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Hello everyone,
Last week the team published the Monthly Studio Report for June, bringing you insight into what all of our studios have been working on. If you haven’t yet, check it out to see what was accomplished throughout June, including the live release of Star Citizen Alpha 3.2.
With our latest contest, we’re asking you to help us celebrate one of the recent additions to the flyable fleet in Star Citizen: the Origin Jumpworks 600i. Craft the next great 600i commercial for a chance to win superb prizes, including a standalone Aegis Eclipse with complimentary Lifetime Insurance.
With the Drake Vulture concept promotion in full effect until July 18th, we recently released the Q&A on Drake’s dirty bird. Head over to the Comm-Link and see the answers to the top-voted community questions on this unique industrial salvage ship.
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
Every week on Calling All Devs, designers, engineers and other developers from our five offices around the world answer backer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted for by YOU. Today, we address questions regarding potential Arena Commander modes, the future of Item System 2.0, and creating missions for ships like the Hammerhead coming in Alpha 3.3. Look out for the new episode on our YouTube channel later today. As always: You can submit your questions for consideration in future episodes of Calling All Devs 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.
Thursday will welcome another episode of Around the Verse where we’ll take a look at the latest Star Citizen news with a project update.
Lastly, make sure to tune in on Friday at 12PM PDT / 7PM UTC for another episode of Reverse the Verse, broadcast live on our Star Citizen Twitch channel. This Friday’s show will be an RTV Gamedev. Join Character Concept Artist Jeremiah Lee as we create a new character concept LIVE with input from our viewers.
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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Every week, we select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it in this section. The highlighted content creator will be awarded with an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
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Three days ago, Crusader Security received a distress call from an emergency shelter on Yela. There was a terrified woman on the call, begging for help. But when the security forces arrived, they found nothing but an empty shelter…
Watch Yela – Part One: The Shelter on the community hub.
Auf einem Bewertungsportal machte ein angeblicher Ex-Mitarbeiter auf Missstände beim Star Citizen-Entwickler Cloud Imperium Games aufmerksam. Das Problem dabei: Offenbar ist das Firmen-Review eine handfeste Fälschung. Dies behauptet jedenfalls John…
Welcome to Cloud Imperium Games’ Monthly Studio Report for June. This month, the team published Alpha 3.2, made progress on Squadron 42, and continued developing new systems, ships, and features for future releases. With that said, let’s dig into the details.
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LOS ANGELES
VEHICLE FEATURES
Mining was an exciting endeavor for the team this month, as they saw it come together to deliver a whole new gameplay element to Star Citizen. Working closely with designers and engineers in the EU studios, the team brought the scanning aspect of mining to life and into vehicles. They’re happy to add to the pool of activities that players can engage in, and hope everyone has fun searching the ‘verse for valuable resources.
Turrets were another large focus for the team this month. Manned turrets received some improvements, such as the ability to focus target a ship and the removal of the counterbalance speed restriction. Players can now also operate remote turrets in vehicles, which was implemented with the Item 2.0 System.
Moving into July, the team will polish what they delivered in Alpha 3.2 and continue work on the many things needed for 3.3.
VEHICLE PIPELINE
The team proudly launched the Anvil Hurricane with 3.2 and look forward to feedback from the community as they take it out for a spin. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into the Hurricane by the Art, System Design, and Tech Art Teams in LA, who collaborated with other global teams to get it flying. Additionally, the Tech Art Team wrapped up their damage passes on the other new and updated ships: the Aegis Avenger, Aegis Eclipse, Origin 600i, and Esperia Blade. They can’t wait for you to blow these ships up!
Meanwhile, progress was made on other vehicles: the Consolidated Outland Mustang Alpha rework is art-complete and currently in the hands of the System Design Team. Additional Mustang variants are close to being handed over to System Design as well. Tumbril Cyclone variants also made great progress on the art side, while the System Design Team is working with Engineering on new tech to support their release. Finally, System Design worked closely with the Art Team in Austin to wrap up their greybox phase of the Constellation Phoenix.
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GAMEPLAY FEATURES
The Gameplay Team was happy to see the Group System make it easier for players to match up and play together. Currently, the team is polishing the feature to give players the best experience possible. After witnessing the response, the team continues to plan ways to improve upon the ways players can interact with each other.
NARRATIVE
The Narrative Team churned out a wide variety of content to flesh out and expand the Star Citizen universe. They released lore that highlighted commercials commonly seen on Spectrum in 2948 and featured an interview with controversial new Drake CEO, Anden Arden. Subscribers got to read the exciting final chapter of the new short story Hostile Negotiations, while a trip into the Jump Point archives saw the wide release of an Observist Dark focused on Grim HEX and the second chapter of The Knowledge of Good and Evil. Finally, June’s edition of the Subscriber magazine, Jump Point, explored the development of the Aegis Reclaimer, met the team behind the new mining mechanic, and explored the history of the MISC Prospector.
Behind the curtain, the team worked with design on further defining NPC behaviors like bartenders, bar patrons, security officers, and more. They fleshed out set dressing documentation to add further environmental storytelling to the PU and Squadron 42, wrote new mission text and clothing and armor descriptions. They wrote a number of articles slated to be included in the eventual release of the Galactapedia and provided copy for a myriad of community and marketing materials, including the Vulture promotion page and brochure.
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The Character Art Team finalized and released the Legacy Armor sets into the PU, as well as the new clothing that makes up the Olisar collection. The team appreciates the comments from the community – getting direct feedback from the players makes all the hard work worth it.
There are a few mission givers in development that are almost finalized, which you’ll see in the next quarterly release. The team is still committed to releasing everything that’s on the public roadmap, so work on other PU outfits and Hurston’s clothing collection are well underway.
With the PU getting a lot of attention this release, the upcoming month’s focus returns to Squadron 42 and its vast cast of characters. The team is creating levels with every character in a lineup, so they can see which outfit each one wears in a specific chapter.
As we saw in Around the Verse, a lot of development time went into the Vanduul armor, spear, and knife. Progress was also made on the updated flight suit and work was started on another major character.
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AUSTIN
DESIGN
Design was heavily invested on working through several issues remaining for quantum travel. This included helping groups travel together and tuning how quantum splines work to ensure an enjoyable experience when traveling from one side of a celestial body to another. Issues were also addressed to ensure that accidents between a moon’s surface and a ship moving at quantum speed are minimal.
While the majority of the team’s focus has gone towards improving the quantum travel experience, work has also gone into adjusting the economy by tuning rewards for missions, cargo deliveries, and mining runs. Work also progressed nicely on ensuring that bars in future releases feature a well-crafted and intelligent bartender to make the experience fun and believable. Although it’s still in the early stages, Design is excited about the first iteration coming to a PU pub near you!
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BACKEND SERVICES
The Backend Services Team grew as a new engineer joined to help with the rewrite of Services under the new Diffusion Architecture. Several Services have already been rewritten while support for the legacy architecture continues. This month focused on taking the legacy p-cache and breaking it up into smaller, logical microservices. Much like replacing parts in a moving engine, legacy work still needs to be maintained until the new shiny goodness is ready to go. When implemented, it will allow for better performance, scalability, and functionality.
Here are some of the Services being created to replace legacy work:
Entitlement Processor Service: handles all purchased and rented items from the website and assures that real game items are created and managed.
Loadout Service: caches and manages the various loadouts for all ships and the player avatar configuration, including outfits and weapons. Right now, the game servers and clients can only access metadata from objects that are currently spawned on a game server. Usually, the devs want to view data of an item that has not been loaded into a game server.
Variable Service: solves the loadout problem above by decoupling the metadata from the items and providing a runtime cache and API allowing game servers and other Diffusion services access regardless of the state of the item.
Wallet Service: deals with changes in currency and manages the current balance in-game. An API is setup to allow for other services to query or modify the player’s balance.
ANIMATION
Animation was hard at work on the next set of mission givers that will bring more life to the PU later this year. There was also rapid progress on the retargeting of male animations to female skeletons, which brings players closer to being able to choose a female avatar in the PU.
Animation also supported outsourcers by creating master retarget files to process all the motion captures shots for the PU, S42 cinematics, and gameplay. They also helped finalize the Vanduul pipeline, which makes converting motion capture data into in-game assets quicker and easier.
ART
Ship Art put the finishing touches on everyone’s favorite stroke of lightning, the Anvil Aerospace F8! All that that’s left for them to do is to finalize the Level of Detail (LOD), make some last-minute material/art adjustments, and be on call to fix any bugs that arise during testing. Also, after an official kickoff meeting, work began on some early concepts ideas for the Origin 300i rework.
The team proceeded on the highly anticipated Constellation Phoenix. Extra care has been given at every stage of the process to ensure that the quality and luxury of RSI is properly showcased. The interior and exterior were fleshed out and are now going through an edit to cut back on some of the busier areas. Next up, the modeling portion in the master bedroom and flight-prep art (interior damage) will be finished, so Tech Art can start with their damage process. Once these steps are done, there will be another lighting pass to get the interior dialed in and closer to completion.
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DEVOPS
The 3.2 release was especially rewarding for the DevOps Team as it included features they’ve been anticipating for a while. On the build side, they’ve been tuning and supporting the feature streams, which are a subset of the main development branches that the dev teams use. This project helped to further isolate each team’s specific feature work and stopped it from interfering with the work of other teams. This led to significantly more builds, as each feature team gets their own on top of the test and general use builds. For this month alone, over 200 unique builds were generated. Overall, the build support improvements have been very helpful and well received, but the team is still working out minor details and constantly tuning the branches for the best output.
The Publishing Team supported daily deployments to Evocati and PTU, and assisted the dev teams with the collection of server performance and bug reports. Server reports are typically more fun on a big publishing month because there’s so much new data to track and report. As many have already noticed, the team increased the pace of publishes again, completing 16 PTU deployments in June. These additional publishes helped the dev team work out the final touches of new features. The team also ramped up the servers in anticipation of Alpha 3.2 release and can’t wait to see them fill up.
PLAYER RELATIONS
The Player Relations Team coordinated with Evocati to test Alpha 3.2 on the PTU and prepare it for live service. They focused on the core features of 3.2, including scanning, mining, ESP improvements, quantum linking, and the new ships.
Now that 3.2 is live in the PU, the team would like to remind all backers of the new Knowledge Base. They’ve added quite a few guides for the update, and now have over 90 articles published. Players should check back regularly, as it will continue to grow with new ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications.
Finally, the team wants to encourage everyone to continue using the Issue Council (IC) to help triage and rate bugs/functionality. They’ll use your feedback to prioritize future updates, plus IC participation makes you eligible for earlier PTU waves.
QA
QA helped push the 3.2 builds to Evocati and PTU, which included publishing checklists for build patches that went to the PTU.
On the game side, QA focused on the 3.2 features, bug regression, and performance testing. Things tested included the mining feature, the new ships, the Avenger rework, quantum travel, the group system, and kiosk purchasing and player wallet updates. They also tested updates to the Editor and Subsumption tools.
On the leadership side, it was business as usual coordinating testing priorities with counterparts in LA, UK, and DE.
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WILMSLOW & DERBY
GRAPHICS
The Graphics Team focused on bugs that covered a wide range of topics, including fixes for SLI/Crossfire, missing LODs on mining rocks, and flickering shadows. They also added a few minor features to improve the overall player experience, such as adding drop shadows to all transparent ship UI screens, adding brightness/gamma/contrast support, optimizing the glass shaders, and fixing multiple issues with RTT on the ship-targeting UI which reduced the cost by a factor of 10.
After fixing the 3.2 bugs, the team’s focus has shifted to Object Container Streaming, which is crucial to ensuring this critical feature isn’t blocked.
UI
UI supported the 3.2 release at full tilt, working on the Item Kiosks to add as much as possible ahead of the live release. Alongside this, the team supported the Mission Team by creating new screens for Comm Array missions, provided the Gameplay Team with quantum travel UI elements, and helped the EU Vehicle Team with their work on overclocking.
UI also focused on critical bug fixes ahead of 3.2. This included multiple issues with the ATC system, such as making the UI clearer for color blind players. Changes for the PMA/VMA included making select ship items uneditable and ensuring all armor pieces are displayed correctly.
ANIMATION
The team worked on the new Spec Ops AI combat set and prepared it for full implementation. This set includes cover, high and low enter and exits, peeks, stepouts, blindfires, reloads, and grenade throws. Iteration and feedback on weapon recoil continued with the goal of providing a solid first-person experience across the full range of weapons available in S42 and the PU.
Preparation started to replace the AI base locomotion sets with finalized data. New capture footage was reviewed with an eye to implement improved AI motion sets and visuals.
Further animation work was completed on Master-at-Arms Chakma to fill in any gaps that the Design Teams had in implementing his behavior for Squadron 42. Work on the Vanduul concentrated on close-combat and weapons.
Player grips now allow varyingly sized objects to be held and carried in a more flexible manner, whether it be one or two-handed props.
Finally, the team completed general bug fixes for the 3.2 release.
GAMEPLAY STORY
The Gameplay Story Team delivered previsualization (pre-viz) for 150 scenes that the Design Team requested, which was achieved a week earlier than expected. This gave the team a couple of weeks to do more in-depth implementation work on high priority scenes. Pre-viz work on the remaining 66 scenes will happen during the first few weeks of July.
ENGINEERING/PROGRAMMING
The Squadron 42 Gameplay Team worked with Cinematics to implement more functionality in the trackview tool to get new cinematic scenes working. Among other things, these changes improved the ability to animate the player by blending them into a cinematic sequence, gaining control over the player’s camera, and allowing a set amount of player-controlled head-look.
The Actor Team got one-handed grips working with props of all different sizes and shapes. They started with two different grip types, one for round objects like a bottle or a cup, and another for square items like a book or datapad. The animators created two versions of each grip, open and closed, and the code can blend between the two allowing the player to hold props of different and awkward sizes without the need for multiple animation assets. The programmers have also been improving the animations used when moving from standing to running and back again. They are trying to keep the response times fast by reducing the amount of foot sliding and animation glitches.
The Social AI Team held a mini summit with the Lead AI and Lead Engine Tools programmers and the AI team in Frankfurt to discuss the latest usable tech and the next steps in development. They are now looking to create a visual tool to help the workflow of setting up usables and reduce the amount of knowhow currently required.
The EU Vehicle Team continued development of overpowering and overheating items with a focus on the quantum drive, shield, and cooler. They also expanded item wear to account for overheating.
The Core Gameplay Tech Team moved Object Container Streaming to the stage where they can turn on the background loading of individual entities. Now, it’s up to QA to find out what bugs come from this change. They also worked on the base functionality of loading and unloading individual object containers. The individual features teams have done a fine job of making their entity components thread safe, as well as moving the Lua script over into C++, all of which is required for Object Container Streaming.
SHIPS
The Ship Art Team finished the remaining tasks needed to get the 3.2 ships ready for release. They also created trailers for the Esperia Blade, Aegis Avenger, and Eclipse, along with promotional shots for the Origin 600i. Other work included whiteboxing the Origin 890 Jump to establish the final room layout and proportions, and R&D work on future Banu ships, with a focus on the Defender. Finally, the Hammerhead is getting a damage pass for the exterior and LOD pass across the interior.
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AUDIO
The Audio Department worked on all four of the 3.2 flyable ships trailers. They supplied the music heard in the Hurricane and Blade trailers, music and SFX for the Eclipse trailer, and music, SFX, and dialog for the Avenger.
The Audio Department also supported the 3.2 mining feature with regards to UI, mechanical SFX, and beam SFX. Additionally, there was a focus on re-balancing audio in line with the IFCS 2.0 update.
ENVIRONMENT ART
The UK Environment Team has been finalizing assets for the new ship hangars, as well as making passes on their dressing, branding, and props. They prepared for upcoming sprints, including sprints for new habitation modules and security checkpoints. Elsewhere, the team investigated and began to whitebox ideas for new small points of interest to populate Hurston beyond Lorville. They did all this in addition to supporting the Alpha 3.2 release with usual bug fixing and maintenance.
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As 3.2 drew to a close, the team completed flight ready effects on the remaining ships, including the Esperia Blade and Aegis Eclipse. They also worked on effects for the Avenger and Eclipse trailers. They finished off the remaining 3.2 weapon effects, including the Kastak Scalpel ballistic rifle, and continued to fine tune and fix any issues with the recent weapons 2.0 conversion.
The team collaborated with the mining and scanning/radar feature teams to ensure the effects were as polished as possible. They also worked with the Graphics Team on numerous developments to the GPU particle system, including improved ‘spawn chance’ and more robust parent/child hierarchies.
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FRANKFURT
ENVIRONMENT ART
The Environment Art Team continued their push on Lorville Section One Nine (L19), bringing more and more areas to a final state. With L19 coming alive, they’re kicking off production on the surrounding areas, including the procedural tiles that represent the wider city.
Regarding organic environments, the team wrapped up the first pass on the Hurston biomes and moved onto defining Hurston’s four moons. Each moon has its own look and feel and reflects some of the elements found on Hurston itself. These new moons are an example of the planet tech system’s flexibility – being able to reuse, remix and create new locations using all elements built to date saves a lot of time, and the process is getting faster as the tools and assets mature.
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BUILD ENGINEERING
The DevOps Teams in ATX and DE are coordinating a suite of tools to accommodate the various Feature Teams. This includes extending the existing auto-integrators behavior, which involves enabling classic chronological integrations as well as parallel, non-chronological integrations based on an acyclic dependency graph. This is similar to what’s used in code compilation to determine the ordering of tasks. Any stream of changes flowing via auto-integration can communicate directly to whoever the owner of the changelist is, or be deferred to a single stream stakeholder if they choose to oversee the resolution of integration conflicts themselves. As new options are added, a counterpart API is being rolled out to enable complementary tools to hook in. The first tool to hook into the API is a merging tool that handles laborious integrations from feature stream teams back into game-dev.
LEVEL DESIGN
The Level Design Team focused on areas of the Persistent Universe, including the flagship landing zones of Lorville and Area 18, and the Rest Stop space station layouts generated by the procedural tools. They completed a versatile whitebox version of a security checkpoint that can be easily adapted to locations of different sizes and security levels, and revisited the interiors of the Refinery space station.
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TOOLS
The Engine Tools Team improved the general game editor stability and usability, and fixed bugs for the 3.2 release. They added the Look Development Mode for artists to unify and isolate light setups for assets. Artists and Designers can now select any asset in any level and activate this mode to have a consistent light environment for tweaking their materials – it’s important to have a consistent and neutral material setup across all assets as it results in much higher visual quality. The Look Development Mode supports a flat light setup for tweaking materials to get as close to a neutral in-engine light environment as possible, along with a presentation mode to get the best visual quality out of a given asset. With the push of a button, this in-engine mode works with all asset sizes, from little props to capital ships. It’s a great tool, as it avoids error-prone and inconsistent manual light setups, so saves time on tweaking the assets for the game.
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QA
The QA Team started June by joining the EU Gameplay 5 Feature Team. One QA member was embedded with the team to attend weekly sprint and planning meetings and work closely with Developers to identify and resolve issues related to the Transit system. The Transit system includes elevators, metros, trams, and similar methods of transportation. Memory testing with the logging of Environment Variables enabled is also underway. In the first run-through, QA assisted the Engine Team in identifying a memory leak within particle emitters. The Graphics Team quickly created a fix and confirmed it once the changes were checked in. This type of testing will be a regular occurrence to ensure the team can stay on top of any potential future memory issues.
In addition, they continued to test new versions of the Subsumption Editor, as well as stay on top of regression and inputting new issues encountered by the development team. The new Subsumption versions consisted of fixes that needed verification as well as a new option to allow subsequent messages to be skipped when there are multiple invalid callback functions generating warnings upon initialization. Functionality in how Activities read information from the platforms has also been improved. A developer can now directly edit an NPC’s schedule loadout via the Activity the platform is being called from. Physics refactoring has also started to pre-emptively catch any new issues from the introduction of these new changes. QA will be doing a weekly Physics smoke test every Monday to test the PU, Arena Commander, and Star Marine in the Game-Dev branch. Then, a report is generated and sent for review and any new issues introduced from the Physics refactor are addressed.
ENGINE
The Engine Team continued with Physics optimizations that allow for more overlap during terrain patch physicalization. They also optimized raycasting when flying over the planet grid along with shadow batch processing. Look Development Mode was introduced to the engine to enable the team to test shading setups in a controlled environment. They improved horizon SSDO quality and performance, which is now enabled by default. They started streamlining the asset pipeline flow for consistency in shading, cleaning up asset presets, and changing the plugin to improve consistency.
For general code development, they supported the inline function expansion in callstacks presented via JIRA and Sentry, and improved support to compile Linux targets through Visual Studio. They completed the first iteration of the mining painter, continued to work on the telemetry system, and made skinning and vertex processing improvements.
WEAPONS
The Weapons Art Team completed all work, bugfixing, and polish for the 3.2 release. This included work on the Gemini F55 light machine gun, Klaus & Werner Demeco light machine gun, Kastak Arms Scalpel sniper rifle, and the Associated Science and Development distortion repeaters (size 1-3). They also spent time on Vanduul lances and knifes.
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VFX
The VFX Team worked on and optimized the 3.2 mining feature. They tackled effects for the fracture beam, the tractor beam that sucks up rocks, and for various rock impacts and explosions. They also worked on the cinematic destruction pipeline for the soft body destruction simulations. They smoothed out the pipeline for importing the soft body simulations from Houdini into 3ds Max, and then from 3ds Max into the engine. This will be used for bespoke, cinematic destruction sequences.
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SYSTEM DESIGN
The System Design Team worked to make enemy ship AI more fun to engage with. Initially, it was built as realistic as possible, but that doesn’t always make for the best gameplay. For example, a computer is extremely good at using the decoupled mode, far better than any human. While this is technically the best solution for fighting in space, it also feels unnatural and unintuitive to the player. They want to strike a balance between realism and giving the player a fun, challenging experience by cutting down the number of unnatural maneuvers the AI can perform.
The team also focused on FPS AI for multiplayer, making sure they function similarly to the single player mode. The push with the Vanduul reached its completion and their behaviors are almost locked down. A lot of work went into how the Vanduul navigate the environment, attack, defend, melee, and react to various weapons. They also spent time on civilian and guard behaviors, adding as much life into them as needed. The team primarily focused on designing modular conversation vignettes, which are blocks of randomly changing dialogue that can be controlled by various AI parameters like morale, hunger, etc. Basically, it’s a giant tree of animation/line clusters. The AI simply navigate through them and every time there’s a vignette, it produces a different outcome based on those parameters, so the same combination of lines will be a rare experience. They also put finishing touches on planetary mining. While some improvements are still needed, they believe it’s at a point where players can enjoy it.
AI
The AI Team was busy implementing new functionalities and fixing/optimizing existing systems. For Subsumption, they introduced the concept of global variables: for single player campaigns, designers might require the definition of generic variables available across different missions. Global variables are visible globally on the various missions and can be saved so that the game status can be preserved and restored for the players.
They also improved the way entities can receive ranged events. A ranged event is started when an entity is in proximity of another event. The proximity can be specified by designers in the definition of the event.
They introduced a new Subsumption task that can mark the entities to be notified so that the game code can efficiently calculate ranges only for the specified objects of the world. Work was done on improving and generalizing the way assignments are handled by entities. Assignments are a sort of command or suggestion designers can send to the AI entities. They can vary from ‘attack my target’ to ‘move to the specified position’, etc. Assignments are a very generic way to influence systemic behaviors and can be used to both script mission flow and/or give AI entities commands. The mastergraph is now responsible for bringing the assignment request to the execution phase, unless the behavior is defined to override the handling of the scenario. For example, while throwing a grenade, the behaviors might wait to handle an assignment that requests his relocation, while if the NPC is just patrolling, it can immediately fulfill the request.
The team had numerous people visit from the UK office for a week of meetings regarding the useable system. They discussed numerous use cases and possible improvements on the system and worked side by side on both existing and new code. Items that came from the meeting to be implemented are a new tool to speed up the usables pipeline, as well as new functionalities in Subsumption to describe complex scenarios of NPCs interacting with the environment. This ensures that their behaviors maintain a simple logic while the complexity remains embedded within the system itself.
Ship behaviors received significant improvements for the future Alpha 3.3 release. The team started implementing different behavior strategies associated with different ship types, so pilots can use the best capabilities of their specific vehicle. They also improved the way accuracy is calculated, so that ships attacking enemies feel more natural and are respectful of the new skill levels recently implemented. Human combat is also being polished. The team is currently going through as many use case scenarios as possible to validate the system works as intended.
TECH ART
The Tech Art Team worked on the Sandbox-Editor-to-Maya live link tool for synchronizing animations between the Digital Content Creation (DCC) and the game’s editor which, for this particular purpose, is essentially used as a rendering backend. Now that the underlying interprocess communication and object serialization frameworks are in place, animators will soon be able to see their changes on in-engine character assets live within the Maya viewport, rendered with all the advanced shading effects that the game engine provides. This will not only allow them to create better animations in less time, it will also facilitate animation asset and rig asset/deformation quality control and make for a much more immediate and precise workflow. They also integrated Motion Based Blending into Maya to enable the animators to easily remove any potential foot sliding after changes were made to an animation.
They implemented a ‘light rig’ switch into Maya that improves performance in heavy scenes and, in return, raises the frame rate during replay to make it easier for animators to work in heavily populated scenes.
Multiple FPS and Ship Weapon bugs were also addressed for the 3.2 release.
LIGHTING
The Lighting Team focused on tasks and bugs related to the upcoming 3.2 release. In addition, they collaborated with the Environment Art and Level Design teams on Lorville. Their current goals are to provide a first pass for lighting and atmosphere across all areas, as well as ensure that the level is built to allow for easy optimization and better performance in the future.
CINEMATICS
The Cinematics Team worked with UK Gameplay Engineers to create a Cinematic FreeLook control system that works with Star Citizen’s unified 1st and 3rd person character rig. Cinematic FreeLook allows a player that’s locked in position during a 1st person cinematic to look around freely. Cinematic designers can specify up/down/left/right limits and steer the player’s headcam towards specific things, like a character, vista, or an important event in the distance. The original Cinematic FreeLook system was limited as the player’s body was not fully considered, so looking too far in one direction meant the player could potentially see part of their own face inside of their helmet. This new system allows the player to work in 1st and 3rd person with performance capture on the body/head, additive animation of the headcam rotation, and Cinematic FreeLook active. The FreeLook system works with the mouse and gamepad thumbstick input, as there are areas that slow down control towards the edges of the ‘look window’ and a smooth re-center after a specified time with no input.
They also gained the ability to run Mannequin fragments on any NPC in Trackview, which will create seamless blends between locomotion and those performing in scenes via Trackview.
The Cinematic Animation Team also worked on testing how far they can technically push the Walk & Talk AI conversations. The goal is to retain the performance that the actors brought to these talks while running numerous real-time additives, such as layering upper body performance capture on top of a personalized per-character locomotion walk set. The tests have so far yielded positive results.
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PLATFORM: TURBULENT
This month, Turbulent wrapped up the Friends feature in Spectrum, provided support for the latest Drake concept, and finished the services build for groups system 3.2.
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The team deployed two Spectrum builds, ‘3.7.13-friends.2’ and ‘3.7.13-friends.3’. The main features included the addition of friends, friend requests, and the Message of the Day (MOTD). Lobbies can now have a MOTD that appears at the top when someone joins.
Friends and friend requests are now complete and easily accessible through an entirely new Quick Access Sidebar. Also, included in this sidebar are Notifications, Search, and Lobby Users. When someone receives a friend request, a transient pop-up appears and an orange dot is displayed next to the friend icon on the Quick Access toggle button. Friends can be grouped by common Organizations.
Additionally, the author of blocked thread replies can be hidden as an option under general account settings. A special thank you to the Spectrocati and everyone who helped test these new features!
RSI PLATFORM
The RSI Team supported the reveal of the Vulture, Drake’s latest ship. The Vulture is a light industrial salvage vessel that needs just one crew member. The Design Team had a lot of fun developing the page to house this rugged workingman’s ship. They also added new controllers in your account settings to allow better management of the content you want to receive in the weekly newsletters. Go to Account/Settings to pick and choose your RSI content.
GROUP SERVICES
Turbulent made multiple releases supporting the backend control for services. Each iteration of the service was followed by a round of support during QA. The work Turbulent did creates and disbands groups. It handles all the requests for invites, accepts invitations, and declines invitations to a group. It then tells the service that these players should be grouped together. This service also controls the necessary permissions around leadership of a group, including transfer when the leader leaves the group or chooses to move it. Additionally, they added a kick function if a member of the group is offline for a certain period.
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With this monthly report, the team says goodbye to the second quarter of 2018 and welcomes Star Citizen Alpha 3.2!
Maintaining the quarterly release cycle, the team was proud to publish another content update, with players exploring the new content since last Saturday. From group systems to quantum linking and mining, it feels fantastic to see people having fun in the game on Twitch and YouTube.
Thanks to all the dedicated testers who helped make this release possible. The entire CIG team sincerely appreciates your efforts during Evocati and PTU phases.
While Cloud Imperium Games wasn’t present at E3, the latest PU trailer was shown at the PC Gaming Show, showcasing the beauty of the ‘verse. Watch it on our YouTube channel if you haven’t yet.
If you’re a content creator, there’s currently a contest running that celebrates one of the recent editions to the flyable fleet in Star Citizen – the Origin Jumpworks 600i. The team is looking for player-made commercials showcasing the beauty of this multi-role luxury vessel. Running until July 15th, it’s your chance to grab one of the fabulous prizes on offer, including a standalone Aegis Eclipse with complimentary Lifetime Insurance.
The Community Team has been planning a wide variety of activities for you to participate in throughout the year and into next, all coupled with sweet prizes. So even if this contest isn’t for you, there are some exciting opportunities coming for you to leave your mark in the Star Citizen universe. Seriously, there will be more contests in 2018 than EVER before!
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The team is always amazed by the contributions made by the community – whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship. This month, they brought back the MVP (Most Valuable Poster). Every week, the team will select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and reward the content creator with an MVP badge on Spectrum and a mention on the MVP section of the Hub.
This month, Centurion subscribers received a limited Voyager-edition Klaus & Werner Arrowhead sniper rifle, while the Imperators netted an exclusive Pathfinder variant. The mighty Aegis Reclaimer spearheaded the ship of the month program that gives subscribers the chance to try out a new vessel.
With the Drake Vulture concept promotion still in full effect, the team recently released the Q&A on Drake’s dirty bird. Want to rip wrecks apart like a pro? Head over to Spectrum to see answers to the top-voted community questions on this unique industrial salvage ship.
Finally, the team keeps getting asked about the availability of CitizenCon 2948 tickets. The good news is that they will be available again shortly if you haven’t already snagged one. Make sure to follow Star Citizen on Twitter, or subscribe to the newsletter to find out when the next phase of ticket sales is available. CitizenCon in Austin, TX, is the perfect place to chat with the developers and get the latest updates on the development process. It’s also a chance to meet with org mates and old friends, or make new ones and recruit members for your crew.
Following the launch of the Vulture from Drake Interplanetary, we took your community-voted questions to our designers to give you more information on the recently unveiled light industrial salvage vessel.
If you haven’t watched our recent Ship Shape on the Vulture, you can do so here. Then, on Reverse the Verse, John Crewe, and Paul Jones answered questions about the Vulture live on Twitch.
Special thanks to John Crewe for answering the top-voted questions.
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Does the Vulture have any special synergy with other Drake ships like the Caterpillar? For example, the rear of the Vulture looks like it could easily back up to the Caterpillar‘s front air-shield door for easy offloading of salvage. (fan image example)
There are no particular plans to have any synergy with other Drake ships as suggested in the image, however the idea is interesting and should work in theory with the Caterpillar and other ships of a similar arrangement.
The Vulture has 12 SCU however, the similar entry level miner MISC Prospector has 128 SCU. With that significant difference of cargo how will profit differ between the ships?
The Prospector has its 128 SCU capacity spread across its multiple saddlebag containers, but cannot hold the full 128 SCU at a single time and must detach these containers to keep collecting material. Each container currently holds 8 SCU so without detaching them the Prospector can naturally only hold 32 SCU at a single time, the current value in 3.2.
Is a scant 12 SCU of scrap material going to be economically viable, considering that scrap usually isn’t worth much as a commodity, plus the cost of fuel burn, cost of demolition charges, and risk of operating a relatively undefended ship in potentially hazardous environments?
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As with all things economy based, we will be reviewing the profit/hour balance and making adjustments where needed. People should not speculate on the viability of the Vulture based on the current ingame scrap metal prices, as these are not the same as what the Vulture will produce. Internally we have discussed the size of the cargo bay during concept and made sure that if we need to increase the size of it, it can be done during production without requiring significant rework, to bring it inline with other profession starter ships. Likewise if we feel the Prospector containers skew the comparison they can be brought down in capacity.
Since the Prospector can scan to locate mineable nodes, will the Vulture have similar scanning tech onboard to tell its pilot what components are still salvageable (salable/usable) and what are not instead of having to EVA out to check manually?
Absolutely, all ships will have scanning ability and certain ships such as the Vulture have enhanced scanners specifically suited to that role.
Does the 12 SCU of cargo space include the space for storing cubes of salvage, or is there a different hold specifically for that?
The 12 SCU cargo space is the cargo grid for both cubes and scavenged items which you wish to legitimately store, of course like in all ships you can place items outside the cargo grids but these have downsides such as not being secure and risking being damaged as well as not being recognized or detected by the kiosk or sales interfaces as legitimate goods for sale.
If intact components will typically be more valuable for low-volume salvaging versus compressed scrap, and the Vulture can only secure those items by pilot EVA, why would players find the Vulture more desirable to use for light salvage instead of better defended and/or cheaper fighter craft/light hauler like the Hornet, Cutlass, Freelancer, or Aurora CL?
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Component salvaging is only part of the salvage career, and whilst any ship could technically do this the Vulture is equipped for the whole process (scraping, processing, and ship breaking) which will maximize profit from your trips versus just grabbing components alone. The Vulture (and other salvage ships such as the Reclaimer) come equipped with dedicated salvage scanners which allow you to identify components and their state much easier than non dedicated ships so whilst you could strip every item out of an abandoned ship into a Cutlass, 90% of them could be such low value such that the Vulture owner would return essentially the same end profit with only grabbing the 10% identified as worthwhile.
An example to use would be Mining in 3.2, players can just fracture and extract every rock in sight but without scanning and reviewing their composition and carefully fracturing, returns will be low versus a player who specifically targets the high value assets.
Given that the initial Vulture concept that the community voted for emphasized a ship oriented towards salvaging valuable components over processing large volumes of low-value scrap material, what prompted the shift towards making the Vulture a low-volume, low-value raw material reclamation ship?
During the concept phase we started out with just the component salvaging process as its key aim, but as we progressed through the concepts it became clear that this wasn’t a particularly interesting or fulfilling role for the ship and as such we decided to make the Vulture a more rounded introduction to Salvage covering all the basic principles.
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Considering the Vulture can only carry roughly a snub-fighter worth of compressed scrap, why were live-aboard features prioritized as a feature versus just making it a daytripper with increased storage space for cargo and/or better tools for harvesting intact components?
Player accommodation and live aboard features will have a role in the future and as such we decided that ships which are entry level should have these basic features to support solo players being able to spend long amounts of time away from base rather than requiring daytripper style planning.
Will there be any risks associated to salvage akin in to mining? I.e. rupturing a fuel line, tractoring in a live wire or causing a structural collapse?
Definitely, like Mining we don’t want it simple to be a click and leave mechanic, but to require some level of skill to control the return on investment for salvaged materials.
What advantage does the Vulture have over another ship that simply removes profitable/intact components and not stay to melt the hull of a wrecked ship?
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Since the Vulture requires some manual cutting of scrap, will it come with the requisite hand tools, or will those have to be purchased separately?
Every Vulture comes equipped with the Multitool which can be used for welding and cutting of objects, alongside a full complement of salvage charges.
12 SCU of cargo … okay let´s try some math.
The Cargo area must be at least 2 SCU wide and 2 SCU in height. So 2 × 2 x L = 12 SCU ; L = 3. So the cargo area should be about 3 SCU long.
For comparison: 1 mid sized power plant (Terrapin for example) is about the size of 1 SCU.
Conclusion: The most profitable job in salvage is to find used components that are still working so cutting them in smaller parts is no option.
So the pilot of the Vulture can store up to 12 mid sized components. Isn´t that a little bit small? Or did I forget an important aspect of salvage?
As mentioned earlier, we’ll be making sure the return is appropriate from an economy point of view and that one method of salvaging is not vastly superior to the other. Components salvaged from a ship are extremely unlikely to be in a pristine condition and their value will drop appropriately, presuming you can find a buyer willing to accept the items in that condition. On the flip side processed and compacted raw materials from salvage will be readily bought by most manufacturing and refineries.
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Are there VTOL thrusters on the ship?
The RTV section mentioned the Vulture had VTOL thrusters instead of a grav-lev system, but the ship description only has main, retro, and maneuvering thrusters.
This is just an oversight on the ship matrix and will be updated soon, the ship has 2 dedicated VTOL thrusters in the front nacelles rear of the landing gear plus the rear two main engines will have VTOL capabilities if required. An early concept had them doing thrust vectoring but was left off later images. We may just use an additional integral thruster depending on what can be implemented at the time of production and whether it is required based on the other thrusters on the ship and their capacities.
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Hello everyone,
Last week we released Star Citizen Alpha 3.2 to the live servers, marking our second successful quarterly release. Several new and updated ships were made available for pledge along with the release, and the MISC Prospector became a permanent addition to the RSI Store.
In the 72 hours since release, we’ve seen an incredible amount of community created content submitted to the Community Hub, and we encourage you all to check it out. We browse the Hub regularly, and it continues to be a powerful source of inspiration.
Now, with the release of Alpha 3.2, we look ahead at making improvements and refining the patch, so keep hitting the servers, report bugs to the Issue Council, and hit the feedback forum to share your thoughts on a specific item or feature.
We’ve also got another opportunity for you all to get creative and compete for some pretty epic prizes in our Origin 600i Commercial Contest. The Community team has been planning a wide variety of activities for you all to participate in throughout the year and into next, with no shortage of sweet prizes. So even if this contest isn’t for you, we’ve got some exciting stuff coming, with more ways for you to leave your mark on the Star Citizen universe. (Seriously, we’re doing more contests in 2018 than EVER before!)
Lastly, let me direct your attention to this week’s Community MVP, TexasSkulls, who updated their robust Trading App to accommodate Mining in Alpha 3.2. Congratulations!
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
Every week on Calling All Devs, designers, engineers and other developers from our five offices around the world answer backer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted for by YOU. Today, we address questions regarding multi-tools, keybdingins, and more. Watch the full episode here. As always: You can submit your questions for consideration in future episodes of Calling All Devs here.
Tuesday will be dedicated to bringing you an all new episode of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this time exploring the Cano System.
On Wednesday, the US offices will be closed for Independence Day, but that won’t stop the content! Look out for an explosive screenshot contest on Twitter, and the release of our Drake Vulture Q&A.
Thursday will welcome another episode of Around the Verse where we’ll take a look at the latest Star Citizen news with a project update.
If somehow Around the Verse wasn’t enough to whet your appetite, buckle in: we’ll also be releasing the Monthly Studio Report for June this Thursday as well.
Lastly, make sure to tune in on Friday for another episode of Reverse the Verse, broadcast LIVE at 12PM Pacific on our Star Citizen Twitch channel. This week, we’ll sit down with Todd Papy to discuss all things Design, so keep an eye out on Spectrum for the questions gathering thread!
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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Every week, we select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it in this section. The highlighted content creator will be awarded with an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
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TexasSkulls has created an application that records prices across all possible trading locations, then displays that information in a relevant way to help aspiring merchants maximize profit during their cargo runs. With the release of Alpha 3.2, Texas has updated the app to include Mining!
Please join us in congratulating TexasSkulls for being this week’s MVP!
Die Entwickler von Star Citizen geben den Alpha Patch 3.2.0 frei. Das Update fällt umfangreich aus - das Changelog liegt bereits vor. Demnach könnt ihr nach der Aktualisierung Bergbau betreiben und so Materialien sammeln. Zudem wird mit der Star Citizen…
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Today, we release our quarterly update to the Star Citizen Alpha Persistent universe, Alpha 3.2. In the new patch, Star Citizen players can use the Prospector ship’s mining arm to gather and sell resources harvested from the three moons, adding new gameplay and a huge resource to the game’s burgeoning economy. This economy comes into play in an entirely new way: 3.2 dramatically expands the number of items players can purchase at in-game kiosks with their hard earned in-game currency.
On the technical side, Alpha 3.2 dramatically improves upon the grouping system, delivering on the Star Citizen community’s most requested feature stemming from a vote in March of 2018. This new feature enables up to fifty players to travel the universe together as they enjoy the game’s more than thirty varying, procedurally-generated, mission types. NPC ship AI has also been improved with new behaviors that give in-game enemies a lot more teeth.
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Star Citizen Alpha 3.2 also adds several new flyable ships and playable weapons and armor, adding to its impressive stable of more than 60 ships and 300 in-game weapons, armor and character items. New playable items include:
One new ship weapon and three new personal weapons for players to unleash mayhem upon their enemies
Six updated “Legacy” armor suits created by various in-game entities that hearken back to years gone by
Kiosk systems – enabling players to purchase numerous in-game items using in-game currency, from remote locations across the Universe
In addition to the new flyable ships added in 3.2, the MISC Prospector has now been added as a permanent addition to the pledge store
And more!
And of course, you can read the comprehensive Alpha 3.2 Patch Notes here.
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Remember, while there’s a lot to explore in Alpha 3.2, the game is still just a portion of the Star Citizen experience! You can help the team improve future releases by reporting bugs and other issues using the Star Citizen Issue Council. The amazing feedback from Star Citizen backers is what has allowed us to interate on the PTU so quickly, and we’re eager for feedback about the Live release as well. You can access the Issue Council here.
Finally, we would be remiss if we did not thank our incredible community of PTU testers for helping make this patch the best it can be! Your dedication is exemplary of the UEE’s finest defenders!
Chris Roberts Traum von einem persistenten Sci-Fi-Universum mit Tausenden von Spielern ist zwar nicht - wie ursprünglich geplant und kommuniziert - 2014 erschienen, soll aber laut den Entwicklern noch in den nächsten Jahren tatsächlich Wirklichkeit…
Writer’s Note: The Knowledge of Good and Evil: Part Two was published originally in Jump Point 2.10. You can read Part One here.
“I know right. Debt ‘s debt.” Eve’ rat know that.
She stop cold. “You think that you are incurring a debt by staying here?”
“Ain’ I? Wha’ I’m suppose think? An I see one an’ ‘m null gon’ jus’ be here an’ . . . null tha’ . . . I won’ be your slave!” Start lookin for way out tha hall ta secure.
I stop cause Mom Super raise her hand. Slow like. Like she do ta quiet tha meal hall ‘fore meal. Hadn’ expected her ta be calm like tha’.
“If I gave a way to repay your debt, would you stay?”
Mom Super got wha’ she talk. Work got, ‘nough ta pay debt. Off some, an’ diff from Bazaar, lock tha’. Bes’ deal ‘m got ta stay with tha Sisters. Rules some, bu’ null like Blues or Bazaar Bosses got. ‘bout now ‘m start figure tha Sisters weren’ part tha Gov. If they’s Gov them give H-kit, like tha Gov.
Problem that. Big got problem when rat got no Hygiene. H-kit got thing like razor. Razor ta shave my head with. Razor I need an don’ have. Head gone ta fuzz a’ready. Tha’ mean ‘lot on streets. Mean rat got i’ in ‘em to go ‘gainst rhyme an’ honor. Mean might give up on tryin’. Creepers and slavers watch ta pounce on fuzz heads.
Walk out tha room an’ rage some ta Mom Super ta get razor. Mom Super ‘most yelled back. ‘fore ran off back ta my room.
‘magined her comin’ through tha door an chokin’ me. I seen creeper do tha’ once.
Mom Super got ask me straight later, “What would you do with a razor young one? Why do you need it so?”
Sisters an’ Mom Super don’ have null clue. I’m hoarse from yelling an wound tight. A’most missed tha ask.
“Wha’ ’m do?! Shave my damn head! Wha’ tha hell else Craz Oldie? Wha’ else i’ good for do with? You know how tha creepers like ‘em?”
“Your hair is a danger to you?” Mom Super ask.
“Hair too long an’ you be gone. Don’ sleep flat for creeps ta get at. Eat food paste or you waste. Know tha rhymes live long times. Stick ta’gether in bad weather. Hoardin’ creds will get you dead.”
Mom Super look ‘round at tha other three Sisters in tha door ta my room. One them reach in bag an’ pull out one sealed H-kit like tha kind I got from tha dispenser once month. Mom Super take i’ an’ hold i’ out ta me.
Snatch i’ null lookin’ at her an’ I head ta corner tha room an’ reflec on tha wall. Big reflec but I don’ need much an sit on floor. Back ta tha door but can see ‘em in the reflec. Them watchin’ as shave tha head fuzz quick like rats got do. Sisters standin’ in tha door outbound one-an-one til only Mom Super left.
“It’s a sad thing to see.” Mom Super say soft. “Red hair is very rare.”
Finish las’ pull move a’fore her sayin’ sunk in.
Turn an’ look at her. “Is?”
“Yes. Very.”
I don’ know, but tha’ look Mom Super got shake me cold for days.
* * *
Interestin’ now tha’ some Sisters would come an’ ask me if could fix some for ‘em. Each nex’ got harder thin’ ta fix. Sometime it some basic an’ big. Sometime it some complex an’ small. Air mover ta some bedrooms stopped. Solenoid switch on machine gone bad. Malfunct ligh’ in tha hallway. Sometimes, mobiGlas like tha kind spacer use. Other time some buggy engine. Eve’ time it got be some’ I neve’ seen or neve’ fix b‘fore. I think ta ‘self tha’ Sisters didn’ know tha’. ‘m learn them tech an’ gear while ‘m work.
Still ain’ got lock on angle Sister play ta. Got think ‘bout Bosses or creepers or slavers workin’ on some rat like. ‘magination come up with like wha’ ‘m hear on street ‘round Bazaar. Ain’ EZ ta stay smart ‘nough ta null trus’ thin’ tha’ sound like street gossip. Eve comin’ from me.
Got parts an’ gear ta fix for days when Mom Super show up a’ my shop.
“Follow me.” She say. Turnin’ she lead me down tha hall an’ back ta main floor and started headin’ ta big door ‘m null got through yet. “Your choice to remain here is a bold one, and you have proven good on your word and not tried to leave again. I believe we should make a gesture of good faith in return.”
Reached tha door. Aft’ she look ove’ her shoulder a’ me she press hand ta tha door release. Pressure seal door slide back an out. Sisters coat norm block view ‘fore I got glint. This time Mom Super step back an’ ‘most push me in.
Light ‘m step into blind me some.
Null tha’ bright jus’ more ligh’ than tha hallway. ‘m look a tha floor. Dark metal like tha hall but cleaner. Null dus’. None jus’ cleaner eve’ thin’ clean. New? ‘bout when ‘m think tha’ my eyes a’just ta light an’ ‘m look up.
‘m couldn’ breath.
Three high a stack rows tall. Leas’ ten meters. Rows wide an’ so long can’ see ’tha end from tha door. Them got books like ‘m in pics. Neve’ see real ‘fore. Oldie info that. VID term, an’ storage media a more types than ‘m know. Figures how some Sisters spend days in here.
Jump some when Mom Super say some an’ break tha quiet.
“You can come in here at any time you’d like, young one. This Library is our most holy place, but the freedom to access knowledge is equally sacred to us. We have been remiss to keep this from you. We have all sorts of information here. What is kept in the Holy Vault is only for members of the Order under seal of the confessional, but all else is yours to explore. The door will now open for you and the Sisters are always willing to help if you need anything.”
“Won’ do much good ta me lady. Can’ read none.”
How come eve’ time Mom Super smile ta me like that an’ I say some she got cry?
She daz like got hit hard, “That’s . . . I had assumed . . . with your skills, I mean. We will have to . . . um . . . How foolish of me.”
Mom Super stared me like. Like ‘m ghos’ or some. She drop her head an’ say some ‘m null hear. When she look ta me ‘gain got look like she ragin’ ‘hind her eyes. Lady move from tha door an’ point ta hallway. She lead though ‘m couldn’ tell where we goin’.
Thought I know tha whole Hall by now bu’ Mom Super stop fron’ door I neve’ been ta. She open i’ an’ make like ‘m suppose ta go in. Small. Got desk an’ VID screen on tha wall. Maybe half size my room.
Mom Super walk ta screen an’ press button ‘n tha side. Flash an’ then i’ come on. Aft’ few boot screens, comp vid Human walk from tha side like ‘em come in ta room like real person do. Got see move top tha screen. Cam doin’ sweep tha place. Done lock on us.
“I’ve brought you a new student.” Mom Super say. ‘most hide her anger.
“Wha’ Lady got ta be rage ‘bout?” ‘m think. “Tha’ her didn’ know ‘m null read?”
Vid screen Lady star’ gabbin’, “A student. One to be taught. Very good. Where shall I begin?”
“The beginning.” Mom Super say.
“Well and good. And you are the pupil?”
Cam move jus’ ‘nough ta know lock on jus’ me now.
‘m look ta Mom Super an’ she jus’ lookin back ta me. Wet eyes some. Figure tha’ ‘m got ta answer.
‘m mos’ cold ta bone. School dead danger ta street rat. Gov Schools free bu’ you spend any ticks there an’ wouldn’ make ‘nough. Some rats starve cause ‘em null make deals.
Know ‘nough ta got numbers. Know ‘nough ta speak straight an’ crook. Know ‘nough ta fix gear. School learned? Like Up folk? Like my cot?
“Sure.” All ‘m think ta say.
Screen prog stat gab ‘gain, “Please sit student, we are about to begin.”
“The program will teach you if you choose to learn from it. It can go as fast or slow as you need. You may consider this part of your work for us as well.”
Tha’ las’ from Mom Super an’ she outbound.
Wha’ got Mom Super raged? An’ ‘m got ta listen ta comp prog? Hell. Teach prog got ta work righ’ then. Null got time ta think ‘bout danger a learnin’ too much. ‘m got new work from tha lady. I neve’ work like this in my life.
* * *
Found new kind of hunger in tha’ room. Sit in tha’ classroom for long stretches. Only leave ta eat or relieve myself. I spend hours more a day there than had ta.
I realize I been starved for information when I’m given more than I can handle but not as much as I want. I’m addict ta it and the drug is free. Learning is no debt. Maybe that why the bosses on the street don’t want rats ta get it. Teach program pushes me hard. It keep lessons comin’ as fast as I complete ‘em.
“High Impact Learning” what teach prog call it. Cumulative points, none percentages. Almost neve’ have to hear lectures. Everything a conversation.
English, Grammar, Ancient Earth History, Math, Biology, Psychology, Sex Ed, Mechanics, Social Studies, Interstellar Commerce, and Physical Activities all covered. Standard Ed for UEE. Even know what the UEE is now.
80 to 90 hours a week I work on my school. Would spend more if I didn’t need to eat an’ sleep so much. An’ Sisters still wan’ me ta fix gear. Got hard time ‘tween fix gear like ‘m good at an’ wan’ ta learn book work. Book work start ta win that. I write essays, I listen ta books, I track my health for PE. I even start going back into the library to read books for school.
So much time passes without my realizing.
Got back to the room one night and see myself in the mirror. I stare into it for almost an hour. I been missing the inches I’m growing up and hair I’m growing out. Shit.
It makes the girl looking back at me in the mirror even look like a girl. She looks like me, except with hair and tits. At first I’m scared to notice.
Tits are still small enough they’ll be easy to hide, but I have hair. Does hair mean what the street says it means? Hell, if I can keep street learning from mixing with book learning now. The impulse to shave it off in haste and fear grips me hard. I almost do it. Almost.
Instead, I dare myself to leave it. That seems to work. I dig through my hygiene kit for the comb I never use. I watch fixated as I pull the comb through my hair and feel the tug against my scalp. I’ve been moving it out of my eyes for how long? Crap. I null know. Been dealing with it but always absentmindedly. Never looking in the mirror. I look in the H-kit again and see the razor. Still in its wrapping. Back in the mirror I catch someone that looks like I’m supposed to but different. She has red hair. Touching it is like touching danger itself. It’s part of me. Maybe it’s a warning to the world that I’m more dangerous now.
I fall asleep to the feeling of hair on my neck. It’s warm. They never tell you about that part on the street. They don’t tell you a lot.
Education Levels pass by. I start out at level 3. Don’t even count the months. Day comes, night comes. Frustration and anger. Success and wonder. Don’t care much about how long it takes, the information is what matters. By the time I get to level 10 work, I’m doing the good stuff like tech.
Days do get long though. The Sisters spend most of their time in the Library. If too many of them are in the Library at one time the halls start to feel dead. That pulls me there. The library is the only place in the Hall that feels alive sometimes. Once I started to read some, I started going there and found that books can be alive all on their own. Sometimes the books even have people in them. Some alive. Some dead. Some real, others not. I get to watch those characters live, play, fight and win. The second time I close a book hiding tears, Mom Super catches me.
“You should take a break from the tragedies for a while I think, young one. You might try these for a spell,” she said leading me to a bookcase I hadn’t randomly selected for raiding yet. “They are not as intense but may be to your interests.”
She may be strange sometimes, but she can read me easy enough.
I look on the shelf she’s led me to and only see some old storage drives. They look ancient. “I don’t want to break them.”
“You won’t, dear, they are quite sturdy.”
With Mom Super’s blessing I take one down and over to the nearest terminal. Takes me a second to figure out the connectors and boot sequence for the thing. Old, like most things around here. I get it working and open the primary file. On it are technical manuals for COMM Tech and COMP Tech for a ship I’ve never heard of. Even ship drive schematics from only a hundred years ago. Tear down instructions, maintenance schedules, even revisioning logs from one version of a thing to the next explaining what changed and why.
Everything a spacer might want to know about her ship.
I’m still a gear rat, just with more skills now. It’s not tech to take apart, but I’ve been creating universes in my head for the books I read. I know I can do the same for this tech. That and all the tech jobs for the Sisters. I know how to fix a dead VID terminal from a hundred years ago, and I know how to imagine an’ make things real.
So I study. As I do, more technical data, notes wit helpful hints for using the terminal, even meals all start showing up at my new hermitage at the terminal in the Library. It’s infuriating. Who? What do I owe them? It’s touching. It’s dangerous not to know who I owe what, but I accept it all the same because I have a plan now. Anything that helps is worth taking. When I get out of here, I wont be just a gear rat. I’ll be a pilot.
On my own SHIP.
* * *
One day word comes that one of “our ships” has just entered the system and is returning. It takes me a second to remember that this isn’t a plot from a novel.
“We have ships?” I ask the Sister. “And that word is plural. The Sisters have more than one ship?”
I don’t get an answer, but she tells me that everyone is assembling in the entry hall. Normally, it’s a common side hallway. I’ve never seen anyone enter or leave as long as I’ve been here. It barely registers that the door is there as I join the Sisters in waiting.
Standing among so many people all in one place starts making me uncomfortable. I realize that I’m more used to being alone now. We all stand with the foremost in a semicircle facing the door. I make my way to the front to be near Mom Super. The Sisters close around us making sure not to give me a straight path out the only exit to the place. The door opens inwardly like it did that night years ago. Years. I shiver thinking about it.
A lone figure is standing outlined by dust and setting sunlight in the shadow being cast by something tall outside. A full face helmet covers her head and the rest of her is covered by a space suit. A sleek, black, beautiful, and expensive suit. I immediately try to take inventory of the suit and its status lights. It’s the gear rat in me still looking for something to fix and charge her for. Or maybe I just want one like it.
As my eyes try desperately to make out the suit better, I realize she’s carrying two metal cases. Each about one meter long and half a meter tall. They aren’t very thick, but they are obviously very important by the size of the locks on them.
She steps forward to meet Mom Super and puts down the cases beside herself as they come to a stop in front of one another. The door closes behind the newcomer and, once shut, she removes the helmet.
Long dark hair fall past the shoulders of a young looking woman with tired, teary eyes. As the normal dusk light settles in the hallway, she speaks.
“Mother Superior! I have returned in honor to my Oath, in honor to our order, and freely of my own choice. I bring the knowledge collected on my pilgrimage. Twice copied for us and again two more for our sisters of the other Hall. I return to my sisters the ship given me, the money given me plus a great sum more, and I return myself in hopes of peace and understanding among my sisters.”
The last words echo off the high walls and fall silent. Mom Super just steps forward and hugs the woman. Others attend to the cases. One case heads toward the meal hall. The other, handed to a Sister who heads to the library. As it opens to allow her and the second case in, I see her turn and head toward the Holy Vault, but the door closes before I can see how she gets in.
Other Sisters in the hall start talking about the new woman and calling her the Returned.
The Returned and Mom Super walk toward the meal hall together. It’s too early for dinner, but everyone is following them, so I do too. I catch more conversation about “the sacrament” as we fill the benches. The short table with five stools that normally sits empty next to the Mom Super now has the Returned at it with the case in front of her. She stands and bows slightly, first to Mom Super and then to the room of Sisters.
I think, “Since when do the Sisters bow?”
They’re a religious order, sure, but they aren’t like the Xeno Cults or Tech Worshipers. I always thought they used the religious angle so they’d be left alone.
The Returned unlocks the case with some sort of code, a key, and then a voice print. She opens it and reveals 20 blocks that look like data drives.
Mom Super Calls out, “The Holy Sacrament of New Knowledge.”
The Sisters all reply as one, “Thanks be to God.”
Each Sister produces a mobiGlas from their pocket and puts it on. I’ve seen some of these models before, worked on them. I haven’t seen so much tech gear in one place in years. It’s like watching flowers bloom as each one winks on.
Someone touches me. I jump.
I’m just on edge is all. This is a lot to take in. A Sister I don’t recognize had done it. Her newly revealed mobiGlas is running a boot sequence as she points to the front of the room. Mom Super, calling me over.
I approach Mom Super, and she begins to smile. Never a good sign. Things go craz when Lady does that. She reaches out a hand to me, “Take it young friend. We would not keep this moment from you.”
“What?”
She laughs a little.
“We’re going to share access to the information the Returned has brought us,” she says. “You may search for whatever you like, however you like. We ask only that you share what you find interesting. Just follow the lead of the Sisters. It has been some time since we had a guest present for the sacrament, but it is allowed.”
A weight falls into my outstretched hand. I know what I dream it to be, but what it can’t be.
“This is yours, young one. A testament to your hard studies that have made even the Sisters envious of your diligence.”
A slim black and blue case rests in my hands. Careful inspection shows no maker’s mark or logos. I open it like the treasure chest I know it is.
A mobiGlas. Top of the line model with a blue crystal scrawl along the side. The world starts to go fuzzy.
None. That danger. No! ‘m null cry! If I cry ‘m weak an’ tha ‘thers will . . . I look around through my tears. I see smiling Sisters with whom I have always been safe. Will always be safe. I still can’t let myself. I choke back the tears and look Mom Super in the face. Unable to meet her eyes fully.
“Uh, thanks,” is all I get out past the tightness of my throat. I turn and bolt to my seat; desperately not wanting to be the center of attention anymore.
The same Sister who nudged me earlier whispers that they will wait till I’m ready.
Sheer panic.
I fumble with the mobiGlas and finally get it turned on. In a moment a blinking cursor presents itself on the screen. Ready.
I look at Mom Super, out of breath. She nods.
Suddenly, I feel cold in the vastness of the information I have access to. So much; more than I could learn in a hundred lifetimes.
It takes hours listening to this or that thing a Sister finds or just pushing through one set of data or another. The hardwood benches normally don’t bother me, but four hours of economic reports, social news and statistics is a bit long to just sit around with my legs falling asleep. Mom Super got up then and dismissed us. Before I duck out to my room with my new prize, she calls me over.
Mom Super sets her face hard. Formal. I get a knot in my stomach just recognizing the look of it. “The advent of the Returned brings with it an authority second only to my own. Upon this authority, a proposal of change may be brought to the Sisters.”
Seems like Sister business. I stay out of that stuff. Old habit not to get tangled, that.
“It may not seem so in your situation, dear, but freedom is paramount to us. Free will and the right to choose are more important than choosing the right or moral thing.” she explained. “The information we gather empowers the choices we make. We even share our knowledge or collect private information at times. We choose what we share and what we do very carefully.”
“Even my speaking at your trial was a choice, young one.”
My heart skips a beat at that. We’ve never discussed that day or why I’m here. It’s an unspoken understanding. She doesn’t give answers to the questions I pretend I don’t have. Her eyes are holding back a sadness covered by a smile.
“I made my choice to interfere and bring you here. It upset many of the Sisters, but your being here has convinced the others of an ugly truth many of them do not want to learn.”
I try to look casual as one of my legs threatens to fall asleep again. “What’s that?” I ask, fearing the problem I know now I cause. Tha problem tha’ I am.
“That we have failed the people of this and other planets. That we are called to teach as well as learn. That our Order must teach the children of the streets, advocating for them as they themselves cannot. We must use what we learn and are told to help empower our fellow Humans.”
“Them can’ be taught Mom Super! What I mean is— that street rats teach each other that knowing too much is bad and will get you killed. They’re so scared, everyone believes the rhymes. Hell, there are even rhymes about not questioning the rhymes. And . . .”
She puts up her hand to stop me.
“Which is the sort of thing this Order does not know or understand fully, but you do.”
She takes a deep breath.
“I never intended to make you the focus of this effort of mine to reform the Order, but you have such unique gifts . . .”
Old Lady stops and stares at me. Her sadness is gone and something more like power burns in her eyes now.
“Will you help us create schools for these children?”
Rage, anger, joy, fear, panic, scheming, dread, hope and shock run through me as I consider what Mom Super just dropped in my lap.
“The choice is sacred. We, I, will think nothing different of you no matter your answer.”
Minutes pass and my mind races. Eventually two thoughts rise to the top of the internal chaos: Mom Super needs my help and if the rats learn the power of information, the street won’t own them anymore. They will have power like I never did. Maybe even like I have now.
An anger and a determination like I’ve never known rises in me and my skin bristles. I can pay my debt to the street, my debt to the Sisters, and the debt of every rat from Bazaar to Backtrack.
‘Unique gifts’ is what she called them. Yeah, those I’ve got. A sly grin spreads across my face.
I look Mom Super in the eye and recognize what’s in her eyes now because I feel it too.
“When do we start?”
* * *
I once thought getting to leave again would be a big deal to me, but it’s not. I never felt trapped at the convent. Well, not after I learned to read, anyway. The world makes more sense now, but it isn’t any different after reading about it.
Maybe that’s what happened to the Sisters. They started living in the Library too much, and Mom Super is trying to get them back into the real world.
We work out when and where the first ‘Street School’ day will be. Two Sisters and I gather in the entry hall to take the rail to Bazaar Street. I wear one of the Habit coats to try my best to blend in with the Sisters. The area around the convent isn’t luxury, but it’s not slums either. I see a Blue on the rail and flinch as he gives up his seat for one of the Sisters, like we’re important or something. Strange feelings creep on me the rest of the rail ride. By the time we get there I want off the rail car so much I almost miss how the Bazaar has changed.
The Sisters look to me and I take the hint: I’m supposed to lead them. I start for Work Row. Rats gather in Work Row when they are on hard times or young and looking to become Gear Rats. It’s just a bigger than normal alley, but it serves well enough. Lots of exits for it too. The way rats like it. The way looks different now that I’m taller, but I get us there without any wrong turns.
Seven or eight kids are sitting on ledges and crates. I turn to the Sisters and nod. They nod back, and we move to an area near the middle of the groups where one wall is mostly empty. One Sister pulls out a small projector and places it on the ground. The other moves next to her and connects her mobiGlas. Some of the rats move closer, curious about the tech. They scatter back as I move next to the projection on the wall and pull back my hood.
“We would like to teach you all whatever you want to know,” I say and try to look at as many of them as possible.
One of the older ones speaks up. “Ja Lady? An’ wha’ make think you gots some us rats wan’? An’ wha’ i’ cos’ us? Fancy Up tech you got ain’ free. Lock tha’. I Checked.”
A joke and challenge. What will it cost? How do I say it won’t cost them anything? Free translates to gullible. Why didn’t I think about this before now? I have to answer fast or they might all spook and leave.
“Because . . . ‘cause rat like you ain’ got wha’ we got teach. Know tha’ lock ‘cause ‘m was rat an’ Sisters taught me more than any rhyme. Null cos’. None debt. All i’ takes is time.” It’s hard to try and force what used to come so naturally to me and what I say is a poor combination of the slang and proper speech, but it might work.
The children look around to each other. I think I caught them more off-guard by how I said it then what I said.
“Tha’ craz. You some oldie rat?” A young one says next.
They’re talking! Don’t blow this.
“Oldie rat? Sure. Craz? None that. What you wan’ a know small-y?”
The young one that spoke goes and comes back with someone else, another child that looked sickly. The sickly one showed a lump on his skin.
“Wha’ tha’ oldie?”
It looked like a cyst or rash maybe, but it could be something worse. Shit. “Tha’ bad some. Gots go ta medics, but null do ‘t here. Bazaar Medics got ta pay off bosses. Ride rail three stop and go ta tha medic down the street ta left. Same like got here. Treat you free like medics here are s’pposed. Somethin’ obvious like this them got ta take in and go on it. Lock truth, that.”
I try to give the sick one my rail pass. The other one shoves it away.
“We got creds ‘nough ta ride rails. Sure them gots ta go on it if we shows up, eve’ we rats?”
“Yes. Them gots ta work it. Lock sure.”
The eyes of the whole group judge me and my words for what feels like eternity. Finally the two depart, and the rest of our class stare at them as they go.
The old one pipes up again,”Wha’ else you got ta learn us rats Sister?”
Acceptance? At least for now. I paid our entry fee by helping those two. They’ll let us try. I choke back a memory as I wonder if I would have ever let the Sisters teach me if I’d still been on the street. We got some brave ones.
“Wha’ you want ta know?” I say through a smile.
* * *
Now, I leave the convent with a group of Sisters every week. Some street children, we don’t call them rats, have even made it a part of their routine to show up to school. Not every time of course; being too predictable can get you killed on the street. Some never come back again. Each time that happens, I have nightmares until I see one that has been missing for weeks return again. Never show my relief for fear of scaring them off by singling them out. Street children don’t use names, and even being recognizable is dangerous. Blending into the group protects everyone. I had to stop some Sisters who were developing nicknames and assigning numbers to the kids to track lessons. It would ruin everything if the kids knew they were being tracked with a name or number.
“Is that why you don’t have a name?” One of them asks me.
Direct dmg, that.
I try to recover but my shock was already apparent. I’ve never thought about that before.
“I don’t know,” is the best I can come up with. Then I change the topic back to school things.
To call it school is a bit of a stretch. The Sisters and I meet in a wide alley with some street children. We tried to start with basic language skills, but these kids are too practical for that. The teaching program I used is too rigid for them. The Children want information they can apply right away. So we just teach them what they want to learn or what we think might interest them: their legal rights if they get arrested. The going price for a part on the legitimate market. How to get a free rail pass or medic check. The way to count change and write numbers. The sort of thing a street child can use right now or use to get ahead. It seems to be working. They seem to like it more and are bringing others with them if they come.
The rhymes are the biggest obstacle to our efforts. When I was on the street I couldn’t go a day without one of them saving my life or helping me get by. All the street kids are going through the same sort of life that I had. Now an ‘Oldie Rat’ like me is asking them to forget what some of the rhymes say or even go against them? Sometimes, I hate myself, thinking it might get them hurt or killed.
Mom Super was right about needing my unique gifts too. Street slang is thick and almost incomprehensible to most of the Sisters. Sometimes I’m translating both directions. I’ve started teaching it to the more adventurous Sisters, but it’s slow and frustrating.
I don’t know how it happened, but one evening while working with a new child, teaching him about staying clean, I look up and all the other Sisters have left. We all tend to come as a group and leave as the day goes on. I’m one of the last most days, but I’ve never been alone. I didn’ know why bu’ that got me scared some.
When the lesson was finally done, I put the hood up on my coat and begin walking to the rail station. I’ve got this uneasy feeling, and I start to walk more quickly. I hear a sudden burst of noise to my left and turn my head to look at it, but the hood blocks my view. The verge of panic comes, and I move even faster. The train is there but as I approach the doors close and it pulls away. The next won’t be for 20 minutes.
I gasp for breath as I lean against the ticket kiosk.
What the hell? What am I afraid of? Walking around alone? My mind is just clear enough now to be angry at myself. At least one Street child must have seen my panic and will ask about it next week. Maybe it will even scare some away for a while. Am I really this stupid?
That thought carries me through the next few minutes. The sun is setting, but I try to relax as I wait.
Then someone walks up to me.
“Oh, you ‘lone, Sister? Ain’ i’ late?” the man says.
Strangers don’t just walk up to you in Bazaar Street.
“Or ‘hapse you ain’ Sister. Null tha’. is i’ rat. Yeah. Gear rat. Street rat eve’.” The man had taken another few steps towards me and stopped again when I backed away.
What did he say? All the panic of minutes ago shoots back into my mind and stiffens my spine. I don’ eve’ got a slag.
I turn to look at the man for the first time. He’s rough and poor looking, but better dressed than I’d expected. He is shaved but unremarkable. I see the shadow of a face I remember well.
Boss Dirk.
“Ya remember me? Got. I remember you, Rat. I remember that you owe me.”
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Hello everyone,
Last week the Public Test Universe opened to welcome First Wave testers as well as Concierge backers and Subscribers. New ships, grouping mechanics and the first iteration of mining could be tested, and according to some explosive clips out there, it seems you guys had a blast!
Now with the PTU being open for all testers since last night, this is the final phase before we can welcome Alpha 3.2 to live. So keep hitting our test servers, let us know in the Issue Council when you encounter bugs, and leave a reply in the feedback forum if you want to share your thoughts on a specific item or feature.
Check out last week’s Reverse the Verse for the latest about grouping mechanics, and remember to #MineResponsibly. Read the 3.2 PTU patch notes to see how mining works and watch the excellent mining tutorials that are out there, before jeopardizing your Prospector.
Lastly, let me direct your attention to this week’s Community MVP, NarayanN7, who created an incredible 600i cinematic. If you’re in awe, inspired and want to put your own Origin Jumpworks 600i into the spotlight, your turn will come soon! With the upcoming launch of Alpha 3.2, the community team prepared a ’600i commercial video contest’, which we’ll be launching in the coming days. Keep an eye out for the Comm-Link!
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
Every week on Calling All Devs, designers, engineers and other developers from our five offices around the world answer backer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted on by YOU. This week, we address questions regarding weapon components, firing ranges and the differences between piracy and griefing. Watch the full episode here. As always: You can submit your questions for consideration in future episodes of Calling All Devs here.
Tuesday will be dedicated to bringing you one of the serialized fiction stories that appeared in Jump Point but were never available to all backers before. Be prepared and read up on part one here.
Thursday brings a new episode of Bugsmashers, as well as an exciting new Squadron 42 Project Update in the latest installment of Around the Verse.
Lastly, make sure to tune in on Friday for another episode of Reverse the Verse, broadcast LIVE on our Star Citizen Twitch channel. Stay tuned for further information about who our special guests will be, what time we’ll go live, and keep an eye on Spectrum for the Questions Thread!
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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Every week, we select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it in this section. The highlighted content creator will be awarded with an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
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NarayanN7 is taking us on a tour on board his 600i. The excellent camera work and music selection left everyone speechless. Well done!
Please join us in congratulating NarayanN7 for being this week’s MVP!
Check out the Origin 600i Cinematic on the community hub.
Ein neues Schiff des Weltraum-Onlinespiels Star Citizen hat die Community des MMORPGs EVE Online in helle Aufregung versetzt. Erinnert das Design doch stark an ein Raumschiff, das es auch in EVE Online gibt. Es gibt sogar Vorwürfe, dass das Design…
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Hello everyone,
Last week we showed a new PU Trailer at the PC Gaming show at E3, celebrated First Contact Day, and revealed the Drake Vulture. If you’re looking for more information on the Vulture, head over to spectrum, ask your questions, and upvote your favorites for our upcoming Q&A.
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
Every week on Calling All Devs, designers, engineers and other developers from our five offices around the world answer backer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted on by YOU. On today’s episode, we address questions regarding renting ships in-game and how insurance timers will work. You can watch the full episode here.
Every third Tuesday, we post a News Update feature, providing new fictional insight on the Star Citizen universe, and this week is no different. Look out for this, and check out previously released lore posts here.
Thursday will see an all-new episode of Around the Verse, with a Star Citizen PU update, a look at player grouping systems, and an all new episode of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this time focusing on the Caliban system.
Lastly, on Friday, Content Manager Jared Huckaby will sit down with our developers to recap Around the Verse and discuss improvements to the player group experience in more detail. Keep an eye out in the General section of Spectrum for the question gathering post and then tune in on Twitch.tv/StarCitizen at 12pm PDT/7pm UTC for Reverse the Verse LIVE.
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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Through the transition of how we air Around the Verse and Reverse the Verse, our MVP program had taken a bit of a hiatus. Fear not though as I’m excited to announce that it’s back! Every week, we’ll select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it in this section. The highlighted content creator will be awarded with an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
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Tessien has taken a series of screenshots in the Star Citizen universe in 4k that definitely caught our eye. For that reason, Tessien is this week’s MVP!
Check out more of Tessien’s images on the community hub.
This week we take a look at two more weapons hitting the Persistent Universe in 3.2, get a Star Citizen project update, and finally find out what Drake Interplanetary has been plotting.
Auf der E3 war Star Citizen kein großes Thema, dennoch wurde ein neuer Trailer gezeigt mit frischen Gameplay-Szenen aus dem kommenden Weltraum-MMO. Zu sehen sind majestätische Raumstationen, verschiedene Planeten und sowohl Szenen in Raumschiffen aus…
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Hello everyone,
Last week the team published the Monthly Studio Report for May, bringing you insight into what all of our studios have been working on. Check it out if you haven’t yet to get yourself up to speed on new systems, ships and features for 3.2 and beyond.
Friday saw the Roadmap updated, where Network Bind Culling and FPS Combat AI moved from the 3.2 column to 3.3, meaning they’ll be added to the game with our Q3 Update. Check our latest Reverse the Verse show, available on YouTube, where Jared and Tyler explain why the decision was made to defer those aspects of 3.2 to 3.3.
This week marks the end of the Hercules promotion. There’s almost nothing this family of ships hasn’t faced, and no situation they can’t handle. The Crusader Industries Hercules Starlifter will be available in the pledge store until Wednesday, June 13 at 11:59pm PDT.
Also, if you’ve got 3 minutes spare, make sure to head over to Spectrum and fill out the Pledge Store Interest Survey, hosted by Turbulent. It only takes 180 seconds and is your chance to have your voice heard, and help make the store a better, and more comprehensive experience. Thank you in advance!
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
Every week, designers, engineers and other developers from our five offices around the world answer backer questions submitted on Spectrum and voted on by YOU. Don’t forget you can submit your questions for consideration each and every week here.
On Tuesday, the Lore Team will publish their weekly blog post. If you missed a post in the past, you can read up on all previously released lore posts here.
Thursday will see an all-new episode of Around the Verse, with a PU update and the Weapons Special Pt. II – double the fun with a double barrel sniper! Also: Citizens have reported transmission interruptions from Drake Interplanetary with the date 2018.06.14 on them. Perhaps they have something new to share on this week’s installment of Ship Shape?!
On Friday, Jared sits down with members of Drake’s design team to discuss the previous day’s reveal. We know how citizens can devour every… scrap… of information when it comes to these new additions to Star Citizen. Keep an eye out in the General section of Spectrum for the question gathering post and then tune in on Twitch.tv/StarCitizen at 9am PDT/4pm UTC for a special Reverse the Verse LIVE.
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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
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Terada takes a Razor for a spin. And another one. And another one. And another one.
Enjoy this stunning video and turn up the volume because this Razor LX quartet doesn’t stop at the setting sun.
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NarayanN7 won an Intel® Optane™900P SSD in one of our screenshot contests last month, redeemed the Sabre Raven code and started rolling. 7 pages of script and 27 hours of filming later, we can marvel at the ambitious project he called “The Chase.”
Welcome to Cloud Imperium Games’ Monthly Studio Report for May, bringing you insight into what all of our studios have been working on. This month, the team made updates to Alpha 3.1, and pushed forward on new systems, ships, and features for Alpha 3.2 and beyond. Work also progressed on various aspects of Squadron 42. With that said, let’s dig into the details.
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LOS ANGELES
VEHICLE FEATURES
The Vehicle Features Team’s primary focus this month was working on scanning for the mining feature and making improvements to turrets, both of which will appear in the Alpha 3.2 release. Regarding scanning, the team worked closely with VFX, UI, and other teams to develop the pinging, scanning, and blob work needed for the launch of this feature.
The team also completed the implementation of cameras on remote turrets that can be controlled by players, allowing them to focus their turret target on a ship to see its relevant status.
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The team, consisting of Vehicle Art, Systems Design, and Tech Art, developed vehicles for both Alpha 3.2 and subsequent releases. On the art side, the Anvil Hurricane completed its flight prep pass and has been handed off to the other vehicle disciplines for the 3.2 release. The Art Team has also wrapped up their pass on the Consolidated Outland Mustang Alpha and has begun working on its variants.
Work was also done on the greybox set-up for the Consolidated Outland Mustang Alpha, the RSI Constellation Phoenix, and the Anvil F8 Lightning.
Meanwhile, the Tech Art Team worked on their final flight prep passes, which included damage and landing gear compression on the Anvil Hurricane and the rest of the 3.2 ships: the Aegis Avenger, Aegis Eclipse, Origin 600i, and Vanduul Blade. Additionally, the team took a Tech Art pass in support of the MISC Prospector for the mining feature.
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GAMEPLAY FEATURES
The Gameplay Features Team is working with the Spectrum and Backend teams to sync to the new Spectrum architecture, which will allow players to view and manage their contacts in the mobiGlas Comms app. The team is placing the chat feature directly into the mobiGlas, so players can communicate using both the visor chat and the mobiGlas Comms app. In addition to this, Group creation, destruction, rules, and interaction are now being implemented and improved as the team works alongside Turbulent. The ability to invite contacts to groups by selecting them in interaction mode is being added, as is identifying contacts by name in your visor.
NARRATIVE
A wide variety of tasks kept the Narrative Team busy in May. The month kicked off with a release of a Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy segment focused on the Oso System. They also recorded episodes for several upcoming systems. They wrote and released three new lore pieces, including part one of the Subscriber exclusive short story Hostile Negotiations. May’s issue of Jump Point focused on the Crusader Hercules Starlifter, game optimization, a Galactapedia entry on whiskey, and more. Two older Jump Point features also received wide release on the site, including the tragic tale of the Lost Squad and part one of the serialized story The Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The Squadron 42 Team spent part of the month working with Production to organize work on the remaining narrative tasks and started tackling a handful of set dressing documents. These kickoff documents focus on specific areas of the game and list ideas for props that could be used to sell particular story moments.
The team also wrote procedural text for new PU mission types. They drilled down into the specifics of some upcoming locations, which included creating posters to be plastered around Lorville and other locations. They worked with other departments to organize and streamline game documentation essential to inter-office communication, and collaborated with the Community Team on Ciera Brun’s Journal of a Volunteer, which was featured on the Hercules Starlifter sales page.
CHARACTERS
The Character Art Team showcased their work on the Legacy Armor sets for both the Outlaws and Marines in an episode of Around the Verse (both of which will appear in Alpha 3.2).
A considerable amount of effort was put into multiple Squadron 42 characters along with new weapon concepts. The upcoming Mission Givers for PU outfits have made tremendous progress, as have the clothing collections for both Olisar and Hurston. The updated flight suit continues to be developed, and R&D on the pipeline for delivering character heads (including realistic hair for all characters) also received attention. And, as always, bugs were fixed for the Alpha 3.2 release.
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AUSTIN
DESIGN
The team put together features and fixes for Alpha 3.2 and pushed ahead on content for future releases. They refined the recipe system to prepare it for future implementation – early iterations will be simple, but will form the basis of a more complex system that allows players to get into the nuts and bolts of what makes items in the ‘verse tick.
Quantum Linking progressed nicely. Soon it will be synced with the Group System to allow for various interactions between local players and those in a party. Once done, groups can easily Quantum Jump to a shared destination together.
Spline jumps were added, which allow players to travel from one side of a celestial body to another. The team can adjust the parameters to ensure a smooth experience while still allowing for future iterations and tweaks by the Design Team.
With the animations of Battaglia and Klim added, focus has shifted to a pair of new mission givers. The team is also building out the Bartender character, with the goal of instilling a level of life and dynamic activity fitting of a real, hard-working mixologist.
BACKEND SERVICES
Feature creation and bug smashing kept Server Engineering busy in May. With the Persistence Cache being broken up and streamlined, several new features and services were created. Data Cache, Badge Service, GEID Broker, and Character Management Service were previously part of a larger Persistence Cache. They were broken out to allow for higher efficiency and scalability of the Backend Services, ensuring they work within the improved and more efficient Diffusion Service Architecture. The Generic Cache service can now be used by any other service to store data and contain persistence. The Persistence Item Cache grants game items for online players, and will organize and manage the associations of items between each other and provide optimized queries.
The team and Turbulent continue to modify the Gateway Service to support the bridge to Spectrum. This work ensures that Spectrum and Services won’t have trouble when Spectrum becomes integrated into the game. Work was also completed on creating a link from CMake generated services into WAF. Now, developers don’t need CMake to use services and can automate the process of building services using WAF for other developers to quickly integrate with their workflow.
ANIMATION
The PU Animation Team finished their previous set of Mission Givers and NPCs and handed them over to Design for implementation. A new set of Mission Givers is now being worked on, and research was done on the Bartender’s animations to bring as much life to this NPC as possible. They also collaborated with other teams to get the Vanduul fully functional and ready for motion capture.
The Ship Animation Team continued adding a modular system for entering and exiting seats and turrets. By breaking up the existing animations into sequences, the character can use any of the enter/exit templates to interact with any cockpit type. For example, there can now be an animation that uses the Aegis Gladius enter animation, but then has the player grab a dual-stick control scheme. Previously, the team was limited to only using the Gladius enter animation for cockpits that used one specific configuration. They can now use thousands of different combinations, granting more flexibility when creating new ships.
The Ship Animation Team focused on completing the new ships for the 3.2 release. They created new animations for the Origin 600i and the refactored Aegis Avenger, as well as the Aegis Eclipse, Anvil Hurricane, and the Vanduul Blade. Plus, they’ve been fixing various bugs for the 3.2 release. They’re very excited about the improvements made to the ship pipeline and are looking forward to the opportunities that it provides.
ART
Work continues with high polygon and flight-prep modeling of the Constellation Phoenix. In the last few weeks, the team focused on the exterior of the ship, getting it fully fleshed out and finishing the damage setup and LODs. They have also been getting the Constellation Emerald setup and modeled. Constellation variants share most of their parts with each other, but to accommodate the Emerald’s paint job, UV revisions of the original Constellation were required. Once the exterior is done, they will return to the interior to finish various parts such as the floor, guest quarters, and master bedrooms (and the all-important hot tub!).
The high poly and detail modeling phase is complete on the F8 Lightning, and the team have moved on to getting it flight-prep ready. The internal damage has been completed and work on LODs are next. Then they will concentrate on the last polish and efficiency pass before creating marketing material for the ship reveal.
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OPERATIONS
On the Publishing side, QA wrapped up the last of the 3.1 incremental patches by testing fixes and changes to IFCS. In addition, they tested the new Launcher updates and monitored both PTU and Live to report any new issues to the devs.
After the devs wrapped up work on 3.1, QA focused on updating test documentation and processes in preparation for 3.2, continued verifying bug fixes, tested new tool updates, and trained new hires. As the month progressed, more 3.2 features came online for QA testing. These features included Quantum Travel improvements, new ship testing, Item Kiosk shopping, PMA/VMA improvements, and ship & weapon Power Allocation.
Leadership worked to better incorporate processes into the new development cycle. This includes dedicating testers to specific feature teams and having them create documentation and test cases. They have also been looking at new software to make testing more efficient as the game grows exponentially.
DevOps continued their work on the feature stream process and staging build system. Feature streams are a subset of the main development branches that allow the devs to maintain a tighter focus on specific features without their work interfering with others. DevOps was happy with the rollout, but it hasn’t been easy. The build system has grown so complex that minor updates and adjustments are risky, which is why they’re working closely with the Corp Tech team in Austin on a ‘staging’ build. This new environment will allow engineers to test changes in a safe location rather than apply them directly into the production environment.
The DevOps Publishing Team monitored the live service for stability and performance indicators, providing a constant flow of data to the dev teams. They also prepped the Evocoti and PTU servers for the next publishing cycle (which is right around the corner). The team provisioned more server capacity for all regions in anticipation of a very popular feature publish.
The Player Relations Team helped wrap up 3.1.4 this month, and have already started early preparations for 3.2 testing with the Evocati. The 3.1 publishes were the first of the quarterly testing cycle. It was a tremendous learning experience that will be used during further cycles.
The team was also proud to roll out over 80 articles to the new Knowledge Base – there have already been 25,000 visits in its first month. Players should check it out, as the team continues to add new ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications.
As always, Player Relations would like to remind and encourage everyone to use the Issue Council to help triage and rate bugs and functionality. The team uses this data to prioritize future updates. Plus, participation makes you eligible for earlier PTU waves.
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WILMSLOW & DERBY
ENGINEERING
The Actor Teams have been carrying on with the ‘pickup-and-carry’ work, now concentrating on reducing the animations required for the different combinations of item sizes, grip types, and player states. They did a rough calculation of all these combinations and it came out at roughly 1700 animations. However, with the sensible authoring of assets, combining animations in blend spaces, and layering up, the team should be able to get this down to under 100.
They’ve also been developing new animation time-warping technology using player knockdowns as their test case. The problem with something like a knockdown is that the time the character spends in the air varies based on the force and environment. Normally, you would play a looping animation, but this can look unnatural. This new method calculates the airtime and stretches a single animation to fill it. Used sparingly, it produces much better results, and the technique can also be used on other features like jumping.
The Social AI Team has got a test setup of a ‘usable’ now fully working with the new channels in Subsumption. A ‘use channel’ describes what you can do in a particular ‘usable’ – examples could be eat, drink, mend, and so on. This is a great milestone as the Subsumption setup simplifies how the designers create ‘usables’, whilst at the same time giving them much more flexibility.
The Vehicle Team has implemented the ability to under and overpower ship components, and hooked it into the vehicle’s MFD UI. For example, when you underpower your weapons, they fire slower or the projectiles have less energy. Similarly, your shields will be more effective if they have more power.
The Tools Team has been working on a new check-in request tool. As they get closer to a release, they lock down what does and what doesn’t go into the build to improve stability and reduce the risk of new bugs appearing. To help, they’ve been developing a new tool that can track all change requests and give a nice interface for the leads to be able to approve or reject changes. With the number of requests going into a build every day, the overhead of managing them was becoming very large. The hope is this new process will reduce the workload on the teams and production, as well as giving better visibility on what is and isn’t approved.
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The ships due for 3.2 have really come along with all the final polish and lighting work that’s gone into them this month. The Vanduul Blade has undergone a rework; mainly around the wings so that it can better accommodate weapons after it was decided the underslung position looked too ‘human’ and needed to be more aligned with the Vanduul aesthetic. It’s also had some extensive work done to the landing gear – previously the ship just rested on the wing tips, but with this change, the wing tips now deploy landing gear to accommodate compression under the weight of the ship. The team has continued to optimize the ship and make sure everything is done so they can switch focus to promo shots and trailers.
AUDIO
On the Audio Code side, the preload manager system was optimized to work asynchronously, so that the audio thread isn’t blocked when streaming audio assets. ‘Asynchronous caching’ was also addressed, which keeps audio events in memory after the game has finished with them. Thanks to this work, assets don’t need to be reloaded from the disk each time they’re needed, which will improve overall performance.
As well as bug fixing, debug info was added to the aforementioned preload manager. The music system was improved with a feature to add a further randomized recombination of tracks. The Audio Propagation and Room systems were extended to enable cheaper pressure lookups and allow for room and object-based reverb. Weapons 2.0 audio tech was worked on further, as were the IFCS 2.0 audio set-up and multithreading optimization. Finally, on the code side, the ATL build process was ported over to WAAPI to enable more incremental audio building, improving iteration times for everyone in the team.
In Dialogue, new content was delivered for Alpha 3.2 via an improved dialogue pipeline. Characters now have their vocal output processed in real-time through communication devices, via porting the audio and any local secondary sound and transmitting it much as one would find in the real world.
In Sound Design, the Scalpel sniper rifle underwent further work and is ready for final review. The FPS weapon system is ripe for refactoring and some work was done to improve quality and simplify the system. They also delivered sound design for the Gemini F55 LMG, the Klaus & Werner Demeco LMG, and the Associated Science & Development Distortion Repeater.
The shopping and mining kiosks were polished to increase responsiveness and synchronization. The mining mechanisms have been worked on extensively and are now ready for further implementation and iteration, with work on the fracture and tractor beams for the mining arm receiving a lot of attention. Hangars had some extra improvement work, and ambiance for the Lorville trash biome was prototyped.
On the ships front, the Origin 600i, Aegis Eclipse, Esperia Blade, and the Anvil Hurricane all had sound added for their thrusters, moving parts, and interiors. The conversion to IFCS 2.0 created a big project to bring everything in line with the modifications to that upstream system. Development of the ship-wide audio concept also continued, separating maneuvering and ‘cockpit feedback’ sounds from the thruster burn sounds, and adding more directionality towards rotation sounds. Room tones that react to ship handling and damage states were also added to the Constellation as a proof of concept. The new physics objects system had assets created to put it through its paces, which will give more behavioral fidelity across the game.
In Music, the Vanduul and Xi’an themes were pushed forward for Squadron 42. For the Persistent Universe, new music was created for derelict ship exploration (small, medium and large).
UI
The UI Team primarily focused on feature work for the Item Kiosks, Mining, and QT Linking. The Item Kiosks wireframes were signed off and later implemented into Flash and hooked up on the code side. The team is now finalizing additional branding skins for the terminals alongside bug fixes on the code now that the QA Team have started testing it. The HUD design for mining was finalized and implemented too. The team is also working on a Kiosk terminal that allows players to sell the refined ore gained from mining. Finally, the QT Linking Flash work has been completed in the UK, with the code hookup for this being tackled by engineers in the LA studio.
In addition, work progressed on improving the UI Tech, with the relevant TDDs being written and a proof of concept being created for the building blocks system. Finally, the team supported the Art Team by providing a generic utilitarian branding sheet to be used within the upcoming Rest Stops among other areas.
ANIMATION
Animation tackled the implementation pass for the trained combat set of FPS AI combatants. This included enter and exits from cover as well as combat actions like peeks, reloads, blindfire, and reloads. A previs pass on the untrained combat set was also completed this month. The team took raw motion capture to compare it to the trained set, so combatants would feel distinct and stay true to their character.
The team also worked on improving the looting system and added assets to improve the general look and feel of picking up objects, boxes, and items in Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe. Work also continued on the weapon recoil improvements. As shown in the recent ATV, the team worked with design and code to develop the look and feel of all FPS weapons.
The team also made some important strides on the Vanduul animation, creating a behavior set to provide a visual guide on how they will move and operate in Squadron 42. Player locomotion sets have been updated to work with an entity-driven system to ensure that client and server animations are exactly the same. The team also made tweaks to some of the poses to allow for better blending between animations and minimize foot sliding.
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This month has seen a similar pattern to last, with the team supporting the ongoing Mining and Scanning sprints. The effects for both are coming along at a rapid pace, improving almost daily – as evidenced by the various WIP footage seen in recent weeks.
Ship VFX received plenty of attention in May, including the luxurious Origin 600i. Work continued on weapons VFX, with visual improvements to legacy ballistic guns, as well as general fix-ups required since the conversion to weapons 2.0 was completed by the Game Code and Systems Design Teams.
Collaboration with the Graphics Team also continued, with spline emitter tech coming along nicely. This continues to open up new ideas, and is likely to prove useful in unexpected areas, such as in Quantum Travel.
GRAPHICS
The Graphics Team worked on multiple features this month, the main focus being mining, which required the expansion of the ship damage-map system to work on new types of assets. It also required completely new visuals to show the cracking and heating of rocks. This work also allowed the team to diagnose and fix some long-standing bugs that should lead to improved texture details.
The multi-resolution gas cloud work is complete, making it possible to combine several gas clouds together at different resolutions and scales. Memory, however, is still the limiting factor, so the team compressed the density fields to just 8 bits per voxel (down from 32 bits). However, the shadowing data is still too large and can’t be compressed as easily. Therefore, research has started on various forms of deep shadow maps that work in 2.5D to try and avoid the memory and performance issues associated with full 3D lighting data.
The foundations of the new multilayer shader system are finished and focus has shifted to adding visual features to the shaders. The first being a new clear coat shading model to achieve convincing paint and anodized metals – both important for high-tech materials. The next is a texture mode called height-variance blending which allows for realistic blending of natural materials (e.g. rock/sand/grass). It supports per-pixel-control of the blend and crucially works at any distance with no aliasing, which is obviously critical with the scale of the game.
Some other tasks included optimizations to the rendering in the editor, a holographic effect for use within Squadron 42, and improved temporal anti-aliasing stability.
ENVIRONMENT ART
The Environment Art Team started the final pass of the Common Element Utilitarian Hangars. The most critical aspect of this was the setup of the master material to give the artists a fully functional set of textures to pull from when taking the assets to final quality. Each piece used in the hangars will now go through its final art pass where, amongst other things, it will have its finished UVs, textures, custom normals, LODs, and physics proxies. There are lots of assets to get up to final quality, but when complete, the hangars will be considered finished from an Environment Art perspective.
Alongside this, work has been done to get future locations ready for production when the bulk of the Environment Team moves onto them later in the year.
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The QA Team continued daily maintenance of their numerous checklists as well as Subsumption, Editor, and Page Heap regression. Additionally, they took some time to be trained by the Engine Team to better understand how to interpret a callstack, which will ultimately lead to quicker and more reliable bug assignments.
A new quick smoke checklist for the client was setup to provide the Design Team with an overview for specific systems in the Persistent Universe, such as AI turrets and their functionality. With the new checklist in place, when asked for the current state of a system worked on exclusively in the DE office, QA will be able to provide information much faster.
QA has also been working closely with the Cinematics Team to provide specifically requested support and set up test levels for easier reproduction and a quicker turnaround. Testing on a potential Test Case Management Software candidate was also started to determine if this new software would allow QA to more efficiently manage and track our test cases and reports.
SYSTEM DESIGN
The team added mechanics for NPCs to use grenades to flush their opponents out of cover if they remain stationary for too long. Also, more work was done on improving the way the NPCs react to incoming grenades – they now use a navmesh to determine where they can safely escape to. Combat ships now know how to fight as proper gunships and not just fighters. For example, if a ship with numerous turrets engages you, it may fly around while its turrets track you down, as opposed to flying directly at you.
Regarding Vanduul combat, a lot of work was done to previz the way they fight. The emphasis was to make them as different from Humans as possible, so players have a completely different experience when fighting the Vanduul. The team is happy with the current results and are approaching full production for the Vanduul enemies. General population NPCs are also being experimented with as the team tests small, almost cinematic vignettes that the player can experience as they walk around major landing zones. Mining is also progressing as it approaches the bug fixing and polishing phase.
ENVIRONMENT ART
The Environment Art Team continued their push on Hurston, and the second group of ecosystems had their first pass completed. One of the newest ecosystems is the Wasteland Biome, which was first shown during CitizenCon 2017 and will cover a large part of the surface of Hurston. The team took the time to properly update the Wasteland biome to take advantage of the newest planet tech completed this year. The second biome that received proper attention this month was the Strip Mining ecosystem, which too can be found around Hurston. Lorville is also moving forward, with the artists spending their time focusing on the various areas the player will be able to visit, refining the shapes and architecture, adding materials, lights, and assets to further bring these areas to life.
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TECH ART
The Tech Art Team continued to improve the deformation algorithms and asset pipeline of the v2 character customization system. Since the underlying tech for facial/head customization is working as intended now, the focus has shifted towards polishing the corresponding assets (head morph targets, head attachments such as hair and beards, etc.). R&D work on the technical foundations for body customization of both male and female characters has begun. Besides developing suitable deformation methods, the team also needs to determine what range of body shapes they can support without introducing clipping artifacts, and which body types they want to support from an artistic perspective. Time was also spent fixing existing bugs and improving the usability of the internal character editor, Character Tool.
For FPS weapons, they supported the Gemini Light Machine Gun, which is now ready for its final review and sign off.
They also completed Tech Animation work, such as implementing multiple animations into Mannequin for the Cinematics Team, improving the Playblast Tool to speed up reviewing, and improving the binder process to map animations from MotionBuilder onto our Maya rig.
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They also completed Tech Animation work, such as implementing multiple animations into Mannequin for the Cinematics Team, improved the Playblast Tool to speed up the process of creating playblasts for reviewing purposes, and worked on improving the binder process to map animations from MotionBuilder onto our Maya rig.
AI
The AI Team worked on adjusting the AI components with the new API to allow a safer construction in different threads – it’s a fundamental step towards fully achieving Object Container Streaming. The Actor code has always been very dependent on Lua (it’s not easy to make a thread safe with good performance), so all the AI components are now being moved to either be fully C++ or Dataforge components. They also worked on a few core functionalities for Subsumption. Subsumption Missions can now define Event Callbacks: missions can receive and send Subsumption events and logic can be written to be executed in association with specific events as described by designers. This functionality is part of the overall effort to support designers in creating more modular missions, and enforce correct communication between modules that can preserve thread safety and avoid a ‘spaghetti code-like’ logic. They also extended the functionality of supporting multiple Mission Objectives for each Mission module. They continued work on improving the way ‘usables’ are defined and executed: designers can now create behavior logic associated with the different use channels of each usable type. For example, assuming there is a usable bed that might expose the following use channels: ‘Sleep’, ‘Rest’, ‘WatchTV’, ‘SitOnBed’. When an NPC uses a ‘use channel’, it will effectively use some logic written by the designers in a similar way to Subsumption functions: this allows a more modular definition of the actions allowed when interacting with a usable maintaining the context of the behavior that is currently running.
Human combat is progressing with improvements in the grenade handling during combat, so fighters can now react to incoming grenades and try to duck to reduce the damage received by explosions. Vanduul AI progress is also continuing along in the prototype phase. For Ship AI, take-offs and landings have gone through a small refactor to allow AI behaviors to utilize designer placed splines to be more robust and deliver a more cinematic effect. Work was also completed on improving the validation of the navmesh during spawning: this allows designers to easily request spawning of characters in reachable areas where there are multiple navmeshes present.
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The Lighting and Enviroment teams have been working closely to add new whitebox-level lighting to the Lorville landing zone. The goal is to start blocking in a basic mood and ensure the entire location is lit consistently without areas that are unnaturally bright/dark while maintaining visibility along the critical player path. Alongside this, they’ve been continuing work with the Rest Stop’s modular lighting. They also recently received some updated holo-advertising assets from the Props Team in the UK and started to explore how these can drastically influence the lighting and mood wherever they are placed.
As the Hangars common element starts to move into the final art stage, they’ve been experimenting with some variations of lighting for each module, which have similar benefits and drawbacks to the Rest Stops modular system. Each module must be somewhat independently lit so that it looks consistent in every configuration. They also built a new test environment for the Character Team where they can balance skin and armor assets in a completely neutral lighting scene for greater consistency across our wide range of characters.
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WEAPONS
The Weapons Team completed a full polish of the Gemini F55 Light Machine Gun, Klaus & Werner Demeco LMG, and Kastak Arms’ Scalpel sniper rifle in preparation for the 3.2 release.
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LEVEL DESIGN
The PU Level Design team spent a large amount of time working on flagship landing zones, pushing the ways in which they use procedural technology for layouts. They’re currently looking into customizing the various entry points into Lorville, as well as adding content for the immediate areas around the city. Time was spent revisiting Area18 to revamp and fully integrate it into the universe, taking advantage of the new procedural tools in place.
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CINEMATICS
The Cinematics Team worked with the Level Designers on newly created whitebox levels to implement scenes that had not yet been featured in the game. They were brought to an initial implementation stage called PreVis to give visibility on runtime length, coverage of space, as well as the environmental interaction each scene requires. The process is important so that scenes taking place on a traversal path from A to B feel properly paced when level designers lay down paths. It also gives everyone working on a level an early preview of the narrative in that specific level. Since Squadron 42 is a narrative-heavy game, getting that in as early as possible helps ensure everything will work as intended.
The Cinematic Animators have been doing R&D on a sophisticated bit of performance capture manipulation called ‘feather blending’. This technique allows drastic changes to performance capture if needed, so animators can decide from which bone to ‘feather in’ the original performance capture on top of. In addition, they can add an additional animation of him holding his pilot helmet in his left hand at his hip and dial in a certain LookAt-range, so he can look at the player. In total, that means combining 3-4 different separate clips of animation at any given time and blending them seamlessly for a convincing result. The team also went back to a level that has a large cinematic and started overhauling the planet setup and vistas to the latest workflow standards. That level also includes Squadron 42’s way of customizing your character, so work was completed on some assets that will be at the core of that process.
ENGINE
The Engine Team generally work on several areas at the same time and this month was no exception. One long term task that was completed was the refactoring of the Entity Component Scheduler. The system is responsible for managing the ‘update frequency’ of the game logic. As more and more features were added over time, its design degenerated, resulting in a hard to use system. With the refactoring complete, each aspect of the scheduler is now orthogonal to each other, making the code easier to maintain and extend. They also decoupled the ‘IN_RANGE’ and ‘IS_VISIBLE’ events from their component updates, which allows components to receive and react to those events without having their update logic depend on them. More features are planned to be added to the scheduler over time.
The team also spent time improving the threading system. For the background job manager, they added a Fiber-based system. As the system was used more and more for Object Container Streaming, they took the time to clean up all out-threading primitives. Now all those are Fiber-aware, allowing them to schedule another job when a background job is blocked and thus a more efficient resource usage. In the same code area, they adjusted the scheduler to not block on submission to improve runtime performance by preventing the main thread stalling when submitting numerous jobs simultaneously. They also gave some focus to Object Container Streaming, making the 3DEngine loading code thread safe, allowing us to load large parts of our game world in the background. They made several improvements to the shader build pipeline and infrastructure code, started work on the vertex animation processing refactor and optimization (moving it to the GPU), and continued work on the telemetry system, amongst numerous other things.
ENGINE TOOLS
The Engine Tools Team continued working on improving the general game editor stability and usability. New tools were added for designers to improve their workflows, including a new console implementation to easier parse the engine/game logging for warnings and errors, also adding better support for the massive amount of console variables and commands they currently have. Console variables and commands can now be filtered and saved out as favorites and shared between designers.
On top of that, a tool called the Window Outliner was added to make it easier for designers to setup, save, and share their favorite toolsets. Another tool, called the Universe Outliner, was added to better scale with the amount of content inside the universe, which replaces the entity outliner from Lumberyard, including additional information for Subsumption. The level layer handling was also replaced by the Layer Outliner, again for scalability and workflow improvement reasons.
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BUILD ENGINEERING
Flexibility was added for the engineers to produce QATR test builds, either by building their code changes against major builds already distributed to the company, or against their own time. This was an engineer request as it gives them more freedom when building changes and handing off for QA verification. A bug in incremental linking was fixed which allowed us to reduce our output PDB file size by almost 50%, taking it down from 2.5GB for debugging StarCitizen.exe to 1.25Gb. They put finishing touches on unifying the DevOps codebases that are used by TryBuild and the main build system, Transformer, so that there can be one umbrella that covers the continuous integration monitoring. This codebase unification also leverages the tech in the Transformer main build system, which has a more straightforward layout in designing both tasks and jobs.
VFX
The VFX Team worked closely with the Graphics Programmers, Gameplay Programmers, Designers, and Environment Artists on the resource mining feature to create an entire suite of new effects. There’s a primary mining beam which heats up and fractures the rock. There are also effects that play on the surface of the rock to show it being cracked apart. After the rock is destroyed, an explosion effect is parameterized based on how well you did; if you add too much power, you get a much larger explosion than a successful operation. After you break the rock, a secondary extraction mode uses a tractor beam to collect the minerals into your cargo hold.
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PLATFORM: TURBULENT
The team at Turbulent made some massive leaps in development for group services with several Spectrum releases to PTU, and provided platform support for the Community Team.
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On May 24th a new release of Spectrum hit the PTU. This very early patch includes a ‘Friends’ implementation, allowing you to send requests and manage your contacts. Using this early rudimentary version, the team discovered functionality bugs and system limitations, and has been refactoring code to optimize the experience.
Currently, the Spectrum Team is in sprint 4 of 4, which is all about the notifications system. The notifications system will provide the necessary alerts for receiving and sending friends requests. This is the last missing piece to get the friends system feature complete. Calling all Spectrocati, expect a full release on PTU within the month.
RSI PLATFORM
On May 25th, a new European Union Law came into effect, protecting the use of personal data. Turbulent made substantial changes on the backend side to create new tools, ensuring that CIG was compliant with the new rules that came into effect.
The Backend Team also produced new tools for the roadmap. A new Import Console has been created on the backend so that production leads can now easily import all their Jira tasks without any requirements from the Platform Team. This has made the review and publishing of the Roadmap faster and much more efficient.
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Turbulent supported the Starlifter launch, designing the page, and publishing the posts from Ciera Brun and Operation Sword of Hope. They really enjoyed working on this project as it included an exciting twist, and reading all of the community stories made it all more rewarding.
Turbulent’s Front-End and Design Teams have been working on building a page to host the FanKit. The Fankit is still being built, and will include a series of wallpapers, logos, possible 3D models, and audio. It will be an excellent tool for our community to build their personal fan projects, not to mention give out some exclusive items.
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The team launched the Knowledge Base on May 10th, and the Player Relations Team has currently built over 82 articles with FAQs, known issues in patch releases, and many other self-help articles. Based on page views since release, the team already knows that the Knowledge Base has had a positive impact on the community, which will continue as the number of articles increases. Last week when RSI Platform unexpectedly experienced server downtime, the Knowledge Base jumped into action to get a post out and inform the community.
They also released a new series of Contact Us forms that will help optimize and prioritize requests. Ultimately, this will help Player Relations react faster to urgent matters.
GROUP SERVICES
Turbulent has been asked to participate in the build of game code for the Groups services, and the Backend Team has been working furiously to build it. The team has been concentrating on an API service to setup group invitations system and the concept of leadership within a group.
The two releases of the Groups service were completed last month, which included all the necessary calls for the invitations. The system is being implemented and tested by US gameplay teams. The next iterations of the service release will include a call for group leadership.
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Taking into account player feedback and constructive input during Evocati and PTU phases, the Community Team supported a successful publish of Alpha 3.1.4 to the Persistent Universe, with improvements to Gravlev, flight controls, and more.
The public unveiling of the Crusader Industries Hercules was celebrated with a story contest where more than 500 contenders competed to win an M2 military variant. Make sure to check out all the Hercules stories, available to read on Spectrum, which feature the ship in everything from cargo runs to epic space battles.
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The team ran several screenshot contests, in concert with an Intel Streamer Promotion, giving away three Intel® Optane™900P SSDs. If you haven’t seen them already, head over to Spectrum now and check out the beautiful entries depicting the themes of space combat, scenic vistas, and lifestyle.
Also in May, another contest was held, aimed at helping new pilots jump into the verse by giving an overview of the Star Marine and Arena Commander game modes. In this contest, content creators had the chance to win game packages and leave their mark on the Star Citizen website as the winning entries will be added to the How To Play section.
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Subscribers received limited edition finishes for their Devastator shotguns this month, continuing a series of weapon finishes exclusive to subscribers and commemorating the Imperial Cartography Center.
The Community Team is excited to announce a direct and organized process for creators to invite official CIG representatives to their podcasts, videos, streams, and talk shows, as the Invite a Developer form is now live and integrated into the ticket system. Check out the FAQ to find out more.
And don’t forget: on October 10th, the entire CIG team will celebrate current and future developments of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 at the Long Center in Austin, Texas. The first wave of CitizenCon tickets is gone, but stay tuned in the coming months for further details and more chances to get tickets.
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Hello everyone,
I hope you all had a stellar weekend. The team has been hard at work and focused on the remaining tasks at hand in preparation for the release of Alpha 3.2. We’re just as eager as all of you to get this one out and explore the new content it brings.
Are you the competitive type? Maybe you want to find a way to immortalize yourself within the ‘Verse? If so, what you read next is a solid recipe for hype. The Community team has been quietly planning a wide variety of activities for you all to participate in throughout the year and into next, all coupled with some sweet prizes. I am confident when I say that we’ve got some really exciting opportunities coming for you to leave your mark in the Star Citizen universe.
To reiterate last week’s message, CitizenCon 2948 tickets will be available again in the near future if you haven’t picked one up already. Make sure to follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our newsletter to find out when the next phase of ticket sales will be available.
With that, let’s see what’s going on this week:
Monday is another all-new episode of Calling All Devs, this time with questions about life support, updates to the Phoenix and Freelancer, and some sort of signal interrupti—
Tuesday will introduce another News Update feature, providing new fictional insight on the Star Citizen universe. As a reminder for the lore fanatics out there, you can see the 2018 lore schedule here.
Fast forward to Thursday, get ready for an all new episode of Around the Verse, this time focusing on a PU update, weapons, and another fresh segment of Bugsmashers!.
If ATV wasn’t enough for you, fear not. Thursday will also bring one of my favorite pieces of content we release: the Monthly Studio Update. Prepare your kettle and get ready for another information overload.
Lastly, make sure to tune in on Friday for another episode of Reverse the Verse, broadcast live on our Star Citizen Twitch channel. Stay tuned for further information about who our special guests will be, what time we’ll go live, and keep an eye on Spectrum for the Questions Thread!
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We are constantly amazed by the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it’s fan art, a cinematic, a YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Don’t forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for a chance at seeing it here!
Every week, 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 address questions on life support, updates to the Phoenix and Freelancer and some sort of signal interrupti—
You can submit your questions for consideration in future episodes of Calling All Devs here.
