into more complex behaviors like flanking, which allows the AI to work better as a team and force the player to think tactically and constantly adapt to what the AI is doing. They also considered what elements from human combat could be used by alien races, and experimented with ways to make them feel unique, so players must deal with aliens differently than their human counterparts.
The first batch of the reworked ship AI is now in 3.1, though some additional functionality is still outstanding. The system is being built so players can choose how to train and specialize their hired NPCs. FPS AI will use the same system in the future to achieve similar goals. On the non-combatant side of AI, they experimented with creating small story vignettes for locations, focusing on Lorville. This should infuse the location with more life and grant the AI more storytelling ability than walking around and sitting on benches. The hope is for players to experience what the lives of the population in a location are like, sympathize with them, and potentially choose sides. To achieve that, the non-combatants need to become more lively and complex.
Towards the end of the month, the team worked closely with Level Designers and Artists on the procedural location tool. They focused on the functionality needed for the tool to create nice environments and connect gameplay systems, like rooms, oxygen, gravity, security and generated AI populations. The tool must do it in a way that once the location is generated, there will be only minor adjustments before it can be released. The goal with this system is to ensure the team can output quality content at lightning speeds with a minimal amount of menial work. That way the team can quickly fill an entire universe, while keeping it feeling specific, depending on the location.
BUILD ENGINEERING
The DE Build Engineers added a sanity check for the RC to TryBuilder. While engineers work, they may change the Resource Compiler (RC), which can sometimes lead to failed builds. With so many unique asset types, it becomes difficult for an engineer to ensure that nothing is going to break. Additionally, engineers may touch a cpp file without even being aware that it may affect the RC. To alleviate this, they isolated a minimal subset of assets and now have them compiled whenever any code in the main branch changes. Each code change that goes into p4 is checked and the whole process is quick, essentially compiling one sample of every type of assets in the Engine. Now, before starting the process of creating a new a build, the team can check the state of RC. If it’s red (as in, the process described above is failing) they know there’s an issue to address. They also added some powerful dedicated hardware to the TryBuild cluster for profiling speed improvements in compilation. This has brought compilation times down significantly, which shifted focus back to optimizing other steps whose build-times now contribute a proportionally significant amount towards the entire build time.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The above illustrates a Perforce-state caching mechanism and smart querying method for comparing local workspace to the relevant global branch the code is being built on. This simplified state-caching mechanism is used to determine if any further version-control communication is necessary. Initial optimizations removed 30 seconds from any build regardless of the machine’s state. In further precise situations, where the slave is confirmed up-to-date, it skips syncing entirely. That saves an additional 30 seconds minimum, yielding build results that can potentially be as low as 15 seconds total. In addition to adding dedicated hardware and eliminating time-costing checks from bootstrap steps for code validation, the team is now looking at binary caching mechanisms so the code-building machines can simply retrieve the compilation results that have already been processed.
QA
For the DE QA team, most of March centered around Subsumption testing with a new version available to test each week. As new features are implemented into the Subsumption Tool, the team maintains and revamps the existing documentation and checklists to ensure QA covers all necessary test cases for Subsumption testing. DE QA also supported the in-house development team with various requests from simple tests to verify if issues devs have encountered are due to their local files or an actual issue within the current build, to the more complex tests that require custom binaries and comparing differences between builds. One recent request involved testing changes that could potentially affect prefabs within the Engine. Extensive prefab testing was performed using custom binaries and test cases to intentionally attempt to break the prefab system. When an issue was discovered, this was brought to the Engine Team’s attention, and they proceeded to fix the issue and return new binaries to continue the testing. Similarly, the team focused on numerous physics test requests for changes that could potentially break other functionality within the client. These changes contained stability improvements to address various physics crashes that were plaguing Evocati in the PTU. While they normally work in the Game-Dev stream, most of the testing was focused on 3.1 as the live release date closed in.
AI
Focus was primarily devoted to stabilizing the dogfight behavior. Flight AI is a young system, and the team is working on the skill characterization of the pilot’s abilities to balance the overall combat experience. A pass was made on the target chase velocities and attack ranges, two important factors to render the combat dynamics less prone to collide with obstacles or escape the assigned boundaries. The AI team also worked on improving player interaction with combat AI. This comes in the form of new behaviors, internally tweakable parameters (like accuracy and missile usage) for designers, and adding wildlines for PU pilots. For AI FPS Combat, they are currently implementing flanking behavior. Further work was done to update the logic for bullet rain, and improve flinch reactions when an AI’s cover gets compromised and they need to leave quickly or target and shoot. In addition, the team addressed bugs and optimized the code for the 3.1 release.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
TURBULENT
March saw major developments in Spectrum with a new release to PTU and Public, a new connectivity API between the platform and the game services, and cosmetic upgrades to promotion pages.
SPECTRUM
Spectrum version 3.7.4 was released to PTU. This version included custom roles, custom emojis and a user block list. The release to PTU gave the team much needed insight, and as a result they created a list of improvements around these features to be included in the live release.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The team had help from the Evocati, who have been instrumental in hunting down bugs and providing direct feedback, in preparation for the live release of 3.7.4. The UX and Design Team has been building interactions for organizations in Spectrum, which includes direct interaction and survey support with Evocati to ensure that the teams are building with community needs at the forefront.
Over the next month, Turbulent’s Spectrum development team will refocus their efforts on the game overlay, work towards 3.2 deliveries, and make process changes to align their efforts with CIG’s internal pipeline.
LAUNCHER
Some minor changes were made to the Launcher, with the latest version, 1.0.1-alpha, including consistency check and bug fixes that affect the analytics reporting.
RSI PLATFORM
The team continues to make minor adjustments to the site’s new elements. You may notice some changes to readability as well as the resolution of some bugs on IE11.
The biggest platform changes are not visible to the user. The team rebuilt the Backend API to prepare for new services with Diffusion. Although the work is not complete, the team took on this three-week crunch project to build the base required to move forward. The rework will open the door for new features, most notably Spectrum chat.
A new weekly newsletter was launched, with a cleaner sleeker design, includes optimizations for those reading on mobile phones.
KNOWLEDGE BASE
The knowledge base designs have been approved and are in development. This project is needed resource for backers and the Player Relations Team. Here’s a sneak peek at the final designs.
The site’s contact form and mobile design are being polished to provide the best possible user experience. The objective is to help citizens find the information they need, and reduce queue times when they need help from Player Relations.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
ST. PATRICK’S DAY & 3.1 FLYABLE PROMOTION
The team supported the setup and design for the St Patrick’s and 3.1 Flyable promotion. It was exciting to see all the in-game shots coming from the new 3.1 flyable ships, and integrate them into the design of the sales page.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Community
And this is how quickly a quarter of a year can pass. After announcing the switch to a quarterly release cycle at last year’s CitizenCon, everyone at Cloud Imperium Games was eager to hit this self-imposed deadline and provide players with a content update. The team even provided the community with a public roadmap updated directly from internal project management tools. The weeks leading up to the Alpha 3.1 release have been hectic, but the team made the deadline and released the first update of 2018!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Thanks to all the dedicated testers who helped make the release of Alpha 3.1 possible. The entire CIG team sincerely appreciates your efforts during the Evocati and PTU phases, and hopes you have a blast playing the latest version on the live servers!
Even with Alpha 3.1 in the hands of all backers, the team isn’t going to rest. The Alpha 3.2 Feature Survey took the opportunity to reassess development priorities with feedback from the community. It let you vote on what features you were most excited to see implemented or improved, ensuring a fun and lasting gaming experience. Voting is closed, but you can check the results on this page.
As always, the team produced content across various social media channels. If you haven’t already, check out the new crowd favorite Calling All Devs, where Jared Huckaby calls developers from his desk to ask questions voted on by the Star Citizen community. Episodes of Around the Verse focused on performance and optimization, the AI on the living Idris, the sounds of science, and a magnificent Ship Shape featuring the impressive Aegis Reclaimer and the nimble Tumbril Cyclone.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Speaking of ships, the Aegis Vulcan was the first concept ship in 2018 and a gateway to a versatile support career in Star Citizen. The team celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with special offers and the Constellation Phoenix Emerald – an appropriate variation to celebrate the spirit of the Irish holiday. Alongside the promotion ran a St. Patrick’s Day Screenshot contest where you had the opportunity to win game packages, including the aforementioned Phoenix. Check out the event thread to see all the entries. Well done everyone and congratulations to the winners!
Also, the team celebrated a marvelous milestone when the number of citizens hit the 2,000,000 mark! Thank you for joining us on this journey. You inspire us every day through your creations, and we’re happy to be part of such an active and creative community.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Hi everyone,
First and foremost, Star Citizen Alpha 3.1 is now live and available to play for all backers. Thank you to everyone who helped test on the PTU in the lead-up to release; we could not have done it without you!
This update marks the first of four quarterly patches planned to be released this year, and the inaugural success of the new delivery schedule. We can’t wait to explore the ‘Verse with you throughout 2018 as we continue to develop the Star Citizen universe with you.
Sunday brought a slew of festivities including a Star Citizen Scavenger Hunt and the first episode episode of From Digital to Delicious: Procedural Cuisine – a brief introduction of our upcoming procedurally generated food system… in 10 hours.
Were you entranced by the endless possibilities of 3D rendering an egg? Us too! (#AprilFools)
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
On Monday, in an all new episode of Calling All Devs, we answer your questions on docking, scanning, blind quantum travel, and more. Watch the latest episode here.
This Tuesday we’ll embark on a journey alongside our lore team to explore the Nul system. Enjoy this series? Check out previously released episodes here.
Thursday will bring us an all new episode of Around the Verse where we’ll check in with the UK Office, and take a deeper look at the Personal Manager Application in your mobiGlas. No summoning threads required! (I shouldn’t have said that)
Lastly, make sure to tune in on Friday for another episode of Reverse the Verse, which we’ll broadcast live on our official Twitch channel.. Details TBD, so check back in the coming days for more info.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
We are excited to announce the release of Alpha Patch 3.1.0 to all Star Citizen backers. This update marks the first of four quarterly patches planned to be released this year, and the inaugural success of the new delivery schedule. At the start of the year, our internal teams underwent a restructuring to allow for easier coordination and focus on a particular aspect or feature. Thanks to this new approach, the development team was able to more efficiently tackle the goals outlined for 3.1 on our Production Roadmap and introduce several new gameplay features and optimizations to Star Citizen.
Starting with Alpha 3.1, players will find new ways to interact with each other. The Character Customizer is now accessible from the main menu and allows players to distinguish their avatars with various combinations of hair style, skin tone, and more. This is just our first iteration of the system and we have a lot more planned for future releases, but even at this early stage it is exciting to see all the new and varied faces exploring the halls of Port Olisar and Grim HEX. Starting with this patch, players will also be able create Service Beacons from the Contract Manager in their mobiGlas and hire other players to provide Combat Assistance or Personal Transport. This new system will be a huge boon to players who may need a ride back to a station from the wilds of Crusader’s three explorable moons, and represents a whole new revenue stream for players willing to lend their combat skills to aid others. This feature is also an initial iteration that will be improved and expanded in future releases, but it’s an important step in further developing the kind of emergent gameplay that is intended for the Persistent Universe.
Not only that, the bevy of new flyable ships and open-canopy vehicles introduced in this patch will provide players exciting options for crewing up and exploring the Stanton system together. Measuring over 150 meters, the Reclaimer is the largest ship currently in-game. This heavy industrial salvage ship from Aegis Dynamics is so massive that the environment art team has expanded Port Olisar’s landing pads to accommodate it. Explorers will want to get behind the sticks of the Anvil Terrapin. The ship’s robust shield system and distinct layered armor make it ideal for exploring untamed space. Racers looking to experience breakneck speed can climb into the MISC Razor. The ship will be a perennial Murray Cup contender thanks to advanced Xi’an thruster technology and a streamlined design.
Plus, exploring Crusader’s moons just got more exciting with the addition of the Aopoa Nox Kue and Tumbril Cyclone. The Nox Kue is a special variant of the renowned Xi’an open-canopy racer that Aopoa redesigned specifically for Humans. The Tumbril Cyclone is a rugged off-road ground vehicle ready to tackle any terrain. Both vehicles are perfect for traversing Cellin, Daymar, and Yela, which also received upgrades in Alpha 3.1, thanks to planetary technology improvements that updated surface textures and topography for more visually dynamic and detailed landscapes.
Additionally, the development team polished many of the exciting features that launched with the 3.0 patch in December. Updates to the IFCS (flight control), AI, the Personal Manager tool on each player’s mobiGlas, ship weapons, ship damage physics and overall performance optimization, all are working in concert to improve the overall Star Citizen gameplay experience.
NEW FEATURES
Character Customizer
With this feature, players can adjust aspects of their character’s physical appearance, such as face shape, eye color, hair style, and skin tone.
Logout Improvements
Players can now safely logout from major stations like Levski, Grim HEX, and Port Olisar. This will persist between sessions for when players log back into the game.
Pirate Hunter
Player will now earn virtue reputation for killing NPC pirates.
Interdiction and Quantum Jamming
AI pilots can now carry Quantum Jammers aboard their ships. These devices produce a field which stop Quantum Drives from being able to function. Players who are interdicted will now first have to destroy ships carrying Jammers before they can Quantum Travel away to safety.
Service Beacons
Service Beacons have been introduced to the PU economy. Using the mobiGlas, players can create and customize “Personal Transport” or “Combat Assistance” contracts that will be made available to other players to complete for the agreed upon payment. After the contract ends, players will be able to review each others performance with a positive or negative rating.
Combat Markers
The old Combat Markers were replaced with new 3D versions that include target brackets, hit indication, and missile locks.
Visor Screen
The visor screen has had additional hit effects for shields and hull areas added to the displays for your ship and targeted ships.
A new MFD screen has been added allowing players to customize the view angles of the target/self visor screens.
New Ships and Vehicles
Tumbril Cyclone
Aegis Reclaimer
Anvil Terrapin
MISC Razor
Nox Kue
New Ship Weapons
PRAR Distortion Scatterguns
Salvation (size 4)
Absolution (size 5)
Condemnation (size 6)
APAR Ballistic Scattergun
Havoc (size 1)
Hellion (size 2)
Predator (size 3)
KBAR 10-Series Greatsword Ballistic Cannon (size 2)
AMRS Omnisky IX Laser Cannon
GATS Yellowjacket Ballistic Gatling (size 1)
CF-557 Galdereen Repeater (size 5)
Star Marine
KSAR Custodian Energy SMG
GMNI R97 Ballistic Shotgun
You can find the full patch notes for Alpha 3.1.0 here.
Ein neues Update zu Star Citizens Singleplayer-Kampagne Squadron 42 zeigt in einem Video Schiffe und eine verbesserte AI in Kampfsituationen. Das Bengal-Trägerschiff ist ebenso Thema wie die Schnellreisefunktion innerhalb des selbigen, welche während…
This week, Sean Tracy and Eric Kieron Davis host our latest Squadron 42 special, where we get a detailed project update and a look into the intricacies of Ship AI.
Writer’s Note: Part two of The Cup was published originally in Jump Point 1.9. You can read Part one here.
At the end of the first stage in the Murray Cup race through the Ellis system, Ykonde Remisk edged out Hypatia Darring with a boost flare that, while technically legal, was definitely dangerous. Both of these two Human racers finished ahead of their main competition, the veteran Tevarin Zogat Guul and the wily Xi’an Nyanāl Mo‘tak Xu.oa. Darring reacts to Remisk’s maneuver …
Darring jumped out of her racer, sped across the carrier bay floor, found Remisk in the middle of a media gang, and drove her fist toward his cheery face.
He ducked just in time.
One of Remisk’s crew grabbed Darring and held her back as she hurled accusations. “You son of a bitch! You could have killed me!”
Remisk recovered from the attempted assault and played it cool in front of the crowd, adjusting his collar and giving a weak smile. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Darring. I ran a clean race.”
“You tried to burn me alive!”
Shock and dismay spread among the faces of those gathered.
Out of the corner of her eye, Darring could see an MCR official coming their way with a concerned look on his face, but she didn’t care. She fought her way out of the crewman’s grasp and took another swing. Remisk caught her arm and held it tightly.
“Back off, Darring,” he said, “or I’ll file a complaint.”
“I’ll file one requesting your dismissal, you cheap —”
“Humans, come now, let’s remain civil.”
Mo‘tak pushed his way through the crowd and stood beside Remisk. He waited until the MCR rules official arrived, then continued. “Attend these words — I can assure you that from my perspective, Mr. Remisk violated no MCR rules. In fact, not only was his move brilliant in its simplicity, but it showed a deep dedication to the integrity of the sport. Remisk never once touched his ship to Ms. Darring’s. He showed incredible care in the maneuver. I can attest to that.”
“You can attest to kissing my —”
Guul stepped in and peeled Remisk’s fingers from Darring’s arm. He whispered into her ear. “Come on, let’s go. Not here, not this way.”
Mo‘tak chuckled. “You should listen to him, young one. Guul is a wise soul.”
Guul ignored Mo‘tak and pulled Darring through the crowd. “I said, let’s go.”
She relented, and they made their way out of the carrier bay and into a long narrow corridor that led to a small atrium with chairs and tables that looked out over Ellis III. The planet’s orbit was alive with the race as it continued with the remaining racer groups down list. It was a beautiful display, the rings of the course pulsing their light, and the blur of racecraft rushing through them at marvelous speeds.
Darring looked out at it, and her anger began to subside.
“Take a seat, Hypatia,” Guul said as he pulled one chair away from a table. Darring sat, crossed her arms, and kept looking out at the race.
Guul sat down across from her, taking care as he bent into the Human-style chair. “Now tell me … what was that all about?”
Darring did not respond at first, but she met Guul’s stern gaze with her own. Then she blinked, sighed, and said, “He cheated. He cut me off and blew fire into my face.”
“It is not a violation of the rules, and you know it.”
“Well, it should be.”
“You know,” Guul said, shaking his head and leaning back, “I would not expect a loose cannon like yourself to be such a slave to the rules.”
Darring finally smiled. “A residual from my father’s parenting. ‘Play by the rules, Hypatia’,” she said, imitating a deep manly voice, “ ‘win by the rules, and they can never have cause to take your victories away’.”
“It is a noble statement,” Guul said, “but, in racing, a touch naive. There are rules, and then there are rules. But you pull something like that again, especially with witnesses, and you’re the one that will be expelled, not Remisk.”
Darring sloughed off his warning. “He’s a jackass, and so is Mo‘tak.”
“That is true, but there’s nothing you can do about it right now. They will do what they have to do to win, and you must keep your cool. Besides,” Guul said, his gaze growing more serious, his face cast down toward the racers rushing past, “I want my last race to be against the best. And if you are expelled, then it will be against wanna-bes and has-beens.”
Darring wrinkled her brow with concern. “Why is this your last? You have many years ahead.”
Guul nodded. “Many years perhaps, but not as a racer. Every joint aches, every bone brittle, and my eyes are failing. It is time.”
Darring sat in quiet, not wanting to speak, not wanting to accept that her hero was near the end. And she had just met him. How could he be leaving now, when she had so much to speak to him about, so much to learn? Afterwards, he would likely return home (wherever that may be), and she’d never see him again. Time would be so precious during the race. When would she have another opportunity to talk to him, to learn from him? If this is his last Cup, she thought, then perhaps I should back off a bit, let him have a course or two, let him take the lead when —
“What is that look?”
She turned to him, shrugged innocently. “What look?”
Guul leaned forward. “You’re thinking about throwing the race for me, aren’t you? You’re thinking, ‘Give the old Tevarin one more victory.’ Well, forget such nonsense. My people are warriors, Hypatia, and we have a saying: ‘Honor your enemy, praise him if you must, but never lose a chance to kill him.’ Here, you and I are friends. Out there,” he said, pointing to the race, “we are foe. Promise me, that if we find ourselves neck and neck on the final lap, and you have an opportunity to win, that you will. That you will show me no mercy, no quarter, and then at least I will know that if I lose, I have lost against the best. Promise me.”
His face was so serious, Darring knew that he would not let her leave the room until she promised and did so sincerely.
She nodded. “I promise.”
Guul stood. “Excellent. Now, I owe you a dinner. Hungry?”
“Famished!”
They walked together through the corridor, took a turn toward the carrier’s mess. It was a good idea to get a full meal before heading to Ellis IV, and some rack time as well. The next several legs of the race would be tough, and Darring would have to face her crew chief soon and figure out if any serious damage had been done to her engine. It was not a conversation she was looking forward to.
“Have your crew chief speak to mine,” Guul said. “He’s an old M50 pilot and has been around as long as I —”
Guul did not finish his words. They had turned a corner and there stood three Humans wrapped in dark clothing to match the faint light of the corridor. The three did not hesitate.
One pulled a knife and slashed towards Darring’s throat. She leaned back instinctively and felt the wind of the brutal attack across her chin. The blade did not find flesh, however, and she tumbled back against the wall.
The other two were on Guul immediately, but despite the Tevarin’s confession of joint pain, he moved quickly, subduing one in a headlock and guarding off the fists of the other. Darring tried to get to him, but her assailant was not finished. He slashed again with his blade, this time toward her stomach. She knocked his arm back with a move she had learned in Basic, then drove her fist into his kidney.
As the man lurched back, recovering from the blow, Darring recognized his face. He was from Mo‘tak’s entourage, the one who had shielded his boss and nodded to her as the Xi’an had walked away. She gnashed her teeth, scowled, and drove her boot into his crotch, knocking him to his knees. She continued her assault against his face, striking him twice before he managed to turn, kick out his leg, and swipe her feet from beneath her. Darring fell hard, her hip reeling from its concussion against the corridor floor.
He was on her again, but she was ready. She timed her move, brought her knees up quickly and flung him up the corridor. She tried rising to pursue, but the body of another assailant flew over her and hit the wall. She looked toward Guul and found him making mincemeat of the third man’s face. His companions, bloody, beaten and clearly not wishing further punishment, collected themselves quickly and dashed away.
Guul released the third man, pushed him back against the wall. Darring tried moving against him, but despite his mangled face, he got away from her grasp, grabbed his blade and shot away down the corridor in the opposite direction of his accomplices.
Darring went to Guul’s side. He had slipped down the wall and was holding a bloody gash across his stomach. Darring moved his hand away to look at it. “Bastards,” she said, helping him to his feet. “Bloody bastards. Come on, let’s get you to the hospital.”
Guul shook his head and pushed her away. “No. Just get me to my crew. It’s not that bad. I’ve had worse.”
“But we have to tell someone about this. Tell them it’s Remisk and Mo‘tak.”
“How do you know that?”
“One of the men . . . I saw him in Mo‘tak’s gang the other day.”
He nodded. “But you can’t prove it.”
“Come on, Guul,” she said, letting her anger rise again. “Don’t play stupid. You know who ordered this.”
“You may be right, but they are far too smart to leave evidence lying around. And if you’re wrong, then it will reflect badly on you, especially after your unprovoked assault against Remisk. Mo‘tak has too many friends among MCR officials. This will go away as quickly as it was attempted.” He pointed down the corridor, toward the atrium and out to space. “We’ll beat them out there.”
Reluctantly, Darring nodded. She did not like the plan, but let it rest. The most important thing now was to get him to someone, anyone, who could help.
Putting an arm around his waist, she helped him back to his crew.
* * *
“You’re late,” Mo‘tak said, sitting quietly in the dark of the room. Remisk took no time to express his agitation.
“It’s got to stop, Mo‘tak. It’s gone too far.”
“How so?”
“They could have been killed. Both of them. That’s not what I signed up for.”
“What did you sign up for?”
“Sabotage is fine. Damaging an engine, clogging a fuel line, denting a wing, forcing a racer back with an illegal move. These are all fine. Win or lose, succeed or fail, it’s all part of the unspoken game. But trying to kill people is another matter entirely.”
Mo‘tak chuckled. “What would you rather do? Race the final course with only me to contend with, or with Guul and Darring as well? The Tevarin is a beast, and that welp is far better than anyone gives her credit for. If they remain in the race, you’ll go down in history as the man who had a chance, but failed to win the Triple Crown.”
You will fail regardless, Mo‘tak said to himself. Once I’ve dealt with Guul and Darring.
“It’s over, Mo‘tak,” Remisk said, emphasizing his point with a swipe of his arm. “I’m not doing your dirty work anymore.”
Mo‘tak turned on an overhead lamp resting on a table at his side. Beneath the cast light lay a small, gold-colored box, which he carefully opened. A small syringe lay in its center. He picked up the syringe and held it as if he were going to give someone a shot. “Oh, I think you will. You still have things to do for me. And if you don’t, I will share with the MCR rules committee what is contained in this needle.”
“What is it?”
Mo‘tak shrugged. “The very thing that has given you an almost inhuman focus, an ability to anticipate moves three, four turns ahead.”
“That’s a lie! I’ve never taken drugs in my life.”
“I’ve been planning this for a long, long time, Remisk. So let me lay it out for you. A young, successful pilot wants to make a name for himself. He wins the Goss Invitational by a nose and begins to think he really has a shot at winning the Triple Crown. He goes to a small-time dealer and asks, “What can you give me that can’t be detected by scanners?’ The dealer gives him this, which I gave the dealer — a Xi’an concoction called e’tâm. For us it produces a mild meditative state, but when introduced to Human brain chemistry, it creates a state of hyper awareness, an almost extrasensory perception. MCR scanners at their current settings cannot detect it. And you have been taking microdoses for months.”
“You’re a liar!”
Mo‘tak ignored the accusation. “And here’s the catch. There’s enough in here to keep you vital to the end of the race. Take it, and you’ll be fine. If not, somewhere around Ellis IX, as your ship is being pulled by the gravitational forces of that giant gas ball, you will go into withdrawal, fall into a deep sleep and be crushed by the tidal forces of its wild weather.” Mo‘tak held up the syringe for Remisk to see, letting a few drops squirt from the needle tip. “What will it be, my friend? Life or death?”
Remisk stood in the darkness for a long time. Then finally, he rolled up his sleeve, and offered his forearm. “You’re a bastard.”
Mo‘tak punched the needle into a vein. “No, Remisk. I’m not. I’m just a businessman, protecting his investment.”
He pushed the entire dose into Remisk’s arm, then laid the empty syringe in the golden box. Remisk got up and rolled down his sleeve. He turned to leave, but Mo‘tak stopped him.
“Oh,” he said, reaching into a pocket and producing a silver capsule. He pitched it to Remisk. “Get this to our man on Darring’s crew and see he puts it where we have discussed. We want to make sure that upstart has a pleasant ride through the Boneyard.”
Remisk left. Mo‘tak lingered in the dark, chewing the inside of his left cheek, considering the future. He sighed. He should never have relied on Remisk, on a Human, to do the work. They could never be trusted. He’d never had one pleasant experience with them in all his life. Not as a racer, not during his years of mandatory military service, not as a young adult, and certainly not as a child, when Human pirates had scattered his family and killed his mother. There wasn’t one in the bunch worth a damn.
But Remisk . . . could he be trusted to finish the job against Darring? Mo‘tak shrugged. It hardly mattered anyway. Whether he did or did not, Remisk’s time in the race was coming to a close. With the dose I gave him, Mo‘tak thought, getting up and leaving the room, he won’t survive the Boneyard either.
* * *
Hello again, and welcome to another broadcast of GSN’s continuing coverage of the Murray Cup Race. After a rough start that saw Hypatia Darring warned and reprimanded for her unsportsmanlike conduct, things have calmed down. Ms. Darring has kept her cool and has fought her way back to contention with a stunning head-to-head struggle around Ellis V against veteran Zogat Guul. Though these two are reported to be close friends, no love is lost between them as they make their way through these dangerous courses. But now the most contentious portion of the race is upon us. The Sorrow Sea, or as most of the racers call it, the Boneyard, looms large in the cockpit window. Can anyone brave the shattered hulls and sharp asteroids that hazard this course? Let’s find out . . .
Mo‘tak was on her left, Guul on her right, and somewhere behind her, Remisk waited to pounce. It had been like this for a long time, shifting back and forth through broken hulls of previous racers and multi-ton asteroids, some so large that their gravity tugged on her hull as she passed. Her radar displayed the Boneyard in all its glory, and there were many paths to take through the obstacles; some shorter, some longer. This was a timed course, but the lanes sometimes narrowed to force racers to poke and prod one another, thus making it one of the deadliest in the race. The broken hulls of the hollow racecraft around her confirmed its danger.
She shifted left and took one of the shorter paths. Doing so would put her closer to the finish line, but the obstacles here were ridiculous in their distribution. She turned left, barreled tightly through a wide hole of an ancient hull. The racer right behind her broke formation and flew down another path. At her speed, Darring could not tell if it had been Remisk or not, but one less bee in her bonnet was okay by her.
Mo‘tak was still on her left, however. Guul had broken formation as well and had chosen a longer path, but one less constricted with debris. She could see his little red blip on her radar, and several others training in on him from all angles. He was in deep shit, she knew, if any of those other racers worked in silent unison to push him off course. His modified Hornet would have trouble with excessive obstacles, but then that’s why he took the longer route. He was no idiot.
Mo‘tak turned his 350r sharply and shot above her. Images of Remisk’s scorching exhaust flooded her mind, but this time, she ignored her impulse and kept course.
Speed is life.
A Banu racer in their heavily upgraded Avenger slipped in alongside her. There were a few Banu in the race, and Darring could not remember the name of this one, but she remembered the distinct green-and-black striped hull. They tried forcing her into the craterous side of the asteroid ahead of them. Darring took her thumb off the thrust, acting as if she were going to slow and allow the Banu to take position, but at the last moment, she gunned her thrusters, shifted sharply up so that the belly of her M50 skimmed mere inches from the crater floor, kicking up dust from its ejecta blanket, and blowing it back into the cockpit of the Avenger on her tail. The Banu had to turn sharply to the left, giving advantage once again to Darring.
I can play dirty too!
Darring laughed into the ear of her crew chief who was warning her to take it slow and not risk getting her hydrogen scoops clogged. He was worried about her engine, which had been refitted after its overexertion around Green. There was still so much race left, and he was especially concerned with Ellis IX, the gas giant that would place serious pressure on her hull. He didn’t want her engine to go down a second time as well. But she was enjoying herself. She was enjoying the Sorrow Sea, the Boneyard, in all its wondrous danger.
Only Mo‘tak annoyed her now. The rest of her competition had fallen behind or had taken different routes. The route ahead of her was still tricky, but it was hers. She commanded it now, and she leaned back in her restraints and let her engine run.
And now Mo‘tak fell back, and his blip on her radar stopped flashing red in danger. She was free, and the finish line was close.
A warning light suddenly flashed on her cooling monitors. She looked down and saw that her engine’s heat dissipation had fallen sharply. She pressed controls, tapped panels, and now other warning lights were flashing.
Something was wrong with her fuel. It was rising in temperature, too fast, too hot, and the cooling system could not dissipate the excess heat fast enough. It was burning her engine, and her hull shifted and sputtered, pressing her forward against her restraints.
She tapped her comm link. “Something’s wrong here! Engine reaching critical heat.”
“Check your heat release override valve on the —”
She tried doing as her crew chief advised, but before she could move her arm, fire exploded into her cockpit, engulfing her torso and helmet. She panicked, trying to pat the fire out with her gloves, but that did nothing. The flames grew larger and larger, working their way under her jumpsuit, piercing the protective lining at her neck, and burning her face and shoulders.
“Power plant breach imminent!” screamed the safety system in her ear. “Power plant breach imminent!”
Through searing pain, Hypatia Darring reached beneath her cockpit seat, tapped the eject pad, and blew her cockpit enclosure into space. Thrusters beneath her seat erupted, and she tumbled after the cockpit, still strapped into her chair, gasping for air.
Five seconds later, before she lost consciousness, Darring watched her M50 explode into a thousand pieces.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Hello Citizens!
Last week, a few members of the Star Citizen team were in San Franciscio for GDC 2018 showing off the latest Alpha 3.1 build, and with it, the newly flyable Aegis Reclaimer, Anvil Terrapin, MISC Razor, and Tumbril Cyclone. It was rewarding to meet both new and long-standing community members alike, so thank you to those who had a chance to stop by and meet the team. Also, a big thanks to our volunteers from the Community who worked side-by-side with us all week, we could not have done it without you o7.
Also, as we shuffle features and mechanics looking toward Alpha 3.2, we wanted to know which features you are most excited about seeing implemented, improved and refined. We have created a Alpha 3.2 Survey to help us prioritize over the next quarter. Be sure to check it out and vote if you haven’t already!
Lastly, with Alpha 3.1 on the horizon, and the Persistent Universe continuing to develop, we’re introducing newly flyable ships to the PU, as well as bringing back some older favorites. We are offering a War Bond option to give you all one final chance to pledge for this selection of flyable ships at their original concept prices here.
Let’s see what’s going on this week:
On Monday, in an all new episode of Calling All Devs, we answer your questions on tractor beams, ship modules, space stations, and more. Watch the latest episode here
Tuesday is Lore Day with another release of seralized fiction from the Star Citizen universe. This week we are releasing an article that was previously published with Jump Point and now being made available to everyone! Catch up on the latest lore posts here.
This Wednesday also sees a new episode of Bugsmashers! with Mark Abent! Don’t miss out on another bug getting squashed in Star Citizen Alpha.
Thursday will bring us an episode of Around the Verse focusing on Squadron 42 and Flight AI. Once a month we update the Community with a AtV dedicated to Squadron 42 and an inside look at its development.
Last but not least, on Friday is March Subscriber’s Town Hall – Bringing Characters to Life. Join Josh Herman, Jeremiah Lee and other members of their team for a discussion about their work bringing the characters of Star Citizen to life, including clothing, armor, and recent and future customization options in the Star Citizen persistent universe. We’ll go live at 12pm PDT on our official Twitch channel.
See you in the ‘verse,
Tyler Nolin Community ManagerThe Weekly Community Content Schedule
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
This week on Around the Verse, we check in with LA Studio Director Eric Kieron Davis for a Star Citizen project update, and get a detailed look at how sound factors into the immersion and storytelling of the Persistent Universe.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
“All right, Jess. I’m heading there now.” With a flick, Umar closed the comm channel. Break time over. Swinging his feet out of the bunk, a swarm of sandwich crumbs cascaded off his chest and onto the bed. He really should start eating at the table again. At least his bad habit of wearing his boots to bed made sense. After working for In-A-Fix Assistance for the past six years he had learned that comms for help always happen about five minutes into a nap.
Leaving the crew quarters, Umar performed a quick a visual inspection on the three BARD drones nestled into the mid-ship docking ports. Charged and not leaking? Check and check. Skipping over the empty fourth port, he gave his favorite drone, Spear, a traditional pat for luck before heading up to the bridge.
Umar adjusted his settings as he sat down in the pilot seat, transitioning the power he had routed to the shields for nap-time back to the engines. With a growl, the thrusters came back online. He keyed the coordinates Jess had sent over into his navigation, swung the Vulcan’s nose around and initiated quantum to the nearside of Cano’s asteroid belt.
Under two minutes, Umar noted as the light smears from the quantum field streaked past. Not too shabby of a response time. While you could always count on life’s ill fortune sending clients your way, providing good service was how you could convert a random refuel run into a potential repeat customer. Especially out in Cano where traffic was a bit sparse.
The ship slowed out of QT and Umar adjusted his flight path towards the beacon’s origin on the rim of the belt. After a few moments of navigating through the field, he spotted the client’s Reliant clinging near the underside of one of the asteroids. He might have missed it completely if he hadn’t had the beacon frequency. Its signature was low enough that the small craft almost blended seamlessly into the surrounding radiation. Pilot must have shut down everything to conserve energy once they ran out of fuel.
Before opening comms, he followed protocol and did a full scan of the area. No point in flying to the rescue if you fly straight into a threat and wind up needing rescuing too. With his MFD giving the all clear, he hailed the client. “Hi, there. I’m Umar Deluca from In-A-Fix. You requested a refueling?”
“That’s me. Thanks for coming out,” responded the pilot, with a kind, weathered smile.
“Of course, that’s what we’re here for. Let me get into position, and then we can have you back flying in no time.”
As Umar rolled his ship above and behind the vessel, he could clearly see that the Reliant’s hull had been badly damaged. There were scorch marks all along the rear fuselage and multiple ballistic holes perforated the wing. Umar had a pretty good guess what caused the pilot to run out of fuel.
“Not sure if you know this but your port dorsal side is pretty banged up. If you want, I could patch you up while I’m out here. Wouldn’t take long and it’d be heck of a lot safer to fly.”
“Appreciate the offer, but creds are tight. Just the fuel for now.”
“Sure. No problem. Stand by and I’ll have the drone right over.”
Umar got out of the pilot seat and went to the control station at the rear of the bridge. He scrolled through his options — Spear for rearming, Shake for repairs, and Liam for refueling. Selecting Liam, he did one last check, and seeing all green, launched the fuel-laden drone. With practiced ease, he maneuvered Liam towards the other vessel’s fuel port.
“Transfer in progress,” Umar informed the pilot.
“Listen, I hate to ask this, but there is actually one more thing you could do for me,” said the pilot, looking bashful as he nervously rubbed the back of his head. “Any chance you have a drink or some water you could spare? Fuel wasn’t the only thing I forgot to stock up on and I’m starting to feel pretty dehydrated.”
Umar hesitated in answering. It wasn’t the sharing that was the issue, but the time. He had hoped to be able to pick up at least two more jobs today and he knew from experience how hard it could sometimes be getting a guest to leave your ship.
“Listen, if it’s a problem, I can just wait till I can fly myself to a station or something.”
Umar felt a twinge of guilt. What was he doing out here if he wasn’t going to help people? “It’s no problem,” Umar said with as much hospitality as he could muster. “If I’m filling up your ship, might as well top you off too. Swing on over and I’ll fix you up.”
Leaving Liam to do its thing, Umar remotely opened the Vulcan’s rear hatch and went to wait by the liftlock in the crew quarters. It wasn’t too long before he heard the pressure begin to cycle. He cracked the fridge, removed two fizzy water cans, and turned just as the atmosphere in the lift equalized.
Umar was a bit taken aback when the pilot bent slightly to avoid hitting his head as he stepped out. The man was very tall, and having a helmet on only made him more imposing. Suddenly, the crew quarters felt a lot more cramped.
“Hope you like etrog flavor,” said Umar, offering the can. “Otherwise I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with tap.”
The pilot didn’t take the drink. Didn’t even take off his helmet. “The rest of your crew still up in the cockpit?”
“No, it’s just me.” Umar regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.
With a smooth motion, the pilot pulled out the pistol he had hidden in his EVA pack. “Sorry about this, but I need your ship.”
Umar’s wrists were aching from struggling against the tape that bound him to the control terminal chair. It was rated for sealing hulls so it wasn’t a huge surprise that he hadn’t been able to loosen it, but he had to try.
At the front of the bridge, the pilot was navigating the Vulcan out of the asteroid field. The control terminal flashed a warning that Liam was moving out of range.
“Come on,” implored Umar. “You could have at least let me get my drone.”
“Look, I’d prefer not to have to gag you,” said the pilot. “I know how uncomfortable it can be.”
“Screw you. Don’t pretend like you’re some decent guy just because you have manners. Not only did you steal my ship, but you pretended to be in trouble to do it. I tried to help you and this is how you thank me?”
The pilot didn’t say anything, just kept his attention on the nav map.
“You know, every time an asshole like you pulls a stunt like this it just makes it that much harder for real folks in trouble to get the help they need. Who’s gonna stop and lend a hand if there’s a more than decent chance they’re gonna get a bullet for their troubles? So yeah, double screw you.” Just like his struggles against the tape, Umar didn’t really expect his rant to help the situation, but it definitely made him feel better.
Surprisingly though, the pilot responded. “I’m not stealing your ship. As soon as I get where I’m going, you can have it back.”
“Oh, in that case, let’s crank some tunes and enjoy the ride,” said Umar with a sneer when a sudden thought occurred to him. “Wait. What the hell was wrong with your ship?”
“They knew my regtag.”
“Who’s they?”
No response. Instead, the pilot finished plotting a course on the nav, and spooled the quantum drive. Colorful lights streaked past as the Vulcan surged forward. In the distance, Umar could see Pox, the last planet in the system, steadily growing larger. Umar had been hoping that they would head towards Carteyna where there would have been more of a chance of running into some authorities, but out here in the far reaches the chances of running into another ship were far slimmer.
“You know you could have just asked for a ride,” said Umar, breaking the temporary silence. “But that’s the problem with people like you, isn’t it? Just take what you want rather than earn it. You wanna know why I fly this rig? It’s so I can undo a little bit of the damage that people like you create. The universe is dark enough without us having to hurt each other.”
The quantum lights faded and the pilot pushed back his chair and stood. Walking past his captive, he headed down into the rear of the ship.
“Where you going?” asked Umar.
“To get the gag.”
Before Umar could respond, a shrill alarm sounded.
“What the hell is that?” the pilot demanded, leaping back up the stairs.
“ECN alert.” Umar looked down at the pop-up notification on his terminal. “Nearby ship sprung a core leak in their power plant. They’re not gonna have long.”
The pilot tapped the controls, silencing the notification. “Poor bastards. That’s a tough way to go.”
“We have to go help them.”
“I’m really starting to think you don’t understand this whole kidnapped thing.”
“If we don’t help them now, they’re going to die.”
“And that’s terrible, but it’s not my problem.”
“Of course it’s your damn problem. You heard the alert. Their power plant is overloading and if the radiation doesn’t fry them, the explosion will. You ignore it, you’re killing them. That simple.”
“And if there’s any security in the area and they show up to help, then I’m as good as dead too.”
“Do you know where we are? It’s a miracle we even heard the alert. We are it. We are their only hope in this universe. Don’t you get that?” Unbidden, tears welled up in Umar’s eyes. “Please.”
The pilot stared at his captive for a long moment.
“If you say one word about me, or try to signal them in any way, you’re going out the airlock. No second chances. Understood?”
Not daring to say anything and risk the pilot changing his mind, Umar quickly and emphatically nodded his agreement.
“Can’t believe I’m doing this.”
The pilot sat back down and adjusted the Vulcan’s course towards the beacon’s signal. As he spun the quantum drive back up, he shook his head in disbelief, “I mean, look how well stopping to help someone worked out for you.”
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Top of the mornin’ to you Citizens!
We hope you had a wonderful St. Patrick’s weekend – or in case you’re living in Ireland, still enjoy a fantastic Paddy’s Bank holiday Monday! But as all enjoyable things must come to an end eventually, so have our green festivities. Our St. Patrick’s Day Screenshot Contest is over, and we’re currently in the process of selecting the winners of our fabulous prizes. With 695 entries, this is no easy job, even more so with all the 695 entries being as good as they are. A big thank you to everyone who submitted a screenshot!
Our special St. Patrick’s Day promotion is also coming to an end today, so grab those ships now before the promotion is over and upgrade your wardrobe with a “Cal is my Wingman” Squadron 42 T-shirt for a discounted price.
And everyone that is attending GDC in San Francisco this week: make sure to stop by the Intel booth to chat with some of our team members and don’t miss Sean Tracy’s GDC talk on Thursday, March 22nd.
Let’s see what’s going on this week:
On Monday, Jared will put on his headset for a brand-new episode of Calling All Devs. This week, we’ll answer YOUR questions about EVA between fast-moving ships, the future of real-time commodity tracking and more! You can watch the full episode here once it goes live.
Tuesday spells L-O-R-E! Our magnificent Lore Team will expand on the lore and narrative that makes up the Star Citizen universe. To shorten your wait, you can check out previously published lore posts here.
No Bugsmashers this Wednesday, but that doesn’t mean those pesky bugs are safe this week. We’ll be smashing in the background while our show will return on the 28th!
Psst! Listen! Thursday will bring us an episode of Around the Verse that will focus on all things audio in Star Citizen. Hear us out; this will be a sound episode!
Make sure to tune in to our Twitch Channel for a new episode of Reverse the Verse on Friday. We hope to see you there!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
Baily’s beads during the Stanton eclipse by Corsair62
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Astronomy amateur Corsair62 witnessed Baily’s beads, a short-term optical phenomenon, during the full phase of the eclipse. Always keep your eyes open for that kind of shots while in the ‘verse!
Below are answers to the most voted for questions in our Vulcan Q&A thread that we posted on Spectrum. Thank you for taking the time to submit your questions and voting for the ones you care about most.
Also, Special thanks to John Crewe and Todd Papy for their help in answering your questions.
Lastly, for more information about the Aegis Vulcan, make sure to check out the Vulcan Ship Shape and our Vulcan themed episode of Reverse the Verse.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Will the drones stop responding if I fly the Vulcan too far away or dock the Vulcan in a nearby carrier?
The drones will have a maximum control range, as you approach that you’ll be warned in time to make a choice to return or continue at your own risk. If the Vulcan or the drones exceed that range then they will slowly stop responding until they are completely unresponsive. Simply coming back in range is enough to return them to complete control and causes no lasting damage.
Having the Vulcan inside another ship will likely not impact range.
How many (100% empty) small and medium fuel tanks can Vulcan fill?
This is a difficult question to answer accurately because every ship in the game has a bespoke fuel tank, so whilst the stats page may say medium fuel tank, that tank is bespoke to that ship and is within a capacity we define as medium. For example a Cutlass Medium Tank is a different capacity to a Vanguards Medium tank.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Remember that the role of the Vulcan isn’t to completely fill tanks, although it can do that with repeat fills, but to provide enough fuel to get you to a proper refuel point. To put a ballpark estimate, that will naturally adjust during development and testing, we expect that the Vulcan would be able to fully fill 8-10 or so small tanks, 2-3 medium tanks and half a large tank. Filling a tank will require multiple trips with drones however.
Will the drones be able to pick up materials from other places than the “cribs” on board the Vulcan?
The drones do have basic arms/clamps to carry items, but the main purpose is to take them from the “cribs” on board the Vulcan. Theres nothing to stop them taking it from elsewhere provided the drone can actually access those areas.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
How are these drones different from the stand alone repair bot we get with 3.3?
The repair bot for 3.3 will be a completely different item and most likely much more smaller, it is personal after all! When creating the new roadmap we needed to find images to reflect the nature of each one so we used an existing piece of concept art for drones for this item.
In general terms, what is the largest ship a Vulcan would be able to fully re-fuel?
As mentioned its a hard thing to define, but somewhere around Retaliator/Constellation size is the goal for a full refuel. Again, this is not a ship designed for fully refuelling others but instead to give them a top up to get them on their way. In a real world example a roadside breakdown service would bring a small 5-10L fuel can to top you up, not a 60L tank of fuel.
If I have a spare weapon in my cargo bay can the drones swap my ships weapon loadout?
This is not something we had specifically designed for the ship in mind, but the gameplay systems would most likely not prevent this from happening.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Does the Vulcan draw its own fuel from the external fuel tank?
The external fuel tank, which contains two fuel tanks to separate Hydrogen and Quantum fuel, is purely for transfer to other ships via the drones. The Vulcan has its own separate fuel tanks to draw from.
Does the cargo bay (elevator to living quarters) function as airlock?
The cargo bay itself does not function as an airlock however the elevator up to the living quarters is enclosed and itself functions as a mini airlock separating the potentially open cargo bay and the habitation area.
Can Vulcan drones drain fuel out of a friendly ship to refuel itself and continue refueling others?
We discussed this in the Reverse the Verse piece we did on the Vulcan and again, this is not something we had in mind for the ship but the systems should not prevent this as its essentially part of the salvage gameplay loop.
Can a Vulcan itself refuel and buy fuel from a Starfarer?
Yes, all ships will be fitted with a “Fuel Port” item which enables transfer from one ship to another with the appropriate equipment such as the Starfarers refuelling boom or drones that can refuel.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
You used an interesting word choice by stating these drones have “tug functions” (brochure). What will they use this function for?
Tug in the context of the brochure was marketing making the word “carry” sound more interesting. The drones can carry items with their tiny claw/clamps and in theory this would enable them to push/pull something around but it would not allow you to have a fleet of drones dragging a ship around like horses and a chariot.
How much space does ammo take up? 12 SCU doesn’t seem like much for rearming.
That depends on what ammo you are bringing! The current volume of the cargo grid is 2×2×3 SCU which is a volume of over 20 cubic meters of space to fill with ammo, ship items or cargo. The cargo room on the Vulcan is also quite spacious and if during development we feel the need for greater capacity then there is room to increase this.
Shouldn’t there be two external tanks, one for Hydrogen and one for Quantum fuel?
Yes, the external fuel tank houses two separate tanks for each fuel type. The Vulcan itself then has two Medium Hydrogen Fuel Tanks and one Medium Quantum Fuel Tank all to itself. This is reflected on the ship matrix page by a total of 3 Medium Hydrogen Fuel Tanks and 2 Medium Quantum Fuel Tanks.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Will the drones be able to work in a gravity well or atmosphere?
They will be able to function in earth like gravity and atmosphere perfectly fine.
How will I know what needs to be repaired and where it is on the ship I am repairing and what kind of overlay will there be on the repair target?
We’ll be discussing this more in the lead up to Repair and Salvage gameplay being introduced into the game in a future patch.
Can you give some detail about how drones will be controlled by the operators?
Drones will be controlled from the Support Stations in the cockpit of the Vulcan, players (or NPCS) will sit down at the station and fly the drone from a first person perspective via the screen. They will function and fly to all intents and purposes like any other ship in the game.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Will we need a good stockpile of ship components to be able to effectively repair all ships?
Another topic we discussed in depth on the RTV was this scenario and in short yes, but only if you want to be able to repair all ships. The Vulcan can be played however you want to play it, be it lurking near a shop to stock up on the exact items needed by customers or filled with generic items allowing a potentially faster response to people in need.
Can you operate the drones via MobiGlas?
This is not something we currently plan to support, at least for the Vulcans drones.
Can we repair, rearm and refuel ground vehicles with the Vulcan?
Absolutely, ground vehicles contain and conform to the same mechanics for items as our ships, just on a smaller scale.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Hi everyone,
We’ve made it to March in one piece… except that guy who tried to steal my cargo on Yela… not much left of him. Anyway, I hope you all had an enjoyable weekend.
Let’s see what’s going on this week:
Every week, designers, engineers and other developers from our five offices around the world answer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted on by YOU. This week, we get answers on player hangars, player-to-player interdiction, repair in Alpha 3.3, and more. You can watch the full episode here.
On Tuesday we’ll be releasing a previously exclusive edition of the Galactic Guide, this time touring the Tal system.
Fast forward to Wednesday for Bugsmashers!, the Subscriber’s Newsletter, and a landslide of information in our Vulcan Q&A, fresh and hot off the press. Curious what types of questions we’ll be answering in the Q&A? Well, we selected your highest voted questions from Spectrum here.
Thursday will bring us an episode of Around the Verse that you won’t want to miss… that is, if you’re a fan of the Reclaimer and/or Cyclone. Let’s be honest though, you don’t even have to own a Reclaimer to appreciate how beastly this thing is.
Finally, If you haven’t had your fill for the week yet, we’ll be live on Friday at 12PM PST at twitch.tv/starcitizen for Reverse the Verse. We hope to see you there!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Corsair62 has taken a beautiful screenshot from the cockpit of a Herald. Oh, did I mention it took them hours to position this shot just right? Well done!
On a very special episode, Sandi Gardiner and Sean Tracy welcome a live studio audience to the ATV set for the first time ever. Our guests are treated to this month’s Star Citizen Project Update, an in-depth look into the ongoing optimization process, and a few choice “jokes”.
Recently we introduced our first concept ship of 2018: the Aegis Vulcan. Since then, we’ve been actively gathering questions about the Vulcan on Spectrum and are excited to bring you the answers you’ve been looking for. Make sure to keep an eye out on March 14th!
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
Every week in Calling All Devs, designers, engineers and other developers from our five offices around the world answer backer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted on by YOU. This week, we discuss buying weapons with aUEC, automated ship turrets, the Freelancer DUR cargo space and more. The episode is out now and you can watch it here.
Tuesday: Interested in learning more about the Star Citizen universe? Maybe you’re curious about the Xi’An race? If so, get ready to explore the Kayfa system in an all new episode of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Fast forward to Thursday. The episode you’ve been waiting for. Tune in for a brand new episode of Around the Verse that checks in with the Star Citizen development team to discuss performance and optimization.
And If Around the Verse wasn’t enough, we’ll be live on Friday at 8am PST, 4pm UTC at twitch.tv/starcitizen with Clive and Rob Johnson (no relation) to follow-up and answer your questions from the live chat.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Nomeus has created an image that quickly found its way spread around our offices. Comical to say the least. It does make you wonder though… Would you rather fight one Idris sized Avenger… or 100 Avenger sized Idris?
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Ever imagined watching the sunset from your 600i? Well now you don’t have to – LundFoci has created an awesome wallpaper that caters to the imagination!
Welcome to February’s Monthly Studio Report with updates from all of our studios to give some insight into what they’ve been working on this past month. As our first quarterly release date approaches, the team’s been collectively hard at work completing the features for 3.1 while pushing forward on the continued development of Squadron 42. With that said, let’s get to it.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
CLOUD IMPERIUM: LOS ANGELES
NARRATIVE
On the PU front, the Narrative Team spent the month working with Design and Audio to polish up some scripts for a few new characters that might be coming down the pipe. The main tasks this month have been defining a new system for the Generic NPC line sets as well as outlining the narrative experience for some of the locations, trying to figure out how to sell the flavor and character of an area for the players walking around it. To do this in a way that’s scalable, the team started constructing a template that calls out the various characters, stores/locations and story moments that would be specific to this location. Once complete, this document could be distributed to the various departments building the area, so everyone’s working off a cohesive vision of the location.
On the Squadron 42 front, work has continued on a handful of other documents and breakdowns that address some of the upcoming text needs for the game. Unfortunately, as this is a Spoiler Free zone, details will have to be furnished at a later date.
CHARACTERS
The Character Team knocked out a tremendous amount of work since the last update on the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42. They’ve been pressing forward on all kinds of uniforms, armor, and clothes, such as the upcoming Port Olisar Collection. Several pieces from that collection have gone from high poly to in-game mesh and will soon be headed to texturing, rigging and implementation in-game around Port Olisar.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The Legacy Light Outlaw moved to the in-game mesh stage. Part of this work involves the creation of a low poly version to help with performance while maintaining maximum quality. Once complete, it will move into final texturing, rigging, and final implementation. The medium and heavy legacy outlaw sets just started their high poly phase, which allows for the heavy detail work, before getting it ready for final texturing. The legacy light marine armor has also entered high poly phase and will soon also go into in-game low poly modeling, texturing and rigging.
Several other PU characters are in various states of production. The team started working on some high-quality mission givers, as well as character concepts for future releases.
One of the newly formed feature teams is focusing on the new Character Customizer, which introduces player customization into the game and builds on the great work that was done last year. This first implementation will include the ability to choose a head, skin tone, eye color, hairstyle and hair color for your character. The team is also putting the finishing touches on the backend functionality so the player’s choices persist.
The team also implemented a facial rig designed to translate human performances onto the alien characters. This rig will allow more of the actor’s performances to translate into a very different morphology.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
In the ongoing mission to simplify procedures within the development, the team created a unified tool installer, which allows for a single installer to automatically update each of the tools artists and designers use.
Another tool the team implemented was to integrate support for loadouts into the 3D modeling software, Maya. This new tool allows animators to polish and preview their character animation work with the characters wearing the particular loadout that they’re intended to wear in the final game. Since clothing and armor vary in size and material, it’s important for animators to know when an awkward character movement or interaction point is actually an error in the animation or simply because they’re wearing bulky armor. Since these poses change dramatically when polishing animations, the team can now see the final loadout ahead of time in Maya, rather than waiting to see it rendered in-game.
The team is always researching or prototyping work prior to committing final resources to complete it. One feature that they’re very passionate about is the director’s camera mode. After collecting feedback from the community, the team has started to revisit this mode to make it more robust and user-friendly by creating more intuitive and obvious controls.
SHIPS
The Ship Team spent the past month getting as many ships and vehicles through the pipeline as quickly as possible thanks to an updated production practice. The base model of the Tumbril Cyclone entered the prep stage which is one of the last steps in getting any ship (or vehicle in this case) ready for operation. In this phase, the team’s creating the vehicle’s damage states and generating the LOD versions that allow the best performance possible.
The Anvil Hurricane has also entered the final art stage, so work is being done to generate UVs, apply custom normals as well as final materials and decals, and finalizing the animations. The other departments are finishing their work before the Hurricane enters flight prep. Overall, the ship is on track to hit our Alpha 3.2 goal as seen on the public roadmap.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Revisions to the Mustang are still in progress and entering the final art stages before continuing through the pipeline. The updated starter ship from Consolidated Outland is planned for delivery in the Alpha 3.2 patch in Q2.
The last ship currently being worked on in Los Angeles is the Anvil Terrapin. The ship is currently having the final animations implemented, which includes the player getting in and out of the pilot seat, the door opening and closing, landing gear folding in and out, as well as the armored shell.
Finally, LA’s Vehicle Feature Team implemented a huge number of ship optimizations to help increase performance. As mentioned in the Studio Update, the goal with optimizations is to find improvements wherever you can, completing fixes that bring milliseconds down to microseconds rather than looking for a single ‘catch-all’ fix. The team also spent time converting items from Item 1.0 to Item 2.0 such as missiles, missile racks, object databank, EMP and various bugs and crashes to increase client performance.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
This month, ATX designers worked on a few key things. One was the Service Beacon, which facilitates player generated content. The plan for 3.1 is to allow players to pay others for services such as “Personal Transport” or “Combat Assistance.” Once a contract is accepted, QT Markers will be created on the Contract Initiator so the Contract Provider can easily get to them. Both parties will be able to see where the other is person is while the contract is active. Either party involved in the contract can cancel at any time, but be warned, players will be able to rate the other person where contract completion is not easily determined. (For instance, when does combat assistance end?) The team is close to finishing the second sprint on this feature, and it is currently in the scope of the Alpha 3.1 release.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
ATX designers are currently organizing the work involved for the next three mission givers. This entails prioritizing their animations, and figuring out how to evolve their functionality. These mission givers exist in locations already in game, as the Object Container Streaming tech to add new locations is slated for the 3.3 release. These mission givers are:
• Luca Brunt: Who organizes races at Grim Hex and collects bets on the races.
• Recco Battaglia: Who organizes much of the mining tasks that are coming and going out of Levski.
• Wallace Klim: Is a drug chemist that has set up shop in the tunnels of Levski.
The new mission givers have not been committed to a specific release, but since they populate locations already in the game, they will be released when ready.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Work on the Constellation Phoenix made steady progress this month. The ship is coming along nicely with the modeling of ‘fancy’ trims and interior ‘set pieces’ (chairs, tables, bottles for the bar, etc.) being a focus of late. Following a positive Whitebox-Design review, the ship is pretty much functional in-game right now. Next on the agenda for the Constellation Phoenix is finishing up the UVs, a material pass and a start on the fine detail.
BACKEND SERVICES
This month, the team provided support for the new Service Beacon system by allowing the backend services to manage all aspects of Service Beacon contracts and states.
They’ve also been marching forward on bringing the fully diffusionized services online. During the process, they’ve made a number of extensions to the Ooz Language and core framework. The end result may not be as visually attractive as a new ship or planetside content, but Diffusion is the system that connects the players to these beautiful things.
In addition, the Backend Service Team provided general support for 3.1 on both the game side and with DevOps.
ANIMATION
Over the last month, ATX Animation shifted from working on Usables to bringing Persistent Universe Mission Givers to life. Good progress was made and the first two mission givers should be completed soon, allowing the team to move onto others. The team is also putting some finishing touches on the Shopkeeper characters (both friendly and gruff, male and female) and the Admin Office Worker.
Ship Animation finished work on the upcoming ships for 3.1, including the Tumbril Cyclone, MISC Razor, Anvil Terrapin, and Aegis Reclaimer.
OPERATIONS
DevOps has been supporting the Engineering and QA Teams with their performance and testing work. Additional effort has been focused on optimizing all aspects of server communication and data storage and retrieval efficiency, including network and database optimizations. The BuildOps portion of the team has continued to work closely with the IT group, expanding the build system to accommodate more granular build types. This will allow feature teams to work on their features independently, with less reliance on other teams, allowing for more rapid iteration of key feature development.
February has been a big ramp-up for ATX QA. The team has been cleaning up its remaining backlog from 3.0 and working with the designers in Austin on 3.1 preparations. They’ve been testing several shopping and commodity changes in anticipation of an economy playtest with Evocati. They have also been doing extensive test passes on probability volume, interdiction, Subsumption, insurance and NPC animations in collaboration with various departments.
On the operational side, the ATX QA Leads Team completed annual reviews and is now focused on collaborating with overseas counterparts on quality-of-life updates for the department. On the 3.1 front, the branch is up and running, which means that QA is in the thick of checking inclusions and completing a smoke to locate any bugs beyond those already found on Game-Dev. A large amount of playtest time has been spent on performance – with all the optimizations, refactoring and cleanup of old code going on, regular captures must be provided to the engineers for progress. New missions have begun to hit QA, along with new debugging tools to diagnose and log problems for developers. The team also started testing the MISC Razor, several ship weapon reworks and updates to the player chase cam. Last but far from least, QA has been very excited to get their hands on the Character Customizer and really start breaking it.
The Player Relations Team coordinated with several other teams to get 3.0.1 out to players, which helped alleviate the golf ball bug and other persistence related issues. As teams continue to work on resolving one-off issues, they’ve also shifted efforts to some overdue project work, such as creating a proper knowledge base and starting the process of adding new Evocati for upcoming 3.1 testing.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
FOUNDRY 42: UK
SHIPS
The Origin 600i is nearing art completion. The exterior is at final art polish with the turret and access doors now complete. Final polish on the interior focused on the captain’s quarters, cargo room, hub area and dorms to get the ship ready for handover to tech design.
The team has also been working hard on the Hammerhead interior. The corridors, turrets and cargo bay are complete. Meanwhile, work has begun on the bridge, captain’s quarters and lift sections. Also, the Reclaimer is now art complete, and will be featured during March’s episode of Ship Shape.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The team has also been tirelessly working on concept ships. Not much can be said about them without ruining the reveal, but they are progressing really well. The Aegis Vulcan promo images were finished for the sale, and a new contract concept artist was brought on board to keep up with demands for future work.
AUDIO
In February, CIG Audio focused on optimizing and stabilizing code to improve performance for the 3.1 release. Both CPU and memory usage have been reduced, and one of the main initiatives in this area has been Dynamic Media Loading. This is still undergoing some testing internally with Audio QA to ensure nothing falls between the cracks, but if all goes well, it should reduce the memory footprint of audio by more than fifty percent. This is in addition to existing tech, such as streaming, which is already employed.
On the content side, sound design creation and implementation has progressed for rest stops and derelicts, and more sound effects were added to the new ships/vehicles that will be available in the 3.1 release. The Grim HEX and Levski locations’ sound design have undergone additional polish, with music logic and additional content on the way for those areas. Also, human-scale weapons (i.e. guns) received an overhaul, especially where the NPC perspectives are concerned, improving and iterating sonically upon the gameplay experience.
Where Squadron 42 is concerned the team has been in ‘pre-post production’, planning how coverage of cinematic sequences will work when the CIG Audio Team switches ‘modes’ and becomes akin to a sound post house after all the cinematic sequences land. Audio has also been lining up more raw source requirements to provide fresh material; building out the Squadron 42 internal Sound FX library was a big initiative this month. To that end, the team will soon be sourcing props and recording all kinds of ‘wild track’ material, as it’s technically known.
Also noteworthy were some big improvements to dialogue spatialisation and more advanced debugging tools to assist dialogue implementation across the PU and Squadron 42. Debug display is never thought of as particularly glamorous but it is invaluable in helping our teams deliver the best experience possible.
GRAPHICS
This month, the Graphics Team has been focusing on three main areas: the UI, performance, and gas clouds. The UI Team has been fixing various quality issues with anti-aliasing and render-to-texture resolution to ensure displays are as crisp as possible. They’ve also been making several improvements to the ship targeting displays, adding back older features into the RTT system such as edge-highlighting and electrical interference. On the performance front, some major improvements have been made to the multi-threading within the editor, which in many cases have doubled the frame-rate on complex environments such as the Squadron 42 Idris. For the gas cloud system, the team has been extending it to support multiple gas clouds at once, with the aim of allowing them to be embedded within one another. There has also been work done on debugging tools for gas clouds to help analyze the complex volumetric data sets and understand how the artists are using the system and where memory and performance can be saved.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
This month, the UI Team has been working with two teams to bring new features and polish to both ship combat and the PMA/VMA. The UI Visuals Team has focused on polishing up the look of the OwnShip/Target status displays, including adding these to the ship MFD screens and improving the overall visual look of the holoshader and surrounding UI. The team is working closely with the Graphics Team to dial-in shader requirements, which aim to improve the legibility of the holograms themselves, as well as the UI in general when projected upon bright backgrounds. The team has also been working on updating the Combat Markers on Item2.0 ships from the brackets that were present within 3.0 with some new geometry and fresh animations.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Alongside the UI Visual Team, the EU-1 Gameplay Team has had UI involvement with the team focusing on polishing up the VMA and PMA mobiGlas apps. For these two apps, a strong focus has been put on improving the overall user-experience by fixing bugs present in the current iteration, as well as overhauling the mobiGlas layout in general to make more use of screen real estate and breaking the menu layout into a more intuitive structure. On the engineering side, the Star Marine Loadout Customization screen in the Front End has been converted to use the PMA code. This will make fixing issues on this screen much easier, as the PMA replaces the custom code that was previously released.
The Art Team, while primarily supporting these two features, has also spent time fixing issues raised in 3.0 and continued work on Chemline screens for Squadron 42.
ANIMATION
Animation has continued to work on the bespoke assets for a wide variety of the supporting cast for Squadron 42, including crewmembers that serve alongside you.
Animation work for the firing and reloading has continued on:
Female background exercise sets have been brought up to final quality pass, pending sign off review. Usable animation sets continue to be refined, eliminating bugs and tidying up popping issues on things like cup, plate and tray attachments.
Chakma continues to have his animation assets finalized, and the team has identified the remaining issues that need to be resolved before closing him out for good.
Player mechanics have been worked on for the newly implemented leaning system, allowing lean right and lean left actions in all stances.
ENGINEERING
Steady progress is being made on object container streaming. The team has been ploughing through the conversion of all the component’s creation routines, so that they can be run on a background thread. To give an indication of how much work is involved there are around 400 of them in total, of which 218 have now been converted, so still some way to go. The streaming can now be turned on, creating everything that is marked as thread safe in the background and everything else on the main thread, so the team can test whether everything is still working as they progress. At this stage it does slow down loading considerably, as it has to wait and switch between the two threads, but that will improve as more components are converted.
One FPS Feature Team is prototyping a new lean mechanic for the player, particularly designed for when a player is in cover. Because of the way a lot of the environments are built, the contextual cover system doesn’t always work that well, especially when trying to look around a corner with walls that aren’t straight-edged. Rather than locking players into a cover mechanic, the team is trying out more of a player-driven cover system, where the player is given the ability to manually lean around left and right, giving them more control and response.
A new feature team sprint has been kicked off on the first version of mining. The team is deciding how to setup different types of rocks with their mineral composition, how they will absorb energy, how players can extract the minerals, and break into them.
GAMEPLAY STORY
The team continued to work on animations for a range of scenes and enjoyed working more closely with design. As a result, animations are beginning to appear in-game and the scenes are developing overall. A new technical animator has also been brought on board to help implement more scenes in-game, and will be joining CIG in April.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Testing and refinement of the interior layout tool has continued. The team now has a locked down library of rooms, corridors and hero spaces to use for an initial version of rest stop interiors and art has now begun refinement of these assets to bring them up to a high visual standard. There is now a large range of different layouts artists can pick and choose from to decide which are the best to go into a first iteration of the complete rest stop. While none of said assets are final yet, the tool has proven itself in its ability to produce a great deal of variety, producing close to 200 different layouts from only one layout graph during testing.
Work continued on the utilitarian hangars and refinements made to the rest stop exterior. These elements were brought together in a final location to create the bones of a finished rest stop with design, audio and visual refinement continuing forward.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
This month, the VFX Team made a “flight-ready” pass on three new ships: the Anvil Terrapin, MISC Razor and Aegis Reclaimer. Also, the Tumbril Cyclone received its VFX first Pass.
Two new weapons also went through the VFX pipeline: the Gemini R97 and Preacher Armament Distortion Scattergun. The Apocalypse Arms Scourge Railgun’s impact effects were revisited following a Design requested to more correctly portray the type of damage dealt out by this weapon.
The team also began some initial investigations into VFX-specific material improvements. They will be working closely with the Graphics and Tech Art departments to create a versatile material template that will provide many cool options for the team. Plans were further fleshed out for the core features the team hopes to move forward with this year, including the previously mentioned signed-distance-field integration, an improved lightning/electricity editor, and location-specific camera-bound VFX.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The Facial Team was busy with the remaining face animations for Squadron 42. The next phase will be polishing and improving the animations, once they’re seen in-game. On the PU front, most of the Mission Giver faces have been completed up to an implementation pass and are ready to go in-game for further work.
The first Derby Studio tour occurred at the end of January. Two backers were scanned and should eventually make their way into the game. There were some serious and some NOT so serious scans! Prep work has started for the next tour, which is planned for March 8th and is exclusive to community subscribers. Improvements to the face scanner are being planned too, which should make it quicker and easier to get through a higher number of scans. Also, the scanner will be moved to another area in the studio. This will enable the team to shoot Motion Capture and Head Scan simultaneously.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
This DE Environment Art Team continued to update the look of procedural planets. With recent tech improvements in place, they updated some of the existing content to make the best use of the advancements, which includes more intelligent color and material breakup, overall improved terrain, and better orbit to ground transitioning. They applied a large amount of these changes to Yela, and will use what they learned in the process on other locations moving forward. A small Environment Art strike team focused on the landing zones in Lorville. They worked closely with Designers and Concept Artists to dial in the look and feel of the locations. The whiteboxing and layout phases are almost complete, and the team is preparing to push these areas towards final art.
QA
Engineering helped DE QA track down the potential causes of performance issues occurring on Live. Each week DE QA participated in a 50-player cross-studio play test with their UK and ATX counterparts, plus some development team members to get the headcount to 50. A new automatic RAD capture system was implemented to perform a RAD capture when the client framerate drops below 15fps for at least 20 frames. This automatic capture process is enabled via CVar, and was whitelisted for use on Shipping builds. The threshold for the capturing system can also be tweaked by Engineering to capture even lower fps drops. Ultimately, this provides further details in an effort to more quickly address performance issues by defining more of the variables.
The team also started the initial testing of the Perforce Integration for Subsumption. This support for merging and integration via Perforce is necessary to allow sustainable workflows when new streams are created and worked in for various releases. Testing is in its early stages, but regular updates to the process are being made as new versions become available. DE QA also provided support for the Engine Tools Team by ensuring Editor issues were tagged with the appropriate Epic links, components, and sent to the correct Assignees. The Editor dashboard and Editor bug writing guides also received a revamp to ensure they have the most relevant and up-to-date information accessible by the Engine Tools Team and QA support.
VFX
The DE VFX Team continued R&D on VDB gas cloud tech. They’ve been experimenting with new ways to create VDBs by using particles that are being pushed around by velocity forces instead of hollowing out geometry. Using several hundred million particles can create very organic looking volumes that can be converted into a VDB and imported into the engine. They will likely use a combination of both particles and geometry to create the final assets. They’ve also been working with the Cinematics Team on effects for Squadron 42. This includes destruction R&D in Houdini, bringing it into the engine and dressing it with particles to give it the desired final look.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
SYSTEM DESIGN
In February, the System Design Team worked mostly on AI related features. For FPS combat, they polished low cover mechanics and timings, and added high cover functionality, which enables the AI to make better use of the environment by using both as they see fit. They also considered how the Vanduul work and feel in-game, and how they use their weapons and gear in Human environments, which are not their natural habitat.
For ship AI, the team focused on integrating the first layer of skills and traits. They worked closely with Engineers to figure out how it affected an AI’s behavior and how readable it was to the player. Since the list of parameters is extensive, they focused on the ones that provide the best effect that the player can understand. Once those are working, they’ll move on to skills and traits that are a bit subtler but add a nice flavor to the fights.
On the non-combat side of FPS AI, they worked with all the existing and upcoming locations to figure out what special actions and behaviors the population needs to feel like it belongs to that specific place. The goal is to tell a story, give the player the feeling that these AI actually live and work on there, and that their actions are affected by the location and vice versa. Ideally, once this work is done, all our locations should get a big boost in the level of immersion and believability. Additionally, they worked on the mining system, focusing on mining material deposits on the surface of planets and moons with a Prospector. The designs are still in the early phase, but they are looking into developing them in a way that easily expands to other forms, like space rocks, gas/liquid mining, comets etc. Mining is just one part of the economy, but once it’s in and functional, they can build the adjacent systems that will make Star Citizen’s economy feel alive.
TECH ART
This month, the Tech Art Team supported other teams, fixed bugs, improved existing pipelines, and prototyped new tools. For weapons support, they created a final preVis rig for the Klaus & Werner Demeco LMG and Kastak Arms Scalpel sniper rifle. Now that the rig is completed and implemented in engine it enables other departments to provide feedback at a very early stage in development. They also updated the Torral Aggregate Kahix Missile Launcher with a final art and animation rig.
They supported the Usables Team to make AI interaction more believable and the Cinematics Team with various implementation tasks. They also improved existing tools to make the animation pipeline faster and more stable. On sandbox and other R&D work, they worked on the Sandbox Editor-to-Maya live link implementation. They also started prototyping next-gen character customization tech. It will feature a runtime ‘wrap deformer’ that makes skin attachments such as beards, eyebrows, haircuts, caps, hats, helmets and similar objects deform realistically on customized/morphed heads even during animations. While this technique is commonly used in VFX and animated feature films, it is not usually (if ever) used in games. This implementation combines the unique strengths and features of this deformation method with the speed of traditional deformers like skinning and blendshapes. This tech, in combination with ‘gene splicing’, will allow Artists and Designers to populate both Squadron 42 and the PU using a quasi-infinite number of unique-looking NPCs.
ENGINE
The Engine Team focused on game code optimization, which is an ongoing process that will continue past the 3.1 release. As an important pillar, they started developing a telemetry system that allows them to gather, analyze, and present performance data continuously and across the company (eventually even in the PTU and PU). This way they should automatically get valuable hints on performance aspects to help optimize all aspects of the game.
They also worked on signed distance field for vehicle physics, made significant improvements to skin rendering, and continued work on object container streaming. They also created a roadmap for work on the procedural systems throughout 2018.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
This month, the DE Weapon Art Team finished the rework of the UltiFlex FSK-8 Combat Knife, and continued work on the Kastak Arms Scalpel sniper rifle and Klaus & Werner Demeco LMG. Quite a few weapon concepts from the Klaus and Werner and Behring were signed off on and added to the weapon production pipeline. Work was also completed on the Gemini SMG and the reimagining of Joker Engineering continued.
BUILD
The DE Build Team worked with the Engineering Team to get incremental build compilations closer to purely incremental, where the build system adds cache functionality to allow switching compilation configs without compromising the pre-existing build cache. This allowed Engineers to focus on streamlining how the code files link between one another to avoid any unnecessary linkages and re-compilations. They also isolated compilation stats, which are now being pushed to ElasticSearch for viewing through Kibana. The isolated compilation stats are built on a specific machine that is not participating in any distributed computation, so as each code change is pushed to the code-base they can verify if the change introduced a timing bubble for compilation. They also worked on various things such as troubleshooting our Dev-ops/build tools, moving the DataCoreBinaryExporter process back into WAF-data, and assisting Tech Animators to resolve a problem with how DBAs get compiled by WAF.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The DE Level Design Team worked on common elements, procedural rest stops, and flagship landing zones for the PU. Work on the common elements progressed nicely, and they finished a whitebox pass on the modular train platforms. Next up are admin offices, customs and ATC. They also worked on integrating the rest stops with the procedural tech. The rest stop will be the test bed to create multiple “base” pieces that the procedural tool will use to create the final layouts.
On the planetary side, they worked on Lorville to make sure it has the required functionality. This meant whiteboxing train stations, terminals and space ports, all of these being common elements as well. Finally, they pushed to get the transit system tech functioning properly. This tech is essential for the Level Designers to be able to fully build the locations. The transit system is a background system handling everything from elevators to trains, and will be an integral part of most locations.
CINEMATICS
This past month, the Cinematics Team had the Gameplay Narrative Animation Lead from the UK come over for a knowledge exchange about scene setup involving AI characters. They were also busy with interior scenes from the first chapter of Squadron 42 that involve an Aegis Javelin. The Javelin underwent mesh improvements, including a viewing corridor to watch the stars, and that meant slight tweaks to the performance capture animation for a scene at that location. They also made progress on other scenes. With the pipeline still maturing, there is a need to revisit sequences from time to time. Cinematic environment art also progressed on several smaller sets needed for Squadron 42’s spectrum shows, as well as Vanduul interior environments.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The Lighting Team continued to work on legacy tasks and volumetric fog conversion. The focus was on finalizing Grim HEX and converting the Star Marine maps of Demien and Echo11. In addition, they’ve been polishing and improving the look of the admin office so that they read better. Finally, they supported the Character Creation tool by providing a high-quality lighting rig that shows off all the detail in the models and textures when players create their character.
AI
The AI Team continued to work on Subsumption implementation which resulted in more challenging ship AI. The team will be adding tweakable parameters for designers so players don’t face impossible challenges. While creating this basic ship AI, they also improved other AI aspects, like Quantum Travel, so AI ships can move freely around the universe in the future.
For ship combat, they’ve been busy developing a baseline Subsumption activity for dogfighting and expanding the existing dogfighting behavior already seen during the December holiday special. Now, AI pilots have a better awareness of the state of the available weapons, and will fire those that have a better chance to hit the target based on the hit prediction computed by the weapon controller. The player goes through a similar process when locking on a target based on the state of the reticles displayed in the cockpit UI. AI pilots now have access to the heating state of the weapons. This enables AI to stop firing a weapon as soon as there’s a risk of overheating, thus avoiding waiting for a longer cooldown period when the weapon isn’t available.
They also did numerous tasks related to AI FPS combat. They added support for using high cover. Now AI can smoothly transition into low cover or high cover, peek, and shoot at the enemy or riposte using blind fire. They made improvements on cover surface generation to reduce computation time and increase robustness for the system. Other small improvements where done on exiting cover behavior, such as when the cover gets compromised and the AI needs to leave quickly. Finally, they also spent time addressing and fixing bugs and optimizing existing code.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
TURBULENT
February was an opportunity to catch up on some backend bugs and errors, as well as introduce a new, more regimented structure for code review, QA and deployment process. This much needed reflection of the team’s internal process will only make it more efficient throughout 2018.
SPECTRUM
Turbulent has been working on the block/ignore feature with backend work starting to match the design and front-end work already complete.
The Custom Roles & Custom Emojis features are having small code reworks after an intensive code review. Diligence in keeping the code in order will only benefit the project as features are added. Expect releases to PTU with these features.
The team has also been working on the Spectrum overlay in-game, and is in close communication with CIG’s game-dev team. This work is laying the foundation for additional features, such as Spectrum Voice chat, planned for later this year.
LAUNCHER
The team is currently working on version 1.0.1-alpha. This version will add consistency checks, specific to hunting down the p4k bug that has so far been impossible to reproduce. The aim is to have the new release in PTU hands before the 3.1 launch to Evocati.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
A month after release, community feedback is still being reviewed on the additions to RSI. The design (contrast & colors) inside the platform bar has been revisited, and the team has been working on changes to increase readability for all users. The feedback has also provided UX with direction regarding navigation, and small steps have been made to help users find the items they are looking for on the site. Expect to see these changes soon.
In the meantime, the team has taken the opportunity to solve some existing account/billing & subscription errors that PR has been dealing with. The hope is to reduce issues over time, which will reduce the queues and wait times.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Work has been ongoing on a new version of the weekly newsletter. It will feature all the expected weekly content, an update on the roadmap, and a sleek new design allowing for better readability on different devices. Coming soon to your inbox!
Platform is introducing a necessary tie in to RSI backend services Diffusion. This long-awaited backend work will give platform and the game the bridge needed for future features. The first of these features will be a UEC to AUEC ledger, connecting your UEC credit purchases on platform to allow for in-game purchases
KNOWLEDGE BASE
The Player Relations Team has been curating and writing the many articles to appear in the new Knowledge Base. This library of articles is intended to help backers when they run into an issue. This will replace the current support page, and provide additional information to the ‘How to Play’ section that debuted last month.
From this Knowledge Base page, users will be able to search for relevant articles, access and submit tickets. This massive increase to accessible information will be a boon to both players and the Player Relations Team.
Turbulent will be leveraging the Zendesk backend, however they are currently working on a redesign of the knowledge base interface, creating a flat and simple UI. Designs are only in a preliminary stage, and hope to be complete in the near future.
VULCAN CONCEPT REVEAL
The Turbulent Team supported the concept reveal of the Aegis Dynamics Vulcan. They had fun putting together the concept ship page and have been happy to hear the feedback it’s been receiving. The Vulcan concept ship event will continue until April 2nd.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Community
February was a great month for the Star Citizen community. By this point, you have likely come to know the new show schedule, which includes Calling All Devs, an updated Reverse the Verse, and a refreshing new take on Ship Shape. Along with Around the Verse, also enjoying a slight revamp in format, these shows continue to bring you the latest and greatest information about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. The team has also been taking the time to monitor feedback closely, so they can iterate on how to communicate directly with you, the Star Citizen backer.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
There’s no better way to get an answer about the game than straight from the mouth of the developers themselves, and Calling All Devs provides loads of great information while minimally impacting the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42. In February alone our devs discussed a wide variety of topics on the show, including Org tools, mag boots, persistence, scanning, weather, the Evocati, and even the illustrious Tessa Bannister. Curious which questions will be answered next? Make sure to tune in!
February also brought another installment of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy. From the natural beauty of Xis and its protected species to the harsh brutality of QuarterDeck and the hardened prisoners who call it home, the episode provided a guided tour of the Kellog System.
Last month also brought two new episodes of Bugsmashers! This show pulls back the curtain on the nitty-gritty details of game development, and even included a sneak peek of the Origin 600i.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The Aegis Vulcan was introduced, and is now available through April 2nd. You can learn all about the Vulcan and its trifecta of support functions in the latest installment of Ship Shape here, or from a previous live broadcast of Reverse the Verse here. Distinctly based on your feedback, the Vulcan is also available in three liveries symbolizing its core functions: the base model bears military green for rearming, hazard yellow represents repairing, and CTR’s distinct blue signifies refueling. Intrigued? Find out more about this limited promotion here. More questions? Post them in the Q&A thread on Spectrum, and the top voted ones will be addressed in an upcoming Q&A Comm-Link scheduled for release on March 14th.
Throughout February, the team has seen a tremendous amount of awe-inspiring content submitted to our Community Hub. If you haven’t stopped by and explored the hub recently, the team encourages you to check it out. However, they are not responsible for getting Yela Yell stuck in your head.
Lastly, the Community Team is putting finishing touches on an official Request-a-Developer form that will make it easier to submit requests for developers to appear on streams/podcasts/videos. The team is excited to share how this process will work in the very near future.
Writer’s Note: Part one of The Cup was published originally in Jump Point 1.8.
Hello everyone, and welcome once again to GSN Spectrum Broadcasting’s continuing coverage of the Murray Cup Race. The MCR, or The Cup as it is more commonly known, is one of the finest sporting events in the UEE. Nearly 100 racers compete in the Classic Division’s grueling 10-stage run, which winds its way through Ellis system’s many wondrous planets and dual asteroid belts. Racers compete to determine who’s the fastest and strongest, as they struggle to maintain the integrity of their racecraft amid some of the deadliest conditions in the Empire. This year’s competition promises to be one of the toughest, as the top 25 share in a meet-and-greet with media and sponsors in GSN’s sports atrium in orbit above Green. Though many come to race, only a few are considered real contenders, and those contenders are now awaiting their chance for glory and honor.
This year’s darling is Ykonde Remisk, a Human who surprised everyone by winning both the Goss Invitational and the Cassini 500. He comes into the MCR with a real chance to be the first racer to win the Triple Crown in twelve years. Then there is Nyanāl Mo’tak Xu.oa, the finest Xi’an racer in the history of the sport. If he prevails, he will be the first to ever win three MCRs in a row.
Zogat Guul, the old Tevarin warhorse, can’t be counted out, either. This legend has won the MCR more than anyone else in its history, but fate and bad luck have prevented him from winning a major event in over five years. His second place finish at the Cassini 500, however, has brought his name back to prominence. Can he win it once more before he fades away?
And finally, newcomer Hypatia Darring has turned heads by taking the pole position away from Remisk. She has never won a major racing event in her short career, but her consistent top ten showings for the last two years indicate that her pole position is no fluke. Can this youngster handle the enormous pressure placed upon her? Only time will tell . . .
Let’s throw it back to GSN reporter Mike Crenshaw, who is making his way through the reception as we speak. Who do you have for us now, Mike?
Hypatia Darring didn’t even notice the reporter’s question as she stared across the busy reception floor. The Tevarin looked lean and elegant amid a gaggle of reporters who crowded around him. Part of her felt like joining the crowd. I should feel the need to whip his ass, to blow past him on the final stage, to force his ship into an asteroid. That would be the feelings of a great racer, a great competitor, one focused and ready to win. But no. Try as she might, she could not feel that way toward this legend who stood only a few meters away. Much to her sorrow, she hadn’t had a chance to speak with him when their paths could have crossed at Cassini. Now, she had to find the time. She fought the urge to walk across the room, push past the media hounds, invite him to dinner, and ask him to sign the worn, faded, dog-eared poster of him in his youth — standing proudly next to his silver M50 — still hanging on her hab wall.
She shook her head and blinked. “I’m sorry. Say again?”
Mike Crenshaw cleared his throat. “Do you think Admiral Darring is proud of his daughter?” Darring clenched her teeth and forced a smile. “Of course he is. Why wouldn’t he be?”
“He has stated publicly, more than once, that he believes you are wasting your talents as a racer. That you should drop all this ‘nonsense’ — his word — and pursue a more fitting career in the UEE Navy.”
“My father has never been one to restrain his opinions,” she said, taking tentative steps toward Guul. “But if you really want to know the answer to that question, you should ask him yourself.”
Another reporter fought her way in. “Alice Frannif, Terra Gazette . . . taking the pole position from Ykonde Remisk was a marvelous achievement. How did you do it?”
Her smile was genuine. “Luck.”
“Oh, come now, Hypatia,” Crenshaw said, regaining the floor. “Achieving a time one point five seconds off the record is hardly luck. How’d you do it?”
She chuckled. “Patience, dedication, focus and an acute attention to detail. That, plus the fastest damned M50 on the circuit. All things I’m sure my father would appreciate.”
The reporters laughed and hastily transcribed notes. Darring made a few more steps toward Guul.
“Ms. Darring,” another reporter interceded, “how do you intend on maintaining your ‘luck,’ as you put it, through the entire race? Ten stages, all timed, many with narrow, dangerous channels, especially through the asteroid belts. You’ll be racing neck-and-neck with some of the finest racers in history. Being a relative newcomer, how do you intend on handling the pressure, maintaining your good start, and ultimately winning the cup?”
“She’s a natural!”
All turned, including Darring, and found Mo’tak Xu.oa, the Xi’an, dressed in a bright purple jumpsuit, standing among a pool of sycophants who followed him to every event. Some of them were ex-GSN reporters, now under full employment by the Xu.oa house, captured by his fame, notoriety and wealth.
Darring controlled her scowl as the stout Xi’an stopped a few feet from her. “She’s a natural,” Mo‘tak repeated, to make sure the reporters could record his reply. He was shorter than Darring by a centimeter or two — which was still unusually tall for his race — but his cool, amber eyes scanned her face carefully His powerful jaw muscles pulled back in a tight approximation of a smile. “She’ll win it by being the best racer on the circuit.”
“Do you really believe that?” Crenshaw asked. “She’s the best?”
Mo‘tak nodded slowly, diplomatically, his eyes affixed on Darring. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t.” He blinked. “How are you, my dear? Rested from your trials at Cassini?”
“Rested enough,” she replied, beneath her breath. The reporters leaned in to hear. “But you should know all about that.”
Mo‘tak waved her off as if she were his lesser. “The dangers of the trade, my dear. I did what I had to do to gain advantage.”
Darring nodded. “But you didn’t win, did you? Cutting me off in a move that, technically, was illegal, only gave you third place.”
“Still, a better finish than you.” Mo‘tak chuckled. His devotees did the same. “The Cassini is not all that important to me, my dear. The MCR is the crown jewel. You’ll understand that in time . . . if you last long enough.”
“Can we get a picture of the two of you side-by-side?” a reporter piped up. The rest confirmed that desire with exaggerated nodding.
Mo‘tak turned to the crowd, preening for all to see. “Of course you may have a picture,” he said, offering his hand to Darring in goodwill. “I’m honored to be a part of this great tradition. The MCR is dear to my heart, and with such brilliant competition, like Hypatia Darring here, this year’s race will be one to remember.”
Hypatia took his hand cautiously. She wrapped her fingers around his broad palm. Forcing herself to relax, she turned toward the reporters to let them take their pictures and ask their questions.
But then Mo‘tak began to squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze until she felt the small delicate bones in her hand giving beneath the pressure. She squeezed back against it, but that didn’t provide much relief as Mo‘tak continued to grip. Don’t cringe, she said to herself. Don’t cry. Don’t give him the satisfaction. But the pain spread up her arm, into her shoulder, through her neck. God, he’s trying to break my hand. He’s . . .
He released, and the pain subsided. She sighed and wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead with her other hand.
Crenshaw was about to ask another question, but then someone spotted Ykonde Remisk, and they all scurried in his direction.
At her side, Mo‘tak chuckled. “We are only as important to them as our last quote.” The Xi’an turned to her again.
This time he didn’t offer his hand. He winked. “.athl’ē’kol to you, my zealous competitor. Safe travel. I’ll see you down the line.”
Mo‘tak disappeared into the doting arms of his fans. As he walked away, Darring caught the eye of a lean, surly-looking fellow who maintained a watchful position behind his employer. He nodded at her. She ignored him and imagined driving a knife into Mo‘tak’s back.
“Don’t let him get to you.”
The voice was soft and amiable. Darring turned to greet it.
There he stood, towering over her. In his shadow, she felt truly small, both in stature and in status. Zogat Guul radiated a kindness and a quiet experience that steadied her rage. She offered her sore hand humbly. He took it without complaint.
“Don’t let that pompous twit get under your skin. He’s infamous for his mind games.” With a quick grin, he snapped into formal posture, as if he were greeting an officer, thrusting his chest out though it was wrapped comfortably in a black-and-gold half-coat. “My name is Zogat —”
“I know who you are,” Darring interrupted, embarrassed immediately by her rudeness. “It’s an honor to meet you. It’s a dream I’ve had since I was a kid.”
“And I have been following your career with great interest.” He took her by the arm and began to lead her toward a table filled with three large punch bowls and an assortment of seafood appetizers. They walked slowly. “You are rising steadily on the circuit. Your name is on the lips of many. Your fifth place showing at Cassini was quite impressive, especially for someone so young.”
“Thank you. It would have been even more impressive had I won, if Mo‘tak hadn’t forced me back.”
“You let him get too close,” he said, with no malice or indictment in his tone. “You had the inside lane, but you slowed down to spar with him.”
“He pissed me off!”
Guul stopped, “Such behavior may be tolerated in the smaller, roundabout races like Cassini. But not here. Here, such raw emotion will get you expelled or killed. True, there are stages along the way where the racing will be tight, where you will have to maneuver for position. But speed matters the most here . . . speed and time. Remember, Hypatia Darring, the one most important fact about the Murray Cup: Speed is life.” He tilted his head to side. “Speed is life . . . or death, if you are going in the wrong direction.”
She laughed at that, letting the seriousness of his words trickle away. “We will speak no more of these things now,” he said, resuming their course toward the food table. “We will have further opportunities to talk later, when the lamprey are not so thick and hungry.” He ignored the wave of a reporter nearby. “Every word we speak here is interpreted and reinterpreted until, in the end, they will make us lovers in the eyes of the public.”
Darring forced a wry smile. “Sorry . . . you’re not my type.”
Guul let out a hearty laugh. He shook his head. “Story of my life.” He quickened his pace toward the food. “Now come, and treat me to a glass of the greatest gift Humans have bestowed upon the galaxy.”
“What’s that?” Darring asked.
Guul smacked his lips. “Lemonade.”
* * *
Mo‘tak crushed the thin shell of the jumbo shrimp in his mouth. He did not bother shucking it as a feeble Human might do. Blast this Human food anyway! What he wouldn’t give to be back at the family complex, gorging to contentment on huge handfuls of fermented needlefish. Their gallbladders had a bile that was as sweet — no, sweeter — than anything a Human might concoct. Nothing on the table before him was actually enjoyable in his superior opinion, but he tolerated it as best he could, smiling humbly as he picked at this dish or that for the benefit of the media. Mo‘tak nodded at a Human reporter as she walked by.
Humans had their uses.
And so did the one that stood now in the center of the media frenzy. Why weren’t the reporters surrounding him, asking him questions, begging him to divulge his secrets for winning the race, just as they had asked Darring? These damned Humans and their inferiority complex! So unwilling to recognize Xi’an superiority. But Mo‘tak was the best racer that had ever climbed into a cockpit, and his perfectly modified 350r, with its purple hull and reinforced golden-striped wings would do what no other racer had ever done: win the MCR three consecutive times. Neither Remisk, nor Guul, nor Darring could claim such a feat. So, why weren’t the GSN nya•osen’p.u surrounding him?
But perhaps that was best, he reconsidered, popping another shrimp in his mouth and sipping on a warm, frothless beer. Let Ykonde Remisk have his moment in the spotlight. Let the media have their favorites. For when they fall, when they fail to live up to the hype, Mo‘tak’s victory will seem that much sweeter. Yes, let them bask . . . then let them fall. And I will see that they fall hard.
“Is everything in place?” he whispered to an underling at his side.
“Yes, sir. Your maintenance crews are dispersed through the Ellis system per your specifications and per the MCR guidelines.”
Mo‘tak scratched his neck in frustration. “That’s not what I meant.”
The underling gulped and wiggled his head. “Yes, that matter we spoke of has been taken care of as well. But I would recommend against it, sir. The risk is too great, and besides, Mo‘tak does not need to rely on such things. He is the best racer on the circuit.”
“I do not pay you to give me such advice or praise. I pay you to do what you’re told. Now go, and make sure everything is ready as I have instructed.” He put his beer down. “And I will go and remind the ‘favorite’ of his obligation to me.”
The underling nodded and ran off to do his duty. Mo‘tak sighed deeply, put on his happy face, and walked confidently toward the madness surrounding Ykonde Remisk.
* * *
She loved her Origin M50 Turbo more than life. Banged up, scratched, red and white paint slopped on to cover a hull that needed an integrity sweep, but there had been no time for any of that after Cassini. Nor had she won enough credits yet for such repairs, not with having to pay for transport ships and her pit crew. But what of it? The power plant was sound, the thrusters new and top notch. In a pinch, she doubted that any racer, anywhere, could match it. Certainly, none of the other twenty-four challengers behind her — including Guul — could beat her in a straightaway. But the MCR had few straightaways. Hull integrity mattered.
As her crew chief rattled off the final systems check in her ear, Darring pulled up the map for the first stage. It appeared with a bright blink to display row after row of rings winding their way through low orbit above Ellis III. Darring studied the rings carefully, reminding herself which ones were large, which were small, where the cameras and timer buoys were located. All racers were required to stay within the “invisible” lane running through the rings; if a racer strayed outside, he or she would lose time. This first stage was both timed and awarded extra credits to first, second and third place. Having the pole position, then, gave her an advantage. But for how long? Darring leaned over in her seat and studied the course carefully.
It was not unlike one stretch of the Goss Invitational, so she had ample experience with this kind of run. Her M50 was built for strenuous zigs and zags through tight spots. But how well would she fare later on, when the courses got more deadly, more strenuous?
From Ellis III, the racers quantumed to Ellis IV where the so-called Seahorse Shuffle took place. Then on to Ellis V and the “Noble Endeavour.” After that, it was through the first of two asteroid belts, a course called The Sorrow Sea, where hulls of previous racers floated as obstacles. Then around the gas giant, Walleye, where ships could be easily ripped apart by one foolish move. A longer stage followed, across the outer asteroid belt (formerly Ellis XI) and finally to Ellis XII. Then the race turned back toward the heart of the system to finished at Ellis VIII. She had run this race before, but never as a true contender, and thus she had taken her time, flown each stage slow and steady, like a marathon runner, to learn all the ins and outs. This time, though, the pressure was on. She held the pole position, the top spot. Everything was different now.
The MCR starter’s voice crackled over the comm link. “Racers, prepare for launch.”
Darring closed the map, affirmed the standard agreement to MCR rules and regulations in unison with the other racers, strapped herself in, and gave a small prayer. She was not religious by any stretch, but figured it wouldn’t hurt. The prayer calmed her nerves as the bay doors of the starting carrier opened to space.
She could see Ellis III through the door. It was beautiful, green, its orbit peppered with corvettes and pleasure craft of the well-to-do who had come out to view the race firsthand. There would be plenty of spectators along the way, a lot of media, and Darring had to just put them all out of her mind. She focused on Zogat Guul’s words — Speed is life — and looked back through one of her cockpit panels to try to get a glimpse of the Tevarin’s upgraded Hornet. But he was too far back. All she could see was Ykonde Remisk’s M50, with its garish gold and blue trim. She noticed that he was too close to her; by rule, there was a specified distance that racers had to maintain prior to launch: the privilege of the pole position.
She gnashed her teeth and cursed beneath her breath. Someone was already violating rules.
“Hypatia Darring . . . you may launch.”
She didn’t even wait for the spokesman to finish. Darring burst out the carrier bay door at top legal speed.
Through a narrow channel flanked by media and spectators, Darring flew the ceremonial lap. The rest of the racers followed behind, releasing one after another, but maintaining their specified positions within the line. Ahead of her, the pace craft sparkled with a flashing red light. Nervous energy spotted her brow with sweat. Her crew chief gave his final comments and instructions. She signed him off and focused on the course ahead of her.
In her ear, the MCR starter counted down — ten, nine, eight . . . Darring thrust to the left, trying to keep directly behind the pace craft. Ykonde Remisk was right on her six, the nose of his racer dangerously close. Back off! Darring mouthed silently, wanting to flip on her comm link and tune to his frequency. It wasn’t strictly against MCR rules to speak to other racers, but officials discouraged it, fearing that frequent conversation during the race could produce distractions that would lead to crashes and injuries. Besides, there was enough chatter going on between racers and their crews. Still, Darring wanted to open a channel and scream into Remisk’s ear, Get off my back!
Five . . . four . . . three . . .
Now, all the racers tightened as the pacer made the last turn to set them up toward the first rings. Darring gunned it a little herself, closing in on the pacer. She put herself now just a little to the right of it, to keep Remisk from rushing past her at the last minute. Darring’s heart raced, her hands shook on her joystick. She tried concentrating on the small object that grew and grew in her viewport: The first ring, its rotating lights swirling around its virtual frame, signaling the beginning . . .
Two . . . one . . .
The red lights on the pacer flashed green, and it fell to the left quickly, breaking formation.
Darring pressed herself into her seat, gunned her thrusters, and blew through the first ring.
* * *
The flashing lights of the rings caused her eyes to ache.
They flew by her quickly and she was concentrating on them too much, too worried about her time, her position in the line. She had fallen to third place by count of the last timing ring. It had been her fault, too, worrying so much about conserving fuel, letting some pilot with a overclocked Avenger take the inside lane. Her crew chief yelled at her for it; she ignored him. The little shit was right, of course, but he was an old academy friend of her father’s, and she was in no mood to listen to him yell at her. Besides, she could overtake an Avenger at any time.
The real focus of her recovery had to be Ykonde Remisk.
The smarmy son of a bitch had forced her against the left wall of the tunnel they were speeding through. Her wing had actually broken the virtual plane, and the voice of the MCR caller came over her comm . . . “Ten seconds added to your time.” Damn! Remisk’s press was not strictly against the rules since his ship had not touched hers, but it was certainly dirty pool and against the spirit of the competition. She had no way out of the pick-and-roll either; it was as if he and the Avenger pilot were in cahoots. That wouldn’t surprise her in the least.
She refocused and thrust her M50 forward, dipping beneath the Avenger and slipping past it on the low. It tried muscling her back, pointing its right wing down to mask her view, but Darring anticipated the move, shifted in kind, and kept her position and composure. Meanwhile, the Avenger pilot had lost his focus on the lane ahead of him, and failed to notice the ring closing fast and to the left. Darring hit her thrusters hard and shifted left, at the last minute moving out of the Avenger’s path. Darring took the turn and ring perfectly; the Avenger saw it too late, tried to adjust, and clipped the ring with its left wing. It broke the invisible plane of the tunnel and then overcompensated into a spin through the void.
Eat that!
She hoped that somewhere behind her, Guul was cheering. She could almost hear his resonant voice singing her praises. She liked the thought, but the most pressing concern now was right in front of her.
Remisk had been pushing his craft at full speed the entire course. How was that possible? she wondered. Sure, he had customized his M50 like all the rest, removing everything extraneous for extra fuel and cooling equipment, but he must be running on fumes by now after boosting like that. There was no other explanation. He would have to burn out soon, and the sooner the better.
She ignored the three other racers pressing hard at her six. She took the next ring and the next, letting the strong inertia pull and propel her craft forward. That was the best way to avoid overheating, she had learned racing around Saturn. Release thrust on the turns, and let your craft drift at top speed into the vector. Then you had enough thrust to pick up the few seconds you might have lost on drift. This racing gig was a game of milliseconds, and each one counted.
She moved up behind Remisk, taking advantage of the last straightaway before the final turns through the ultimate three rings. There was not much time left, and she had to make her move now.
She tried shifting up and over his craft. He moved to block her. She shifted down; he moved again, in perfect unison, their ships equal size. She shifted left, right, and each time Remisk moved to counter. How is he doing this?
He was a great racer. There was no doubt of that. He was strong, athletic and cool-headed. Remisk had not gotten where he was on the circuit without being smart and precise. But his moves, his instincts were almost supernatural, as if his senses were enhanced. But that was impossible.
Every racer went through a rigorous medical exam to ensure that no drugs had been introduced before the race, and further testing would be conducted along the way to ensure none had been taken after the first stage. Remisk was just that good.
Then I have to be better.
She pushed her engine to its limit, exceeding safe levels, much to the ire of her crew chief. He implored her to back off, take second or third place, don’t risk blowing your ship so soon for so little reward. Little reward, my ass!
She had taken the pole position, and she was going to let everyone know that it was not some fluke, that Hypatia Darring was here to stay. She wouldn’t give her fath– the media — grist for their mill.
She barrel rolled, letting the rotation of her M50 spiral her forward like a screw. Remisk, fearing that he would be clipped himself, shifted ever so slightly to his left, and Darring pounced. She pulled alongside him, letting her craft settle. She punched her thrusters again, feeling them wail their discontent through her arms and hands. Her stick was shaking, her heat warnings blaring. She could feel it all through her body, and there was, in all the galaxy, no feeling like it. It was something her father had forgotten. He was a good fighter pilot himself, or at least he was in his youth. But he had spent too much of his life in slow giants like destroyers, cruisers and battleships. He had forgotten what it was like to feel flesh tingle as strong g-forces threatened to rip your skin from its bones. Guul understood it. Remisk most certainly did. And even that sorry son of a bitch Mo‘tak understood the ecstatic feeling of sheer speed.
She pulled ahead. She took the next ring flawlessly, shifting against inertia and rolling through the next ring, which appeared immediately after the last. The final ring loomed large in the distance. Her crew chief, his attitude suddenly changed, barked “Go! Go!” into her ear. She smiled. She’d made the right decision. She most definitely deserved to be here racing among the greats.
Remisk pulled up above her, obviously giving her first place. She kept her course forward and strong, letting her warning systems holler. She giggled like a child, accepting praise from her chief. The flashing lights of the last ring did not make her weak or sick this time. She welcomed them happily.
Then a shadow came up over her, darkening her cockpit. It was Remisk, his M50 finding new life and overtaking her ship. In her joy, Darring had not realized that her thumb had lightened its pressure on her throttle, and she had slowed just slightly. Slowed enough for Remisk to swing his craft up and over her hull and plant itself, with its main thrusters, right in front of her cockpit. Darring tried keeping her speed and course, but Remisk kicked his boost and threw a gout of yellow fire across her cockpit windows.
Darring rolled left. It was a serious mistake. She tried regaining her position, pressed her thumb deeply into the throttle, but it was too late. Ykonde Remisk passed through the final ring in first place. The Avenger and one other racer took second and third, while Darring, her ship rolling uncontrollably through the last ring, barely finished fourth.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
Last week, our first concept ship of 2018 was made available for pledge. The Aegis Vulcan is Dedicated to assisting pilots with the unique ability to refuel, repair, and rearm those in need. The Vulcan is the perfect ship for getting your foot in the door in all three professions.
Also, last week’s Reverse the Verse had special guests Will Maiden and John Crewe answer your most important questions about the Vulcan, so be sure to check that out here. And don’t forget, we are collecting questions for the Vulcan Q&A Comm-Link scheduled to be published on March 14th. If you still have questions about the newest ship, submit them to the Question Thread and upvote your favorite ones.
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
On Monday, we released a new episode of Calling All Devs. This week, we discuss the Evocati, weather in the PU, and the Polaris ship update! Watch the episode here.
Tuesday: The Lore Team will publish a serialized fiction story that has previously appeared in Jump Point, but is now available to everyone! You can check out previously published lore posts here.
Wednesday: A new episode of Bugsmashers! will challenge Mark Abent to fix another pesky bug that currently affects the Persistence Universe.
Thursday is an all new episode of Around the Verse that checks in with Production Lead Eric Keiron Davis for an update on what the Los Angeles Studio has been working on recently. Also, the Monthly Studio Report will be published, showing off what our teams around the globe have accomplished in February.
Friday: Make sure to tune in to our Twitch Channel for a new episode of Reverse the Verse. This episode will serve as the February Subscriber Town Hall featuring production and the new RSI Roadmap.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
This week’s episode features our monthly Squadron 42 project update. Get the latest on what the devs have been up to and take a look at the complex AI systems being implemented in the game, using the massive crew of the Idris frigate as an example.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
Last week, we released our first concept ship in 2018 – the Aegis Vulcan. Serving as an entry point into three Star Citizen professions, the Vulcan is designed to assist all vessels in trouble. Currently only available as an Early Bird offer, everyone will have the chance to add one of these versatile Aegis Dynamics support ships to their fleet on Thursday, February 22nd.
Also, if you haven’t already, we highly recommend watching last week’s fantastic Reverse the Verse episode featuring Lead System Designer Dan Trufin and Star Citizen Live Director Todd Papy from our Foundry office in Frankfurt, answering gameplay system questions posted by you, the Star Citizen community. Check it out for news about mining, salvaging, exploration, and much more!
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
On Monday Jared will boot up his classic Skype for a new episode of Calling All Devs. This week, we have questions about Scanning Mechanics, the BMM, and multiple character slots! Watch the episode here.
Tuesday is lore day! The Lore Team will publish another in-fiction story to help cure your craving for more Star Citizen lore. Check out previously published lore posts here.
Wednesday: We have a quick cooling down period. Bugsmashers is taking a short break, but we’ll see Mark Abent’s return on February 28th!
Thursday will see an all new episode of Around the Verse that you won’t want to miss!
Friday: Make sure to tune in to our Twitch Channel at for a new episode of Reverse the Verse. This time host Jared Huckaby welcomes Lead Technical Designer John Crewe and Art Director Paul Jones for an episode focusing on the Aegis Vulcan and ship development from design to concept!
That’s all for this week, citizens. We’ll see you in the ‘Verse!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
When an Outdoor Writer plays Star Citizen by ZebVance
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
ZebVance, an outdoor writer covering fly fishing, hunting, camping, and hiking recently discovered Star Citizen and decided to start a blog. Give it a read in the community hub.
