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Big Bennys started from humble beginnings as a vending machine floating around Crusader, but you guys took him to places we never dreamed possible. To celebrate your efforts, and because the first batch of shirts flew off the shelves so fast, we’ve added additional stock and additional sizes of the long-awaited Big Benny’s t-shirt, available for pre-order now! Show your allegiance to Star Citizen’s most popular noodle vending machine with this dark grey tee featuring the Big Benny’s Logo! Fabric is 100% pre-shrunk cotton. Follow the care instructions on the shirt tag to keep your t-shirt looking its best!
*Subscribers may pre-order starting today, July 29th and your orders come with a Big Bennys patch. Additional stock will open to all backers on Monday at 12 noon PST.
Price includes worldwide shipping. This is a pre-order; estimated ship date is October 2016.
ATV SEASON 3: NEW SHOW! NEW TIME! 1500 PST / 2200 UTC!
This week, join our Los Angeles studio as we check in with the Studio Update, take a look at the flight-ready Reliant, and explore new clothing options coming to GrimHex Station.
Die neue Ausgabe ist da!Mit der Vollversion Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. Titelthema: Star Citizen - Wir haben Chris Roberts neugegründetes Frankfurter Studio Foundry 42 besucht und viele exklusive Eindrücke mitgenommen. Außerdem in dieser Ausgabe…
Richtig gelesen, ihr könnt euch im Universum von Star Citizen verewigen - eure Freunde werden neidisch sein! Einer der vielen Monde in der Spielwelt wird den Vor- oder Zunamen des Gewinners dieses Preisausschreibens tragen. Was ihr dafür tun müsst,…
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Start Transmission
Howdy, haulers! Thanks for settling in for another installment of Clean Shot. My name’s Craig Burton and today’s show is almost over capacity — a Hull-D sized load of information coming your way! Ready to do this, Kari Ann?
That’s what I like to see, a big thumbs up! Our illustrious associate producer Kari Ann is calling the shots today while Skinny’s off getting some much needed R&R. Honestly, Skinny didn’t even want to take a vacation. New components make him weak in the knees, so I told him someone needed to run a new top-of-the-line power plant from Lightning Power Ltd. through the wringer and give me a review. Don’t let Skinny know, but after years of working with him, I think I finally discovered a way to get him to take some vacation — convince him it’s work.
Enough about Skinny. Let’s get this show going with a special TroubleZone.
We’ll start in Indra. This Xi’An system sees more than its fair share of Human haulers looking to trade with the Xi’An and Banu there. Well, over the past few months, an organized operation has been targeting Humans traveling through the system. Since the offenses occurred in Xi’An space, it’s hard to confirm the specific details, but from what I’ve heard, it sounds like a pretty straightforward grab job.
Pilots are lured to a location by a distress beacon and then swarmed by ships telling them to dump their cargo or come under attack. Those who listen and give up their goods without much of a fuss are free to go, their ships a bit lighter but their lives still intact.
There are no exact numbers on how often this has happened, but a UEE envoy to Indra has begun negotiating with the Xi’An council there to bring Human ships under the protection of authorized, independent Xi’An forces operating in the system. But take that for what it is — a solution left in the hands of some bureaucrat. Until this gets sorted, I’d be extra careful when heading into Indra. Personally, I wouldn’t go alone if I could help it, and as much as it goes against my good Samaritan streak, I definitely wouldn’t leave the normal shipping lanes for any distress beacons.
Moving on to Charon. It’s been over two years since civil war broke out on Charon III, and there’s still no end in sight. Numerous attempts by the UEE to bring the states of Dellin and Acheron to the negotiating table have failed. And now with the Vanduul War drawing most of the government’s focus, attention has been diverted away from the conflict.
Here to update us on the situation is Xavier Yu of Empire’s Overlooked, a Terra-based nonprofit. He has an interesting new plan to help the people of Charon III, and is in need of some altruistic haulers to execute it. Thanks for joining me today, Xavier.
Xavier Yu: Thank you, Craig, and thanks for drawing attention to a situation that has gotten far too little attention of late.
Happy to help in whatever way I can. Before we dig into the nitty gritty, give us a quick update on what’s happening on Charon III.
Xavier Yu: Quite simply, the situation grows more dire each day. On the ground, the civil war has not only crippled the planet’s economy, but also made it extremely dangerous to deliver aid. To make matters worse, it’s become increasingly difficult for us and other organizations to raise the money and supplies needed to help. That’s part of the reason we started searching for a new way to make a difference.
A few years back, when this ugly mess began, I remember the show receiving a ton of comms from folks asking how they could help. We referred a good many people to your organization. Any idea what changed?
Xavier Yu: To be honest, the UEE entering into a war of its own has been the biggest issue we’ve faced. Vanduul attacks have brought out the best in people all across this Empire, but they also diverted a lot of public and private resources away from this civil war.
Also, in a broader sense, crisis fatigue definitely has been a factor. When a tragedy of this scale first makes news there’s an initial burst of people motivated to help. But the longer a problem persists, the harder it becomes to maintain interest in it. At a certain point, it stops being headline news. People forget about it or wonder if their help is making a difference. Meanwhile, new causes, also worthy, take center stage.
What do you tell donors wondering why they should help a world tearing itself apart rather than one affected by, let’s say, an unexpected natural disaster or the war with the Vanduul?
Xavier Yu: I tell them that we must separate the politics from the public. The politics between Dellin and Acheron are destroying Charon III, but it’s the general public that is suffering. Since the UEE government has no legal jurisdiction to direct the planet’s politics, we must focus on empowering the people of Charon III so they can do it themselves. That begins by helping its people achieve some degree of economic stability.
Currently, the main industry on Charon III is war. This is particularly true in Dellin, where for many, working for the military or a company producing instruments of war is the only way to earn a living wage. Our new initiative looks to break that cycle by purchasing goods directly from the people of Charon III. If people can earn a living making furniture, clothing, jewelry or whatever else, then they won’t be forced to work for the war machine.
Over these past few months, we’ve put the infrastructure in place to execute this plan. Now we need dedicated haulers willing to brave the dangerous circumstances to pick up these products from Charon III.
Let’s get specific here, so all the haulers listening fully understand what they’re in for.
Xavier Yu: Simply, there’s no guarantee you won’t come under attack when entering or leaving the planet’s atmosphere.
That’s just horrible. Aren’t ships broadcasting a humanitarian signal protected under UEE law?
Xavier Yu: Technically, yes, but the UEE Navy no longer has the presence in system to ensure this protection. After war was declared against the Vanduul, a majority of the UEE fleet keeping an eye on the conflict was reassigned to the Vanduul front.
Once they left, both governments accused each other of using humanitarian shipments to import various munitions. Now, anything that enters the planet’s atmosphere is considered fair game by both sides. Luckily, we at Empire Overlooked have trusted sources on the ground that can direct our ships to landing zones considered safe at that moment.
Sounds like this isn’t exactly a job for everyone.
Xavier Yu: Definitely not. It takes a person with a certain set of skills and the right kind of ship to be able to handle this assignment.
Let’s just hold it right there. Kari Ann’s giving me the signal that it’s time for us to take a break. On the other side, Xavier Yu will dig into the specifics on what kind of pilots he’s looking for. Then I’ll pass along my thoughts on whether the performance of J-Span’s Cryo-Star cooler is worth the price.
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Big Bennys started from humble beginnings as a vending machine floating around Crusader, but you guys took him to places we never dreamed possible. To celebrate your efforts, the long-awaited Big Benny’s t-shirt is now available for pre-order! Show your allegiance to Star Citizen’s most popular noodle vending machine with this dark grey tee featuring the Big Benny’s Logo! Fabric is 100% pre-shrunk cotton. Follow the care instructions on the shirt tag to keep your t-shirt looking its best!
Subscribers: If you purchase the Subscriber version of the shirt, your order will also include an exclusive Big Benny’s patch!
Price includes worldwide shipping. This is a pre-order; estimated ship date is October 2016.
Welcome to the June 2016 monthly report! June was a most excellent month for Star Citizen, with the release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.4.0 and the 2.4.1 followup patch. 2.4 added a number of forward-facing elements to the game, including shopping and our first large flyable ship (the Starfarer)… but it was even more important ‘under the hood’ as it introduced persistence to Star Citizen! Persistence is essential to making a constantly-evolving multiplayer world, and there’s a lot for us to build on in future patches.
We also launched the Drake Dragonfly this month, our so-called ‘space motorcycle’ and the community responded with excitement! These cool, little ships are going to be so much fun to play, we’re eager to see them running around Port Olisar (and then across the surface of our planets!)
We hope you’re enjoying your time in Crusader, and we appreciate the incredible effort the community has put into helping test these game builds. With a game as complex as Star Citizen, intended to be played by pilots around the world, there’s so much in the way of architecture and systems that needs thorough testing in the real world… so the thousands upon thousands of players who’ve submitted bug reports are truly appreciated. Here’s the monthly report:
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Summer is finally come and the heat is on; not just in Los Angeles but in the ‘Verse as well. We are already half way through 2016 and just like the changing of the seasons, there has been quite a bit of change in Star Citizen. So let us take a gander at what the Los Angeles office has been up to for the month of June.
Engineering
For the Los Angeles Engineering team, the ItemSystem has been the number one priority across the team. However, over the course of any software development, bugs arise and decisions need to be made whether and when to divert resources to address them. Working on Star Citizen is no different. The Engineering team did get a boost in headcount with the addition of Steven Humphreys, an engineer from the UK office who has transferred to Los Angeles.
Lead Paul Reindell has always led by example. Not only is he involved with programming the game, he finds time to conduct interviews, training and mentoring the Engineering team’s newest members, and still is able to fix and close out multiple game bugs. That leadership is reflected in how industrious the Engineering team is.
Ariel Xu over the past few months has been steadily working on developing the PortEditor tool which drastically assists with how designers edit content by allowing dynamic adding/editing of the contents of the Port. Previously, it was necessary to edit the asset offline and reload it manually into the editor for every change. It’s easy to take something like that for granted by expecting that it should exist, but remember – tools don’t build themselves! Engineers Chad McKinney and Patrick Mathieu have completed major steps in improving the Use/Interaction system of Star Citizen.
Chad Zamzow’s focus includes implementing revised, component-specific IR/EM signatures, cooling systems, and shield emitter changes. While Mark Abent has been implementing features for the power plants, ship seat interactions, and also spent a large amount of time fixing bugs for the 2.4.0 release.
Tech Design
The Tech Design team is where many of the cool features you see in-game are fleshed out and implemented after the Engineering team has created the code and Art the assets. Being a part of the Tech Design team is more than just coming up with brand new ideas to implement in the game. The technical aspect is being able to understand the tools and capabilities of the game engine and being able to design features while remaining within the boundaries of what the tools are capable of. This is what makes our Tech Design team incredibly valuable to the development of Star Citizen. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what the Los Angeles Tech Design team has been up to in the month of June.
Starting with Tech Design Lead Kirk Tome, the number of tasks and bugs he has closed out is on the right side of hilarious. A total of 28 bugs and tasks have been resolved this month by Kirk alone of all shapes, sizes and durations. Many of the features completed this month are fundamental design tasks such as updating new information regarding the Cooling/Heat functionality of ships, balancing such as increasing the fuel tank size for the Xi’An Khartu-al, and fixing clipping or collision issues with the Mustang Delta and Drake Cutlass. This is on top of running the Los Angeles Tech Design team!
Calix Reneau’s focus has largely been on the Caterpillar and its various features that will expand Star Citizen’s repertoire of things you will be able to do in-game. The ship’s functional Tractor Beam installation, a new game mechanic, is one such feature of the Caterpillar and Calix has completed the design aspect of not just the Tractor Beam itself but also how the control terminals function. These are major milestones for in-game functionality and for the Caterpillar.
Matt Sherman’s tasks and bugs have largely surrounded the MISC Reliant. The final tech design for the Reliant has been completed along with multiple bugfixes which brings it one more step towards being available for players to enjoy.
Our newest Tech Designer, Stephen Hosmer, has already jumped in feet first and has closed out 33 bugs and tasks so let’s give a round of applause for the LA Tech Design team’s new guy. The majority of tasks completed by Stephen are adding new functionalities to Dataforge such as adding in tooltips that appear when performing a mouse-over of column headings and being able to mass edit cells. Ship-wise, Stephen has fixed issues on a bit of everything ranging from the Gladiator, Vanguard, Cutlass, Constellation Andromeda, and the Sabre just to name a few.
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With 2.4.0 out the door, the Art team has been continuing its focus on even more new clothing, polishing up some of the new animations you’ve seen in our recent video content and character fidelity, and hammering out the ships they have been working on for the past couple months.
Starting with Forrest Stephan, 2.5.0 clothing support for the Character Team has been one of his top priorities along with helping the Character Team with support for Squadron 42. The LA Concept Art team has also been hard at work creating beautiful examples for the art team to render into 3D. Gurmukh Bhasin has been working on Space Station stylization/looks while Justin Wentz has been fine tuning and revising Caterpillar concept pieces. Fashionistas Jeremiah Lee and Cheyne Hessler have been hard at work on the clothing as well. Jeremiah has been drawing up designs for the Odin Munitions Corp uniform while Cheyne is working on shirt color variants and tons of other clothing assets.
Omar Aweidah has completed creating pristine materials for the Light Armor phase 1 and has moved on to the Medium Marine Armor. James Ku has been mentoring our artists and upping their game while working on creating asset geometry for the female model and in-game heads.
On the ship-side, there has been a lot of work on the Drake Caterpillar continuing through the month of June into July. Elwin Bachiller and Daniel Kamentsky have completed the interior, working on the Engineering Engine Room and Cargo Module respectively.
Animation
For Ship Animation, we are receiving back the motion capture animation for Imaginarium for the improved and quicker ship entry and exit animation that many of you have been hoping for, and the Austin Studio is hard at work adapting them ship-by-ship. On the PU side, our team is working on life animations for the PU and for Squadron 42, working with Design to get workzones, mess halls, nightclub and bars, medical and all manner of world life animations into the game.
On the FPS side, the team is working on finalizing the feel of the gameplay for the base stocked weapon (rifles, shotguns, etc.) and pistol animations and also working on animations for a railgun. We are also working on the cover system, assuring that the distances for Players leaving cover is consistent and readable and also increasing the degree of visual feedback for when the Player is in the cover state. We are also working on updating and improving the jump mechanics and animations as well as committed a hip direction switch that happens when you are with no weapon- your hips will flip naturally to the direction you are going with no weapon, but stay in the right facing when using a stocked weapon.
Global Technical Content
As usual, the Global Tech Content team has been busy at work on a large range of features. Starting with their fearless leader, Sean Tracy, the armor and loadouts have been converted to use the new item system and Sean has now moved on to working on the Helmet 2.0 setup all while planning and scheduling tasks for the Tech Content team. He’s quite the busy guy!
The Radical Rigging Roughnecks, John Riggs and Gaige Hallman, each have had their hands full with various tasks. John has been working on the Male Navy Medical Doctor asset rigging and has started reviewing PU clothing, while Gaige has been creating the female clothing volumes and is doing R&D on standardizing neck sizes.
Mark McCall has completed work on creating character archetypes for Squadron 42 along with male Shubin miner uniform animation while Matt Intrieri has been hammering out too many bugs to list but has emphasized his work has touched on lighting, LODs, VFX, and is now working on fixing damage issues on the Drake Cutlass.
Associate Tech Artist Patrick Salerno has also been face down doing bug fixes that the QA team finds and has been primarily focused on missing asset issues and fixing bugs that occur when developers use the editing tools we have.
Finally, one of our newest to join the Tech Content team, Erik Link has completed a tech implementation pass for inspecting weapons as well as implementing assets in the game through Mannequin.
Quality Assurance
The Los Angeles QA team spent the majority of June, along with the Austin QA team, working on 2.4 and then prepping things for 2.5. LA QA Lead Vincent Sinatra led the Quality Assurance team in taking a preliminary look at procedural planets and are very excited with the progress we are seeing. On the bug front, our primary focus was on hammering away at the shield system for ships though we also took a pass at testing the Mustang, along with a review of the Reliant by taking preliminary flight tests in order to move it towards getting it flight-ready.
With Vince at the helm, our QA testers have had quite a bit on their plate. Colby Schneider has done quite a bit of exploratory testing in examining persistence in the PU as well as taking early swings at the procedural generation for planetary exploration. Colby has also performed some very preliminary testing of the Dragonfly and the Reliant but both craft are still in not quite ready for public deployment.
Eric Pietro’s focus has been on the 2.4.1 patch being pushed out to the PTU by the time this report goes live, with primary emphasis on looking at network stability and in-game performance. Eric has been in constant communication with the deployment teams to monitor and test implemented changes in the PU. Apart from that, Eric has also been tasked at looking into EVA physics, keyboard/controller functionality, and in-game animations. QA testers actually do quite a lot on a day to day basis!
Conclusion
Like every month preceding it, June has been productive. New ship developments, new in-game assets, new art pieces, a new format for Around the Verse, and new faces. We are definitely not idle in the studio and we hope these updates give you a glimpse of what goes on in the LA office, so thank you for joining us this month and allowing us to share what we’ve been up to.
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June was a busy month in the Austin studio with multiple teams burning the midnight oil, working hard, and making lots of progress. We tested the many progressive iterations of 2.4.0 and published this to the Live server! This represents a big milestone for the Austin team since this is the first public version with Persistence and sets the stage for many additional persistent features yet to come. Our team is growing on many fronts with new QA, DevOps and Game Support team members starting this month. Many new faces and fresh perspectives who have all hit the ground running in their respective disciplines!
Austin Development
The month of June certainly was a busy one! The dev team here in Austin has had their hands in several areas of the project like always, and worked diligently to support the release of SC Alpha 2.4.0 where needed.
The Backend Services Team reached a MAJOR milestone this month with the release of Persistence in 2.4.0. Jason Ely, Tom Sawyer, and Ian Guthrie have all but tied a neat little bow on this major feature that is crucial to any MMO. With persistence comes a broadened way of approaching the game development of Star Citizen, and it’s a welcome challenge for our team. Since the release of Persistence Jason, Tom, and Ian have been cleaning up and knocking out the edge cases that were causing issues on the Live environment. There were some crashes that cropped up with the persistence cache that have since been resolved and subsequently released with the 2.4.1 patch.
The Design Team in Austin is looking farther out to future releases now that 2.4.0 has gone Live. Another major feature of 2.4.0 that was run out of Austin was Shopping. Lead Designer Rob Reininger and his team have since turned their attention to further fleshing out the Shopping design, adding elements for Purchasing via Kiosk, Selling, Commodities, and Remote Storage to their to-do list. We’ve touched on all of these features this month, however our primary focus right now is iterating on feedback for Purchasing via Kiosk that we’ve received from CR. We want to get this functionality online soon so that we can add some new shops and inventory to the game, including Dumper’s Depot and its inventory of ship components and weapons. Design intern Robert Gaither has been playing around with a program called Axure that helps us visualize how the user experience will work with the Purchase Kiosk. We’re hoping to have our next iteration in front of CR for approval and signoff soon.
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Our Ship Artists have been plugging away at their tasks for the Hornet F7A and the Herald. Both of those ships are in “Final Art” phases and the guys are going above and beyond to hit their deadlines.
Emre Switzer, Lighting Artist in Austin, has been working with the UK to wrap up an initial lighting pass on a new space station called GRIMHex. This environment is looking absolutely amazing and its thanks in no small part to Emre’s superb lighting skills.
Our Animation Team has shifted gears slightly this month. We’ve been getting data back from Imaginarium that Jay Brushwood helped run last month, and our Ship Animation Team has started reviewing this data and getting it into game. We’re getting data back for brand new ship enter/exit animations, and we’ll be using this data to reauthorize our ship animations to account for varying enter/exit speeds. We’re tracking well on the Hornet and Super Hornet right now, so look for speedier enter/exit animations on those ships soon!
Our PU Animation Team has altered course by request of Design to try and get some specific animation sets in game to be used with Subsumption, our peaceful NPC AI system. We’re going back and polishing animations for sitting on couches, leaning against walls, interacting with terminals, inspecting weapons, standing idles, and much more. With the aid of Erik Link, our new Tech Animator in our LA studio, we’re able to get these animations into game post-haste so that Design can start hooking these animations up for NPC’s to utilize! In addition to this, Lead Animator Bryan Brewer has been busy nailing down interaction metrics for several of our animation sets, including Sitting on Couches, Getting into Bed, Gripping Tools/Handles, Sitting/Standing Console Interactions, and the Bar Scene. These metrics will make it much easier to standardize how NPC’s interact with what we call “Usables”, which are items/props that characters can interact with in the scene.
QA
Austin QA was extremely busy through June with a big focus on 2.4.0 and 2.4.1, with us providing support for 11 PTU pushes and 2 Live pushes over the course of the month. This included everything from build testing, patch notes, databases checks build to build, as well as post-deployment support.
Persistence testing was a major focus item for our team throughout the month as we worked closely with our engineering team to overcome the remaining hurdles for 2.4.0, acting as a point of contact both for network engineers as well as our platform team to ensure everything was functioning normally. Major kudos go out to both Jeff Daily for his tireless work testing, documenting and supporting the platform team and Bryce Benton for taking on investigating emergent database and back-end issues.
We conducted a number of stress-tests with our PTU play testers, and started a new round of regular global performance captures with the entire QA department. Across the latter half of June, QA switched gears toward getting our development stream stabilized for 2.5.0 and providing ongoing support toward our 2.4.1 patch.
Several members of the Austin team were pulled into testing several new web and launcher security features for our site alongside Turbulent. We used this time to provide information on the functionality of the new security features, and provide recommendations to the Game and Customer support teams for supporting them. Special thanks to Scott McCrea and Brandon Crocker in particular for their tireless work testing and breaking the new security tools!
Otherwise we’ve been making major efforts to get ahead before our next big push, with the team as a whole concentrating to clear out a significant portion of our JIRA ticket backlog.
Marissa Meissner and Andrew Hesse have been focusing on laying down foundational work for QA over the next several months, including updated test plans, further training new hires and ensuring that new tools and procedures are documented for the global QA team. To round out our month, we also welcomed a new QA hire to our team this month, Michael Blackard and promoted Andrew Rexroth to QA Specialist!
Game Support
June was an amazing month for the Game Support Team!
We were all hands on deck early in the month for 2.4.0, whether it was testing on PTU, publishing to Live, or triaging the one-off issues afterwards. Game Support worked closely with QA, DevOps, and Production to run daily builds and tests with Evocati and 1st Wave PTU testers until we rolled out to Live, then we worked to track down issues related to Persistence into 2.4.1.
On many levels, 2.4.0 has been our biggest launch ever considering the amount of infrastructure changes on top of game content updates. With the advent of Persistence, we had to account for all of the scenarios in which a player would buy, use, equip, transfer, or destroy items, all the while making sure the platform, the game server, and the client are in sync with each other. As we progressed through the month, we continued to isolate and fix specific one-off situations that needed particular investigation, and we appreciate everyone’s patience as we troubleshot our Persistence related bugs.
As we’ve stated before, we’d not be able to do this as quickly without the immense help of our volunteers. Thank you Avocados and PTU testers… the BDSSE is one step closer because of your gracious help and tireless efforts.
On that note, as a reminder for those wanting to participate in Evocati or PTU: It’s possible to be added by being an active and helpful member of the Issue Council. We’ll be adding to both Evocati and PTU ranks later this summer, so jump on in!
Internally, we’ve refined and updated some of our publish processes to streamline the way we get a build out. While these are largely invisible to you, the result for you should be less downtime, fewer mistakes, and increased communication.
We’ve also been finalizing some of the work related to Multi-Factor Authentication, both in terms of the user experience and the processes we’ll use to support it. Security of your account is of paramount importance to us here at CIG, and we very much look forward to rolling MFA out to the public later in July.
Lastly, we’re excited to grow by one here in Austin, Texas as one of the original Star Citizen backers, Eric “Proxus” Green, has joined us here in Game Support. We’re thrilled he’s onboard, and you’ll be hearing more from him next month!
IT/Operations
June brought us some exciting new developments in our patch reduction size project. When we started this massive overhaul we knew the project was going to be big incorporating several teams working together. We also knew that we’d uncover numerous hidden land mines along with hopefully a few little gems. This month we continued work on some of our internal delivery tools. As planned we will be rolling out the new patching mechanisms to QA and the developers to work out the kinks prior to working the new system in to our new public launcher. We did run in to some challenges this month on some of our core technology but we were able to quickly work past these problems and in the process we’ve designed an even better internal delivery approach. We still need testing to prove the new findings but it’s beginning to look like we may now be able to reduce our own storage footprint for all these builds which is something quite significant considering we’re currently producing 36-40 TB of build assets per month.
This month our LA studio got some core networking upgrades. As the LA QA team expanded, we saw exponential growth in network traffic per day due to the amount of builds they’re transferring across the network to each of their multiple testing systems. At the same time we upgraded the build storage as well which provided a major increase in build delivery performance to the entire LA studio. It’s pretty gratifying to see the teams receiving their builds faster than expected and we can’t wait to start rolling out some of this patch reduction technology so we can start seeing internal teams patching builds rather than copying multiple full builds per day.
LiveOps/DevOps
We deployed 12 publishes to PTU and two Publishes to Live this month. The addition of persistence has added more complexity to our publish process but the team is keeping up with the game dev schedule while writing optimizations to our publish orchestration system. This behind the scenes work is hard to see in the game but the near zero down time publishes and the high rate of PTU and QA publishes we can achieve makes it highly gratifying work that the entire team has been able to engage in.
Ahmed has been busy gathering and analyzing data gathered from the servers and managed to make an appearance on Reverse the Verse – June Subscriber Edition (embedded below.) In this interview he answered a number of questions about the servers and publishing. He even drew up a chart explaining how our game servers and the multiple services work from a high level starting from the build system all the way out to the final game publish.
Work has continued on build system optimization this month with our goals shifting slightly from build performance to build stability. We saw major improvements in stability as a result and still managed to pull out some minor gains in performance. As previously reported, this is an area where we will continue to focus as build iteration is a top priority for a development effort our size.
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Hello Citizens! Another good month in Manchester. We’re quite pleased to have Alpha 2.4 in Citizens’ hands, and we’re eager for you to see some of the other content we’ve been working on. Here’s June!
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The concept team is growing, we have secured two new artists to join the team, one will be taking on the mushrooming list of props and the second chap will be tackling environments plus anything else we can throw at him
As most of you will know the Drake Dragonfly went out the door for its concept sale, all I want to do now is put the whole team on making the other manufacturers versions but that’s just my own wish and I hand on heart have no idea what the plans are for more (no really I don’t!).
Gav Rothery has just wrapped up a new ship that I think looks pretty awesome and we’re now focusing back on solving some Klaus and Werner FPS weapon designs and fleshing out the family (in addition to some work on the new corvette!)
A new small vehicle has also been worked up and passed straight to the production team – hmm I wonder when that’ll come out??..Ship items and props are ripping along and the whole universe feels like it’s starting to be more cohesive which can only be a good thing.
Also taking some time to work with Justin in LA and solve some areas of the Caterpillar that needed another round of attention and love – don’t worry owners, it’s mainly some shape language work to the command module and Turret – looks good, but then I’m biased!
Next month we’ll be addressing ship weapons and how to make more from less – watch this space.
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The environment team has been working on many different tasks this month. As always the main production focus is on a sq42 level, and now we’ve started to move into the Final Art phase for most of the Shubin interior levels too. We are hardening up the Levski landing zone environment and bedding it into the procedural tech – feels really cool flying from space and onto a planet! Our lighting team has been blocking in some visual target areas for GrimHEX, this environment is shaping up and have a really good flavour to it. There is a demo coming up and we’re well on the way making sure we’re going to show you something special.
Props
As mentioned last month we have been on the final push for this batch of ship items. Shields, Coolers, Power Plants and Quantum drives are on their final art pass and we are just finishing up the last few Avionics modules, this should be complete within the next sprint (possible two…) and that closes off the first round of ship components.
We’ve had 3 new artists start in June so it’s been a busy few weeks but it is really going to help with supporting all the different areas of the game that require props and ship items.
Work has also progressed with the useable items which allow our players and AI to be able to fully interact with the props and environments, it’s a collaboration between the animation, design and props teams and will add that layer of natural interaction that will help to fully immerse the player in the game world.
With the amazing new procedural tech coming online we are looking at what we need to do to really push the visuals and work out what technical limitations we will need to accommodate when we ramp up resources for the feature.
Looking forward we are moving some of the team onto the smaller vehicle components to support the release of the Drake Dragonfly and pushing forward with the other ship item types while the rest of the team continue ploughing through our Squadron 42 prop list and as always do our best to squash any bugs with our live releases.
All in all, it has been a busy but productive month… and next month will be more of the same!
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With another exciting month having gone by, the ship team in the UK has been plenty busy. We have made substantial progress on the Bengal with the main hangar, hangar lift wrapping up shortly along with the interior and exterior bridge of the ship. Idris interior does not have many more rooms left to do, with the team now focusing on some final polish before moving on to lighting and exterior damage.
Every improvement we make on the Idris will directly benefit the Javelin, one of the many benefits of using the manufacturer set to keep pushing the quality bar. Speaking of the Javelin, a lot of time has been spent finding the right look and feel for the hangar which is needed in both Squadron 42 and when it goes live in the PU. So capital ship progress is coming along great!
What about the other ships you ask? Well, we are happy to report that the Argo is wrapping up this week where we are left to hand it over to remaining disciplines and ensure it has everything it needs in order to go out to all of you! Several improvements have been made to the pod since it was last shown so keep a look out! We have also started production on both the Dragonfly and another vehicle, something we are all very excited for as it presents new challenges for us to tackle. The Dragonfly will be finishing its whitebox phase this week. Lastly, we are doing a lot of work to make sure the Vanduul ships look great, the UK team are focusing on the Driller (a carrier) at the moment. Every lesson learned here will allow us to share procedures and techniques across the entire Vanduul fleet!
Graphics
This month the graphics team have primarily been focussing on fixing bugs for the next release, and continuing with several major refactors to the underlying renderer code to pave the way for future features (e.g. improved transparency sorting & phasing out of DirectX 9 style code to help move to newer graphics APIs).
The gas cloud tech is also undergoing a major change to make use of a ‘bricked’ voxel format which allows increased detail in just the areas we need it. This is crucial for achieving details on very large gas clouds that would otherwise require a prohibitive amount of memory. The brick format should also allow us to make a number of optimisations where we can perform fewer calculations on large open areas.
The work on the improved HDR effects is continuing with upgrades to the exposure control system, but we’re excited that the new physically based bloom and lens flares have been enabled in the main development branch meaning this will be part of the next release to the backers. The new optical effects are faster than the previous effects, look much better, and crucially allow art to globally change the appearance of these affects with just a few button presses rather than having to tweak hundreds of individual flares. This is because the new flares are created in screen-space rather than being hand placed, and as a result we get flares off reflections too (e.g. when the sun reflects of the very shiny Starfarer).
Animation
This month we’ve been focusing in on the core FPS elements of the game. A new jump mechanic is being worked out, as well as testing stocked cover and blind fire and making tweaks where necessary to keep first and third person working well together. New pistol and stocked reload animations have been worked on to give a bit more weight and feel to reloading the weapons. We’ve been involved in testing the new camera and eye stabilisation and working our way through as many assets as possible to give a nice solid core feeling to the fps portion of the game. Selecting and deselecting weapons has been given another pass, working with tech animation we’re very hopeful to get a more polished 1P and 3P system online very soon. We’re excited with the progress even if there is still a lot more to come.
Engineering
Always seems to be a busy month getting a new release out, this time 2.4.0. As mentioned previously this was a large release for us because it’s the first time we’ve effected persistence in this production environment, and it changed the way a lot of systems worked, which in the long run is a very good thing but it was a major piece of engineering with a great deal of complexity.
Moving on from that we’ve been aware for a long time that some pretty hefty enhancements to CryNetwork would be required for a project of this scale, and getting 2.4.0 out really just re-emphasised this. CryNetwork was really starting to creak under the demands we’re making of it. We’re now chomping at the bit to start making a sustained effort on developing the new technology we’ve been designing on paper and proving it in the codebase. One such technology is the Global Serialized Variables which are designed to make the gameplay programmers’ lives easier and help optimise the network bandwidth. Previously when we were using “aspects” it is up to the gameplay programmer to decide what information needed to be sent over the network and then also to deal with both writing that information out on one end and reading it back in again at the other. This was always prone to mistakes in transmission because of the nature of network latency, which is unfortunately never really under your control. If you don’t receive, read, and parse the data in exactly the same manner you wrote it out you end up with a disconnection, which can prove more fiddly than you’d imagine. It was also very inefficient as if even one bit of data got changed the whole aspect block would have to get sent. The serialized variables takes all that away, the programmer just marks which variables they want to replicate to the server/clients and then the underlying system can just detect which have changed since the last time they were sent, and which haven’t, and takes care of the rest in a nice and efficient manner.
We’ve also been having problems with the underlying message queue which, although it would send packets through reliably, they wouldn’t necessarily come through in the correct order, and so you end up with a lot of code having to untangle that. Issues caused by this are very hard to track down and fix, especially within the real-time requirements of a multiplayer game, as by their nature they are completely random and the fixes tend to be horrible and nasty. We’re completely rewriting this message queue and it is going to be designed to better enforce the ordering and transmission of packets. This means we can make certain assumptions which will help clean up the codebase, for example if you get a message telling a player to respawn you know that the message killing them in the first place has already arrived and been processed. If there are any logicians out there in the audience, you’d love this stuff.
Otherwise gameplay progress has been ticking over nicely on all the usual aspects of the game.
Audio
Hello all! June was another busy month for CIG Audio. Here’s a breakdown of what people have been up to.
Sam Hall was mainly working on getting the dynamic bank loading to work as it should. As it stands, work is 99% complete, but we still need to deal with bank loading synchronisation before we can go live with it – this is to ensure sounds play on cue first time, every time.
Sam has also been optimising the Editor’s audio plugin start-up time to help with productivity. It now saves up to ten seconds every time the Editor starts up. Though this may seem inconsequential in the context of a single instance, all these periods waiting add up! (Think about how much time you’d lose in your own life if you had to wait at least ten seconds every time you opened your email or a Word document) Sam’s also currently working on improving the audio playback with the animation tool, Mannequin.
Graham Phillipson has been refactoring and refining the code to better support reverbs and weapon tails, to make transition between areas smoother and more “realistic”. Added more options to audio mark-up for how audio triggers begin. At the start of the month he got the prototype together for in-game VOIP which has wide-ranging implications for the persistent universe.
Darren Lambourne has been undertaking general maintenance of ship audio (improving sync on anims, bug fixing). Establish the audio structure (geometry and Wwise side) for the playable Idris, and working on designing the ‘tone’ and first pass implementation of the Idris ambiences.
Luke Hatton has been working on new explosion sounds so that smaller ship sizes (Hornet, Xian Scout, M50) aren’t quite as overbearing as the larger ones. He’s also been working on more pass-bys for the likes of the Origin M50; he’s currently looking at the pass-bys for the Starfarer, which require a different style because of the sheer size of the ship.
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Stefan Rutherford has been continuing work on the GrimHex map, putting down the foundations there for ambience. We’ve changed our process quite a lot where ambience is concerned; this is a lot more spatialized these days rather than made up of ‘2D’ beds/backgrounds so that the audio is far more compatible with head-tracking based audio rendering (i.e. VR) and also offers more momentary variation and interest. Otherwise he’s been revising and improving upon the FPS weapons.
Ross Tregenza has been primarily designing a system that will play cool cinematic music in a self-managing and context sensitive way throughout the Persistent Universe. He’s been working with Pedro Macedo Camacho to get the new music in place and fine tune the system – it’s already sounding awesome. The dynamic music system is also starting to make its way into Squadron 42, where it’ll be used in tandem with bespoke set piece music for the most dramatic moments of the game. He’s been working with Geoff Zanelli on that content – again, already sounding fantastic, even in its early days.
Ross has also been working on ambient sound for a variety of locations across Squadron 42, and keeping the audio guys informed of any S42 based developments, as well as assisting the dialogue guys when possible to help progress the battle-chatter systems.
Simon Price has been improving scalability of the dialogue pipeline, migrating Ship Computer dialogue over to the communication system ahead of a refactor/standardisation. Also generally porting dialogue to use the CommunicationSystem to give designers more control.
Bob Rissolo – lot of prep and preproduction work for S42 shoots, combined with editing dialogue for cinematics, making progress on the pipeline tools and tech with Simon.
Phil Smallwood has been riding shotgun with Bob recently so as to assist him on S42 shoot dialogue capture duties, and undertaking some dialogue edit work too.
Matteo Cerquone started taking ownership of various sub-systems such as physics, character Foley, as well as assisting Ross with S42 sound design.
Ewan Brown has been implementing support for multi-positional sounds within the game editor, which is a neat optimisation that reduces the number of voices for a given sound, even if it’s assigned to play from multiple positions. He’s also been working on low level audio synchronisation and various Mannequin tool improvements.
Last (but not least), Jason Cobb has been hard at work at a whole list of tasks! He’s been developing audio build validation scripts, fixing voice leaks, documenting test cases for Flowgraph audio trigger fixes and more… real nitty gritty stuff that will make Star Citizen all the more immersive from an audio persiectve! He’s about 90% complete an area-based mix state mark-up for multicrew ships, and he has been investigating the same for single-seat ships.
VFX
As has been the case company-wide this past month, the VFX team has dedicated a significant amount of time focusing on asset clean-up. Specifically in our case, we have been making sure none of our particle libraries are referencing missing textures, materials, custom lens flares or objects. These are the sort of tasks no one looks forward to, but there is something quite satisfying about whittling your way down a long error log list! Caleb in Frankfurt has been working hard on this, so no doubt he will elaborate on this process.
As well as this, we have been performing other general maintenance tasks such as converting various assets – smoke, fire and explosions in particular – over to the new heat map/gradient tech we now have in place. This is an ongoing process, as there are loads of legacy assets we want to convert in order to take advantage of the new tech.
Speaking of which, the new heat maps and gradients tie in beautifully with the optical bloom and flares that you will hopefully see in the next live release, as well as the tiled particle lighting we mentioned briefly in last month’s report. It’s been a long process getting all this tech to come together, but we feel confident that in the long run you will see a big step up in the quality of our effects!
In terms of new content, more work has been done on weapon impact effect variants, a polish pass on a new laser cannon, and an environment VFX pass for a new PU location. Finally, we have done an effects pass for flight-ready Reliant.
As always, busy busy busy!
Design
It’s been a busy June in the design department here in the UK. The Live team have grown to 4 full time designers and will be 5 in mid-July. I don’t want to spoil anything so I will just say that they are all working flat out working on expanding the content for the 2.7 Live release for the Stanton System. There is a lot of cool stuff going into that release on the systems side that we are excited to get out into the community, such as the new landing and take-off work that is being implemented by Craig. As of me writing this it is all using placeholder (programmer art), but are hopeful that Zane and crew will be able to take a pass at it before it is released into Live.
The systems design team have been working on MobiGlas and particularly the StarMap app, which is looking great as a portable version of our favourite web app.
As you will probably see from other reports we are refactoring the AI system for both combat and interstitials into one system called “Subsumption” that will systemically deal with a huge variety of different AI states. While this has affected some of the progress on a few S42 levels, it is looking hugely encouraging for the levels as a whole, cutting down massively on a lot of complex and sometimes fragile bespoke scripting from design.
The Tech team are working on the various ships and vehicles and we are hopeful to get the DragonFly, which is feeling very fun and different to what you will be used to, into the live stream soon. We are also almost there with the Argo light utility ship!
That’s it for now, except to say a big thanks as always for your fantastic support.
QA
UK QA have been very busy over the past month. Our primary focus was getting Alpha 2.4.0 out of the door. This required us to work in sync with our ATX counterparts, as well as the select backers in the Evocati group. As you’re no doubt aware, Alpha 2.4.0 is probably our biggest update since 2.0.0, with the introduction of shopping and persistence to Crusader, as well the Starfarer and Starfarer Gemini, our biggest flyable ships to date!
Alpha 2.4.0 is now in your hands, and has recently been patched up to Alpha 2.4.1 in order to extinguish a nasty infinite loading screen bug and an issue with ship persistence. We have continued to monitor the Live build, gathering feedback from you guys, as well as looking into issues that only seem to arise when the game is out in the wild.
Beyond that, testing on Squadron 42 continues as development ramps up, with our dedicated Squadron 42 testers performing daily smoke tests to help the devs narrow down on persistent issues. Adam Parker, our resident ship expert, has been putting the Reliant and the Argo through their initial paces. Mark Tobin, FPS extraordinaire, has been leading initial group tests on the FPS systems. Mark White, one of our seniors, has been testing additional systems you’ll be hearing about shortly!
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The Frankfurt team is running at full capacity, we have 49 desks in the office and just signed our 49th employee. We’re very selective on who we bring in, and have had a large amount of interest on joining from people worldwide. We’re also an extremely diverse group, made up of 13 different nationalities I believe. Luckily we planned ahead and as I previously mentioned we’re expanding our office space. The extension will hold an additional 25 people and will be ready for us on August 1st.
We’re getting closer to showing off more of our progress, and look forward to getting stuff in your hands. See below for a portion of some of the stuff we covered this month, it’s impossible to put it all, but gives you a sense of some of the larger items.
Weapons
Last month the weapon art team has been hard at work polishing up the existing Behring ship weapons as well as making a new Size 5 variant. On the FPS side we finished the ballistic Smart Ammo and the 1st pass texturing on the Behring P8SC submachine-gun. We’re also in the process of updating the Behring Pro-Line grenades and finished the 1st pass model so it can be rigged, animated and tested.
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DE QA is happy to welcome Glenn Kneale as the newest member of our team! Glenn joins us from our CIG-UK office in Wilmslow, and he will be our new QA Technical Lead in our Frankfurt office. Glenn started the month by setting new grounds in personal development for the EU QA Technical team. New procedures for reporting have been set in place to ensure all information and progress is shared seamlessly across the UK and DE offices. DE QA also continued to spend the majority of the month of June testing the procedural planet together with support from Mark White in the UK. We also worked together with Marius Airinei to identify and debug a crash on the Crusader public servers. The crash was related to missiles being fired at other ships, and the reproduction rate is painfully low. We managed to repro the crash on the 2nd day of testing, and we were able to provide Marius with the information he needed to work toward a solid solution. Chris Speak has also been helping Ivo Herzeg by creating physics test maps, which Ivo is using to test both physics enabled character ragdolling and physicalized objects such as bottles, chairs, and other in-game props (see image above). The next few months will be focused on ramping up our testing for Gamescom 2016 together with UKQA and ATXQA, and we cannot wait to share what we will be testing – it is truly something to look forward to!
Cutscenes
The cutscene team spent the beginning of the month prepping material for a new Mocap shoot. A few key members headed to the UK the last week of June, and will return to Germany in a few weeks when the shoot is over. This is the last fully scheduled shoot for Squadron 42, with the possibility to return for a pickup shoot if needed. The Animators on the team also spent some time this month supporting the in-game animation team, as well as doing some animations to test out NPC head looks.
Engine
This month Ivo continued to work on smoothing out bits of the animation code, working on head-bobbing, Eye-Stabilization, and Head-stabilization. He’s made great progress and we’ll have something to show off in the very near future. We’ve also made some good leaps on the Procedural Planets and toolset for artist behind it. The tech team is excited to show off what they’ve done, and we’re getting close.
Rotating VisAreas: We worked on support for Rotating VisAreas. A VisArea can be thought of as a room with windows, which allows us to cull away all objects not visible through the windows (classic portal culling). So far VisAreas were 2.5D Shapes (polygons with a height). This was fine for our use cases so far: Regular flat levels like Area18 and Ships, where the VisAreas are part of the local reference frame and hence are still 2.5D, even if the hosting reference frame is rotated/moved. But now we have planets, and planets are round, which brings a new challenge. To allow us to use VisAreas on planets, we had to implement support for rotation. This was implemented by keeping the 2.5D representation but adjusting all the checks to be in VisAreas space, hence transform each point into the space of the visarea before it is checked. Doing it this way allowed us to keep all current VisAreas setups, and just extend the functionality.
Tree-ification of the ZoneSystem: The ZoneSystem was started as a spatial data structure which replaced the octree we used for fast culling for rendering. Such cull operations are mostly “large”, meaning they tend to cover a large area. Now the ZoneSystem (as planed from the beginning) is being used for more and more systems. Most of those systems tend to do “small” queries, like finding all objects in a 2m x 2m x 2m box with Tags [x,y,z]. The ZoneSystem is now responsible to find all objects in the whole universe inside this box extremely fast. When we experimented with this, it turned out that some parts of the ZoneSystem still utilized a linear search, and those didn’t scale well in our large universe with such small queries (large ones had enough other cost to not notice those issues). Hence we extended all internal data structures to utilize AABB trees, allowing us to more quickly exclude objects improving the runtime from O(N) to roughly O(Log2(N))). As this was a very complex change, since such tree structures must also be maintained in an efficient manner when some objects move, it took some time. But we are now in the final steps of local testing and so far it looks very promising and to give us the performance benefits we were aiming for.
Tech Art
Did a good amount of support to the Engine team on various things such as head stabilization. Also continued to support the weapons team, rigging new weapons as they get completed. Did some weapon select and deselect RND on animation driven IK, with the goal of getting them to look smooth in various frames of the animation while still being as responsive as they need to be. Also continued to address any and all bugs or issues from the global team.
AI
Let’s start this monthly talking about Subsumption and the mission system.
Subsumption has received a lot of attention this month, we first of all worked a lot with Tony Zurovec to introduce several features in the tool, then connect them up into the system code.
We introduced the concept of tasks with parallel children: when creating a subactivity, we can connect several tasks one to the other to create a chain of operations the NPC will then execute. We can now create archetypes for tasks that can actually serve as fathers of multiple children tasks: they manage the lifetime of the subtasks, how those tasks are executed in parallel with the father, and what to do when the father is interrupted.
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In the picture we can see a node that executes in parallel specific subtasks, and it succeeds as soon as the one child succeeds and it fails as soon as one child fails.
Any node can be setup to have parallel children, but the actual task is totally responsible to define how the execution takes care of the children itself.
We also developed the concept of Checkpoints and Goto tasks.
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A checkpoint is a way to store specific points in the behavior from which it’s safe to restore the execution at a later time. Any time a Checkpoint task is hit, then the system automatically stores that entry into the internal This.Subactivity.Checkpoint that can be then used by the Goto task. This allows us to create jobs that can be interrupted and resumed, we can perform operations in the middle of longer behaviors and resume the old tasks as soon as possible.
We introduce the functionality to handle specific events in the subactivities directly so that we can decide whether we wait to finish some operations before reacting to some events. We also started to work on the core code for the Subsumption Mission system: missions will sit on top of the normal NPC activities. Game and level designers can create their mission influencing the population of the level, the schedule of the NPCs, setup objectives and a lot of additional things. We hope to show you some screenshots about the mission system soon!
We’re close to complete the work on the local navigation mesh to allow characters to move inside moving ships, planets, etc. Regarding the spawning system, we moved the definition of the spaceships’ crew into Dataforge so that designers can easily setup this content without manually editing an xml or any configuration file. We also started the work to properly unify the code paths that spawns characters and ships.
Regarding the communication system we’re working close with the audio engineers to support properly external audio files that can be played through WWise, we also developed some new debug draw functionalities to help designers keep track of the dialogues used, the amount of times they are triggered, and so on.
This month we also worked on the ships behavior to properly support strict limitations on the flying behaviors: boundaries have always been considered as a soft limitation allowing ships to leave the assigned area to enter it back immediately after the restriction was not respected. We introduced improvements to the ships behavior to properly react to the target leaving the restricted area they might be assigned to, we introduced a new “boundary patrol” behavior that will trigger once the target cannot be reached due to “external” orders to the running behavior.
As usual we also continued on improving the stability of the overall AI system and to fix as many bugs as we could!
Design
On the System Design side we’ve focused on figuring out how our Vanduul behaviors work, what makes them special and unique compared to fighting against a human opponent. These guys need to offer the players a complete change of combat style where they will have to adapt to a faster paced, more explosive and melee heavy combat compared to their human enemy counterparts.
We are reworking the way docking in stations will work and all the services that will be available to you and your ship once docked. We’ve seen big problems with players not having enough landing pads so we are designing an automated system that will handle how pads get allocated, how you dock, undock and how your ship is stored once you get out of it. Our main goal is to get players and ships off the docking hangars as quick as possible to free them up for the next player that might want to use it.
We are starting to design the overarching security and criminality systems that will help us detect wrongdoers and report them to the NPC authorities who will take action. The idea is to, while still being lenient towards a player who merely errs occasionally (i.e. honest mistakes), have the world react in a ruthless way to people who abuse other players or do things that they’re not supposed to. The main goal is to make this part of the world so the NPCs take matters into their own hands based on the local law of the region of space rather than us developers having to police abusers. (Let’s face it – the devs and game support are always going to be very outnumbered. While we of course care about our players, we can’t personally be everywhere at once, so the system must have some ability to take care of itself)
The FPS suit is also getting a rework and is heading towards a more modular approach where players will be able to switch components and adjust it to what they need, be it combat or otherwise. At the same time we are looking into developing a new breed of modular deployable gadget that the players can customize as they see fit.
Work on out of combat human behaviors continues and we hope we can show you guys something as soon as the stuff comes online.
Level Design has finished the design of the lawless base we mentioned in last month’s report, and have been supporting and overseeing the art and design teams who are taking that whitebox design to completion, both at Bhvr and in the UK studio, to communicate the vision and ensure that the core design is preserved throughout the hardening phase. To make sure we could hit the 2.5 release with the lawless base we split it into tiers, which we can focus on one at a time. Expect to see that location evolve in steps over the next few major releases, with new areas opening up and interesting opportunities unlocking as we progress.
We iterated on the design of Levski (initially based in Nyx) to prepare it to be placed down on the Stanton planet. This involved adding extra hangars for parking, new road access and parking for visitors coming on-foot or driving on the planet surface to the mining base, and adding bedrooms for players to be able to sleep and respawn there. It is now in the artists’ capable hands to bring those additions up to the quality of the rest of Levski, so we can finally enable players to land on a procedural planet and have a first landmark to visit there. These days we’re digging more into modularity for building locations quickly and efficiently, focusing on service stations in particular.
We have also seen two new LD recruits join our ranks, Ben and Tobias, and focused on on-boarding them: getting them up to speed with the engine, designing practice levels to wrap their heads around the intricacies of Star Citizen and space environments, and generally welcoming them in the family.
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Behaviour Interactive has been busy working on some thrilling content you’ll see in Star Citizen Alpha 2.5. Here’s the rundown:
Engineering
In June we integrated the last feature missing from the optimized Hologram framework: Render to Target. This should significantly affect ships using on screen Holograms (like the Constellation, Retaliator, Aurora) and enable much better framerate. Not only that but other ships which previously displays empty screens (Vanguard, Sabre, Avenger, …) will now correctly display Holograms.
A lot of polish and bug fixing went into shopping as well. The mobiGlas shopping application will give better feedback on the status of your purchase request. You’ll notice that armor racks will display a full mannequin when trying them on instead of a floating head. All of this and more solid server and client fixes for improved stability.
Design
This month was very exciting working on the new outlaw space station. We finished working on the shops, Francois Boucher and Jesse Kalb respectably taking care of the clothing store and the personal weapon store. The artists did a fantastic job working with the tight layouts and they look great. We also worked on future shop locations for this space station and their whiteboxes are well underway.
Overall, we spent a lot of time in the Outlaw space station, fixing collisions issues, setuping gravity, kill triggers, airlocks, spawn room and logic, landing pads and a bunch of other things. I expect us to continue working on that location for a while, adding more and more and keeping it top notch.
Art
This month we continued working on a map from the previous month, an abandoned imperial asteroid base now occupied by “new” denizens.
Aside from finishing the remaining undefined structures and visuals, we’ve spent a major portion of this month polishing the environment. We took the designer’s vision and added a slice of life to the map.
The key focus of the polish was story telling. We wanted the environment to give clues on what happened in different sections within the map. The visuals for habitation pods, for example, reflected purposeful rearrangement of furniture and objects after the pods were constructed, as if dweller groups in different pods were trying to differentiate themselves from others, some sort of gang mentality perhaps.
Shops, on the other hand, contained objects that showed how the shop keep conducted business, how he went about his daily life outside of the business, and ultimately, how he left his mark in the forgotten stories of the abandoned base as time passed.
Per the same level of detail in other maps we helped create, expect landing pads, hangars, the exteriors/interiors to be full of its own life and style. We also added a bit more polish on a mining world we previously helped create. Stay tuned.
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Atomic Batteries to Power, Turbulent to Speed!
Greetings from sunny Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month:
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Last month, we completed the QA phase with the help of the CIG team. We are getting ready to launch MFA for the website and game launcher. In the first phase, you will be able to setup MFA with an email address or by installing our mobile app. If you’re new to MFA, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. There will be a post and tutorial explaining everything, plus a new FAQ page that you can consult at any time. This extra security is optional, but it’s easy to setup and will further protect your information and purchases.
Communication Platform
Internally, we are releasing a functional version of our new communication platform, which includes chat and the new forum. This will go through internal QA only. In the meantime, we are continuing to work on adding features to the platform, such as bookmarking and search. We are eager to share this new platform with the fans, but we have a ways to go yet. Well worth the wait, we can assure you!
Game Launcher
For those of you who’ve been following this column regularly, you know that we have been working with CIG on the new version of the game launcher/patcher. There’s a heavy-duty feature list, and we’ve been listening to CIG’s requests and suggestions. Development continues at a healthy pace, and we’re targeting to release a first version by end of summer.
If you’re new to this column, the new game launcher will support multiple environments (e.g. PTU, live) and multiple games (e.g. Star Citizen, Squadron 42), and will allow for background patching. The interface will be the same as the current version, but future iterations will include more features.
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Ship Happens
June was an exciting month for ship sales. Towards the end of the month we were introduced to the Dragonfly, a speedy little ultralight ship with attitude, to be used as a solo rider or as a swarm of Dragonflies. Two versions were put for sale: a sleek, stealthy looking black version and an in-your-face yellow version for those who want to be seen. Not only were these two variants for sale, but we also saw the return of the Caterpillar, both by itself and in a special package with both Dragonflies and LTI for all three ships; a very exciting combo!
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Best Damn Space Sim Community Ever
The community that never sleeps. Serving a community in as many different time zones, continents and countries is an exciting challenge every month, and in June, we began to restructure our output to better serve the wider audience.
Day-to-Day
June was a month of focused efforts. Work continues on developing the Gamescom presentations for August, including our first real convention showfloor booth, modeled to invoke a sense of the bridge of an Idris. You may attempt to read into that what you like, but we promise it was just a matter of saying:
“Let’s do a fancy booth this year.”
“It’d be cool if it looked like the bridge of an Idris!”
Sometimes, it really is just that simple. =)
In addition to having a cool booth, we’ll be livestreaming gameplay from our latest builds on the showfloor itself over the course of the five days. While it’s still too early to say what that will involve, we’re looking at it as a chance to hang out with our fans both in attendance and abroad, give away some ships and swag, and simply celebrate how far Star Citizen has come in the last year. We anticipate broadcast times will match those of Gamescom operating times.
Broadcasts
June was dedicated to our run-up to our Around the Verse 100 Celebration, with a concentrated effort towards building out the video infrastructure necessary to expand and encompass our studios around the world, in addition to improving the overall presentation of our releases. Many of these changes won’t be visible to the public until July, August, and beyond, but the work that lead to those changes was a strong focus in the month of June, and you can see the beginnings of that work in Around the Verse 100 released on June 30th.
We look forward to sharing the new broadcast plan in the coming weeks once additional details are further cemented.
You Guys
As another month of development passes, so does another month of stories, content videos, and community accomplishments!
Last month, we highlighted the PTU testers, and we have to highlight them again! You all have been an extraordinary help in June, assisting us with getting SC Alpha 2.4.0 and 2.4.1 out the door! Your tireless effort has been greatly appreciated, and we plan to continue utilizing the PTU environment and our Evocati test group in future patches. Thank you!
On the streaming side of things, we were very happy to see the long-awaited return of Geekdomo’s always entertaining stream, Starcast. In addition, we want to give a huge congratulations to Farasalt for taking his streaming endeavor Full-time!
The Austin, TX Bar Citizen events continue to raise the bar every thanks to the amazing efforts put in by Scrapped, Pyrothoric, and Gany. The evening was Jam-packed with good drinks, good people, and of course, a lot of Star Citizen discussion/theorycrafting. If you have not been to a Bar Citizen before, we highly recommend seeing if there is one in your area! Great job guys!
On the Community Hub front, we continue to see incredible content flowing in! Terallian continues to develop his Star Citizen cinematic videos that we all love to see. This guy started learning the Cryengine only 2 months ago, and every video he puts out just gets better and better! Simoniac pulled out all the stops by releasing his USUK Hauling Interactive Starmap that left us all in awe! If you have not seen this thing, you need to stop what you are doing and jump on the Community Hub ASAP! Fantastic work Simoniac!
This community is packed with talented artists of all forms, and we are looking forward to seeing what you all do in the month of July!
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What comes after Alpha 2.4? Alpha 2.5, of course! 2.5 is going to add a major point of interest to the Crusader area: the GrimHex pirate base. As we continue to develop our reputation and faction system, we need a place for pirates to call home rather than having everyone on Port Olisar together. So we’ve built a very cool station with some exciting features you’re going to enjoy. 2.5 will also feature the flyable Reliant and a number of other updates we’ll be discussing in the coming weeks.
It’s also full speed ahead for Gamescom! Cloud Imperium will have a booth on the showfloor to show off Star Citizen, and there will be several chances to catch up with the team outside the convention. Expect to see more details before the next Monthly Report is due!
ATV turns 100! We tour the Foundry 42 UK offices, get an update on 2.5 and the GrimHex pirate station in News From Around the Verse, and check in on updates to the Bengal Carrier in Ship Shape.
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To: leeth
From: scire_facias
Sub: biz prop
2946.6.24.03.42.31SET
leeth-
we need to talk. you dont know me but ive learned alot about you.
was workin in chronos when info about your company found its way to me. nifty little racket youre running. taking a % of resources and supplies your concern ships to the synthworld and diverting them to branaugh instead. funny thing, your companys past 8 quarterly reports dont mention it at all.
guessing some shareholders wouldnt be happy youre sending supplies to a planet of tevs instead of the synthworld. sure there are plenty of competitors willing to pay for such info.
good thing ima reasonable individual and offering you right of 1st refusal. this info will be sold. if not back to you then someone else.
u have 1 SED to respond …
-scire_facias
________________________________
To: scire_facias
From: leeth
Sub: Re: biz prop
2946.6.24.19.21.09SET
I don’t know how you got this account, but understand that I do not respond to blackmail. I will be forwarding your information to local authorities. I’m sure they’ll be in touch.
-L
________________________________
To: leeth
From: scire_facias
Sub: Re: biz prop
2946.6.24.23.11.57SET
hahahahahaha …. maybe the attached will change your mind. if you have any issues interpreting the data then show it to your team. theyll tell you how imperially blasted you are.
btw whats attached isnt even the most interesting breadcrumb you dropped. also leeched a series of comms between you and some associates on branaugh 2. i really liked the message dated 2946.6.13 where you pledged your “undying support” for their future plan.
listen i understand why youre all hot and heavy over this plan. youre a tev with a shipping empire and strong ties to the system. makes you primed to profit big time. sure you could weather the blowback if your connections to this expanding tevarin colony leaks … but what about senator kossi?
you pumped a lot of creds into his campaign to help him win. it wont matter if senator kossi knows about whats happening in branaugh or not. some unscrupulous soul could look at this info and make claims about who is really behind the senator. itd kill his career before it began.
still sure u want me to sell this info to someone else?
-scire_facias
< attachment: leethbranaughbiz.ssp >
________________________________
To: scire_facias
From: leeth
Sub: Re: biz prop
2946.6.25.13.48.22SET
How much to make this go away? I’ll need ironclad assurances.
-L
________________________________
To: leeth
From: scire_facias
Sub: Re: biz prop
2946.6.25.21.47.36SET
as for assurances if i told you i torched everything would you really believe me? in my experience the best way to build trust is through a mutually beneficial business relationship. so heres my offer …
silence is expensive but im not into creds. info is my currency of choice. so youre going to keep giving me updates on what youre shipping into branaugh and how your fellow tevs are progressing on their plan.
do that and ill stay silent. hell – ill even explain how to fix your flawed security so no one else can screw you.
deal?
-scire_facias
________________________________
To: scire_facias
From: leeth
Sub: Re: biz prop
2946.6.26.15.52.08SET
Normally, I avoid doing business with people I don’t know, but you’ve left me no other option. I agree to your terms, and will offer you this as a show of good faith.
Senator Kossi has no idea what’s going on in Branaugh. I’m certain you’ve scoured my comms in search of a smoking gun, but it’s not there. He is a true statesman and wholeheartedly dedicated to making the UEE a better place for all Citizens and civilians.
Come after me all you want, but if Senator Kossi gets dragged into this, there will be severe consequences. What he represents is bigger than both of us. After 300 years, the Tevarin people are just starting to become part of the fabric of this empire. All that progress will be washed away if he gets tied to this.
So I’ll be abundantly clear, if you take Kossi down, I will spare no expense to exact my revenge on you. I’ve worked hard to become a Citizen and stake out my place in this empire, but trust me, I didn’t grow my business into a massive multi-system operation without learning a few tricks. If you ruin him, you’ll only guarantee your own demise.
Now that we’re business partners, I’m trusting you’ll do what’s in the best interest of all parties involved.
-L
________________________________
To: leeth
From: scire_facias
Sub: Re: biz prop
2946.6.27.01.04.33SET
ill expect weekly updates on branaugh. keep feeding me info and we wont have a problem.
Human history is a story of exploration and expansion, written by brave individuals willing to set sail across an uncharted sea or enter an unknown jump point, each driven by the curiosity of what exists just over the horizon. Not asking if they should go there, but only if they could. The Banshee System exemplifies Humanity’s ability to overcome nature’s obstacles. At its center sits a pulsar, spewing enough radiation to make the system’s green zone planetary surfaces inhospitable. Many commonplace activities, like EVAing outside of a ship to perform repairs, can be deadly. Yet Humanity has found a way to call the system home. Maybe not because it should, but because it could.
Banshee’s pulsar is a rapidly rotating blue-white neutron star. Though there are many pulsars in the universe, Banshee’s is the only one discovered so far with jump points connected to it. This fact has led some scientists to hypothesize that the jump points’ proximity to a pulsar could eventually lead to their collapse and cut off the system from the wider universe. This fear permeates popular culture, despite the fact that the 2943 discovery of the Banshee-Tamsa jump has made the system one of the most connected in the UEE; only Terra and Hadrian are currently linked to more systems.
Still, danger and the Banshee System have been synonymous since its discovery in 2317. At the time, the Fora System was crawling with contractors brought in to terraform Hyperion. Spearheaded by Adaliz Dayan, a number of adventurous individuals decided to spend their free time exploring the system. The group dubbed themselves the Immram Association and exploration became a popular way for workers to enjoy their free time between shifts. One day, Dayan’s scans picked up a mysterious pocket of radiation in the middle of space. She sent a comm to her fellow IA members to investigate the anomaly. By the time others arrived, Dayan was gone.
IA members assumed Dayan had found a new jump point, but were unable to locate it themselves; when she didn’t re-emerge, they soon grew concerned and contacted the government. Eventually, a military pathfinder unit was dispatched to her coordinates to begin a search. When they finally discovered the jump point, what would come to be known as the Banshee System and its radiation spewing pulsar waited on the other side.
Sadly, Adaliz Dayan and her ship were never found. It is assumed she perished due to a pulsar flare and that her ship still drifts through space. Conscious of her sacrifice, Dayan was credited with discovering the system, and the Immram Association allowed to name it. They settled on the nickname Dayan earned during her college Sataball days and the system formally became Banshee — a doubly fitting title as the association with the ancient creature of myth served well to warn people of the system’s inherent dangers.
Wary of the hazards the Banshee System and its pulsar posed to the public, the government didn’t herald its discovery. They even passed a bill making it illegal for unauthorized ships to enter the system. Tensions came to a head in the early 26th century as Earth’s overcrowding reached cataclysmic levels. A legal argument erupted over whether the government had the right to ban people from a system. Many worried a future government could abuse this power to hide valuable land and/or minerals.
This led to the landmark Minto vs UPE court case that nullified the government’s permanent ban. The decision opened the Banshee System to all, and is also the reason the UEE cannot legally keep people from venturing into Vanduul space.
Curious members of the public, and numerous private interests, entered the system and quickly saw they weren’t missing much. Though massive deposits of raw materials existed on Lorona (Banshee III) no one could figure out how to safely extract them. Until, as has been the case numerous times in Human history, war catapulted technology to a new frontier.
During the First Tevarin War, Persei-based UPARQ developed massive magnetic coils designed to weaponize solar electromagnetic radiation. Though the project failed, UPARQ realized the coils could be an ideal method to collect power in the Banshee System. It wasn’t long before autonomous drilling rigs, powered by panels of these connected coils, bored into Lorona’s surface and allowed Humanity a place to hide from the pulsar’s effects. Today Lorona’s landing zones are lined with these iconic coils that power the vast settlements and mining operations beneath the planet’s surface.
TRAVEL WARNING
Refuel and run a complete system diagnosis on your ship prior to entering the Banshee System. Due to the extremely harsh conditions and pulsar fluctuations, rescue and repair operations can be exceedingly risky.
BANSHEE I
This small dwarf planet contains small pockets of mineral resources. However, its proximity to the pulsar makes extracting them a deadly proposition.
BANSHEE II
A terrestrial planet with an iron core. Documents released during the Historical Truth Act of 2941 revealed that a secret Messer era operation removed a number of specific swaths of the planet’s heavily irradiated surface. The intention of the operation, or what was done with the extracted sections, was not found within the documentation and remains unknown to this day.
BANSHEE III (Lorona)
Were it not for the vast resources of Lorona, many say the UEE would never have claimed the Banshee System. Today, it’s an essential and irreplaceable part of the universal supply chain. Extensive mining operations extract everything from precious metals to short carbon for the diamond laminate in cockpit glass.
The planet’s riches and inhospitable surface have driven Humanity to create a vast system of underground settlements connected by tunnels, a network that continues to expand to this day. When mining operations begin drilling and excavating new areas, the previous dig sites frequently become home to settlements of workers and their families. Some of these encampments want to trade with outsiders, while others prefer to be left alone. To avoid any confusion, we recommend not venturing into the tunnel system without a local guide.
Once deep enough underground to not have to wear radiation suits, or “Below the Line” in local slang, visitors spend most of their time in Kesseli, the capital and one of the largest subterranean cities in the universe. Though still a mining settlement at its core, the amount a valuable resources moving through the city have brought a measure of wealth to the inhabitants.
Under a ubiquitous layer of dust, numerous Empire-wide franchises have a presence here to supply locals, traders and visitors alike. One can even find high-end restaurants servicing well-paid mining executives. Lorona’s local culinary treasure is undoubtedly the Beutrempe, a sweet or savory puff pastry that uses a yeast strain native to the world to give a uniquely tangy taste. These delicious delicacies are on the menus of most restaurants, but can more easily be found baked in stalls set up near the most trafficked tunnels.
BANSHEE IV
In the 27th century, the Cenote Concern undertook an ambitious business plan to turn this distantly orbiting ice giant into an industrial source of heavy water. The plan famously failed and subsequently drove the company out of business.
HEARD IN THE WIND
“Haulers take heed or the death for which this Banshee keens will be your own.”
– Old Folk Saying
“Take the worst, most awful place in the ’verse, and you can be damn sure there’s not only someone who wants to live there, but who will think you’re crazy for wanting to live anywhere else. These are my people.”
– Senator Junger Ries, Lorona, address to constituent dinner, 2943
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< BEGIN TRANSMISSION >
I’m Garret Coliga and welcome to another episode of TRACKER with all the latest news, tech and tips from around the bounty hunting ’verse. So settle in, we’ve got a good one for you.
Today’s show is brought to you by Klaus & Werner, makers of reliable energy weapons like the Model II Arclight. Trust me, I’ve used one of those bad boys for years and it’s never done me wrong. So, if you’re in the market for a new energy weapon for your ship or personal loadout, do what I do and start your search with Klaus & Werner.
Let’s dig into some official Bounty Hunter Guild news by checking the HotSheet. Remember these bounties are considered current as of the recording of this show, but might not stay that way. As always, check with your local Bounty Hunter Guild branch or the nearest law enforcement agency to confirm which bounties are active in your area.
Here’s one I haven’t seen before. Tre Wiebo is wanted for what’s being described as eco-terrorism in Gurzil. Apparently, this guy has been targeting miners in the system as a form of protest. He’s also been leaving copies of his manifesto after each attack. In it he goes into great detail saying how we must protect Gurzil so it can “naturally form.” Seems Mr. Wiebo has become very attached to this swirling mass of protoplanets to the point of violence.
Now, although to date, Wiebo has not killed anyone, his MO is to disable mining vessels with EMP strikes before delivering damage that’s devastating to the ship, but not life-threatening to its crew. Basically, this guy’s goal is to keep mining ships from leaving the system with the resources they’ve collected. Even though Wiebo isn’t dangerous in the traditional sense, he’s a gifted pilot who is extremely skilled at non-lethal combat. My recommendation would be to approach him on the ground if at all possible.
Next, we’ve got several credible reports of “Hot” Rod Rettenmund being spotted in two systems. The notorious ship jacker seemingly vanished over two years ago after escaping Tanys’ Advocacy Office and swiping one of their Stalkers. Ever since, his trail has been colder than the streets of Jele City.
That all changed four days ago when “Hot” Rod was spotted by multiple face-recs in the Fora System. Those reports were followed by a more recent update of him in Nemo where his trail seemed to indicate that he was desperately searching for a top-of-the-line scanner. No word on what spooked him out of the hole he was hiding in, but if I were a betting man, he appears to be making a run into Banu space through Corel. Of course, he’s surprised us before, so nothing can be certain with this guy.
Hearing about the reappearance of “Hot” Rod Rettenmund got me thinking about an old friend of mine, Louise Boyd. She’s carved out quite an interesting niche for herself by working cold cases. She agreed to come on the show to talk to us about this often forgotten aspect of bounty hunting. Great to have you here, Louise!
Louise Boyd: Hey there, Garret. Thrilled to join you. Quite a show you’ve got here.
Thanks. So you’ve built your reputation around finding criminals who have seemingly vanished. Many bounty hunters avoid cold cases due to their difficulty and low clearance rate, so why’d you decide to start working them?
Louise Boyd: Necessity more than anything else. There was a time about thirty years ago when I was running out of options to earn an honest living, so I walked into my local Bounty Hunter Guild branch and asked about opportunities.
At that time, I didn’t have any experience hunting criminals, but I’d grown up hearing stories from my grandfather, who was a respected bounty hunter himself. All those years, while he was entertaining me with his stories, turns out he was really teaching me bounty hunting tradecraft. Though in hindsight, it was a bit like thinking I could be a pilot because I had seen a photo of an M50 once.
You still recall anything you learned from his tales?
Louise Boyd: Absolutely! The first point that comes to mind is also the one thing I tell any young and hungry bounty hunter that asks me for advice — the best catch is a peaceful one.
My grandfather’s favorite stories were never about big gun battles or epic dogfights. Once he located his bounty, he loved to use deception. It allowed him to get in close and create confusion right before making the arrest. One he loved to tell involved him dressing up as a food delivery guy and knocking on this guy’s door with a fake order.
I think nowadays hunters call that “Baggin’ a Benny.” Did your grandfather inspire you to work cold cases?
Louise Boyd: Not that I recall.
So what drew you to them?
Louise Boyd: To start? To be honest, it was the lack of competition. Same reason I always ate the licorice flavored Gelbees growing up. I went after the high paying jobs at first like everyone else, but surprise, surprise, bounty hunters with years more experience or connections would beat me to the punch. I just hadn’t built up the skills or knowledge I needed to compete on that level, yet there were these piles of cold cases just sitting there that no one else wanted to touch.
I knew most people avoided cold cases because of the reasons you mentioned above, but I figured it would give me the chance to work a case at my own pace, and if I made an error or two, the stakes were much lower. So I picked one involving this woman who ran a ship insurance fraud ring for years, then vanished only days before the Advocacy was set to indict her. Turns out, I got lucky and ended up figuring out where she went.
Don’t be so modest, Louise, you’re one of the best bloodhounds I know. Which makes me wonder, why have you stuck with cold cases all these years?
Louise Boyd: Well, there are a few reasons. Generally, they’re safer than chasing normal bounties. Sometimes, it’s because the bounty has been hiding so successfully that they never see you coming. Other times, they’ve lived in fear of being captured for so long that they’re almost relieved you found them. I’m sure that sounds funny to some of your listeners, but everyone carries guilt in their own way. Many of my easiest collars come on people who did horrific things decades ago, and have had to live with that guilt while going unpunished.
Also, there’s no better feeling than contacting a family to tell them you’ve closed a cold case that affected them. The feeling is, well, almost indescribable. Being able to provide closure to people who never thought there was a chance for it.
That’s some really inspiring stuff, right there. So we need to take a quick commercial break. When we return, Louise is going to share with us her top five tips to help you crack that cold case. Plus, we’ll walk you through adjusting the scope on a Klaus & Werner Arrowhead sniper rifle to make sure you’re taking the perfect shot. That and more when TRACKER returns.
“The most important thing is to have a connection to your ride. Your ship needs to be your friend, your family. Why would you ever trust your life to something you didn’t love?” - Kyle Valentino, founder of the Lonely Hearts Dragonfly Club
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Where can you go with the Drake Dragonfly? You’re on Terra. Take a look at the horizon and pick out any point. A looming mountain, a faraway alien ocean teaming with life, a distant megapolis. You’ll be there in no time. Now you’re on Port Olisar. Crane your neck up and pick anything in the heavens. A blazing star, a desolate moon, a looming asteroid. The Dragonfly, Drake’s first ultralight ship, will take you there… and beyond!
Drake Interplanetary is fond of claiming that they build starships for the way you live; with the Dragonfly, they’ve gone an extra step and built a new way of life around the ship itself. Highly compact for easy storage anywhere and capable of traversing both space and ground, the 2947 Dragonfly changes the way we think about ships.
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Durable and inexpensive, the Dragonfly can be operated by a lone rider, a team of two or serve as part of an intergalactic ‘motorcycle gang.’ Like other Drake ships, it is designed to operate alongside other ship platforms: imagine loading up a Caterpillar with a trio of Dragonflies, flying close support and retrieval for a Cutlass Red ambulance or strafing a massive cargo ship. It’s all possible with the 2947 Drake lineup.
The new Dragonfly is available now for preorder in an exclusive yellow early adopters’ variant. A selection of other packs are also available below, including a “Ride Together” two-pack that includes both the limited edition yellow Dragonfly and the standard production black model. Whether you’re looking forward to feeling the wind in your hair as you rocket across planetary surfaces or whether you want to experience nothing but your suit and your thrusters separating you from the void, the Dragonfly is ready.
Not just a ship, a way of life! This brochure, straight from Drake Interplanetary, introduces this ultralight snub and the unique culture surrounding it.
Feel that? It’s pure acceleration. The Dragonfly isn’t a ship, it’s an seamless extension of your whole body. There’s nothing between you and the void... and like all great pilots, you can hear the void calling. The Drake Dragonfly is fully rated to operate in planetary orbit, deep space and beyond.
What good is traveling the stars if you’re stuck taking a bus at your destination? The Drake Dragonfly doesn’t just tear up the spacelanes, it effortlessly adapts to planetary ground travel, both on and off-road! Whether you’re blazing trails on a newly discovered world or just want to run circles around the 9-to-5 crowd on their commute, there’s no other choice.
Take a good look at the Dragonfly, because under normal circumstances all you’re going to see is its dust. The Dragonfly is built around a simple philosophy: there’s nothing more important than acceleration and manoeuvrability. The fully open pilot’s seat and the rear-facing passenger slot allow the Dragonfly to behave more like a surgical instrument than a ship. Go ahead, leave them all behind.
Who says you can’t take it with you? You already know the Dragonfly goes where you go... and it’s also designed to live how you live. With the smallest available footprint and a compact design, the Dragonfly can easily stow away in an over-crowded garage, the tightest hangar or the smallest capital ship. Because part of owning a reliable machine should be having it there when you need it.
Don’t just be the first to own a new Dragonfly, show the world. The Drake Dragonfly is being produced in a launch-exclusive yellowjacket-and-chrome paint scheme to inaugurate a new kind of travel. This scheme is available only through authorized pre-orders. See your Drake Interplanetary dealer today, before it’s too late.
Want to get where you’re going without so much flash? The standard production model of the Dragonfly includes the Singularity paint scheme, featuring a deep black look with matte highlights. It’s elite sophistication and genuine class for a ship that doesn’t need to beg for either. Other color options are available, see your local Drake Interplanetary dealer for details.
You already know how reliable the Drake Caterpillar platform is. We’re pleased to announce that the Dragonfly has been designed specifically to work alongside the Caterpillar’s existing infrastructure. Up to three Dragonflies can be stored in each of this very hungry ship’s modular cargo units and deployed while in flight. There’s no better way to get a squadron of Dragonflies from place to place than aboard a Drake Caterpillar!
The 'Cat is designed for versatility above all else. The distinctive doors on the front and side bays allow easy transfer of goods and equipment while spaceborne, quickly expanding the ship's original search and rescue role. The cargo areas been adapted to fit a host of needs including Merchant Marine resupply ship, small-scale mobile salvage platform and traditional merchant transport.
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The Drake Dragonfly is intended to offer an even lighter type of utility snub ship than the Merlin or Archimedes. Though it is smaller, the Dragonfly is unquestionably meaner… and its ability to be used as both planetary and space transportation sets it apart like nothing else! (Note that the exposed cockpit means that the Dragonfly cannot re-enter; it must be carried to and from a planet by a larger ship. Like other snubs, it does not feature a quantum drive.)
When we first imagined the Dragonfly, we pictured a motorcycle gang of space pirates pouring out of a Caterpillar to take on a convoy. The Dragonfly is so inexpensive and so ubiquitous that it’s the perfect choice for a budget-conscious pirate gang… or any group that values the bottom line above strict safety limits. Beware the shipmaster who offers you a slot aboard a Dragonfly, he might just be sending you on a suicide mission!
From there, we realized that the Dragonfly would be less a ship and more an essential tool, an intergalactic pocket-knife that’s small enough, fast enough and maneuverable enough to get itself into tight spots where other ships wouldn’t dare tread. With the ability to traverse planet surfaces, the Dragonfly isn’t just the tool of a pirate… it’s useful for explorers hoping to get the lay of the land or anyone else wanting to move from place to place quickly.
How much fun is the Dragonfly? You’ll find out sooner than you expect! Star Citizen’s designers have already begun setting up this new ship in the engine… because we’re as excited to jet around with so much freedom, too! Keep following the Comm-Link for updates on the Dragonfly’s status. We hope you enjoy this ‘different’ concept and we can’t wait for everyone to go riding on the spacelanes!
Caterpillar Update
Caterpillar Update
Drake’s smallest ship isn’t the only one in the works right now… we’re also building out their largest! Cloud Imperium’s engineers, designers and artists are working to bring the Caterpillar into the engine as we speak. Since the Dragonfly is intended to complement the Caterpillar, we’ve decided to offer you a sneak peek at some of that work. Keep following the Comm-Link for more on the Caterpillar, including a behind-the-scenes look at the work going into it in an upcoming Around the Verse!
Like all Drake ships, the Caterpillar has versatility in its DNA. With multiple cargo bays available to be repurposed for a multitude of functions, the Caterpillar’s modular design allows it to be perfect for everything from armored cargo hauls to effective search and rescues. And, when paired with the new 2947 Dragonfly, the Caterpillar can add one more role to its already impressive roster: a mini carrier. That’s right, the Cat can launch Dragonflies directly from the cargo hold as protection fighters or as agile scouts!
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ATV Excerpt – Behind the Scenes of the Dragonfly
Concept sale
About the Sale
The Dragonfly is being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar or to fight in Star Citizen. The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add a Dragonfly poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Dragonfly mini ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Life Time Insurance or these extras. Dragonfly model will be the yellow version.
If you’d like to add one to your fleet, they’re available in the pledge store until June 27, 2016. You can also view a detail of the Dragonfly in the Holo Viewer in the Tech Overview of the ship page, and be sure to enjoy the Drake Dragonfly brochure, an in-universe artifact straight from Drake Interplanetary headquarters!
As with every Concept Sale, we will also be doing a Q&A post. For the Drake Dragonfly, we’ll be taking questions here in this thread and posting the answers next week. Look for the Comm-Link Schedule next week to find out when that post will go up!
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game. In the case of the limited-edition yellow scheme Dragonfly, a limited number proportionate to those sold will be made available in the ‘Verse upon ship launch for players who do not want to purchase during this sale. Going forward, Drake will produce the black variant for in-game sales.
Additionally, please note that the Dragonfly will be entering the ship pipeline now, it has been fast tracked for engine integration, with designers already working to enable it in-game. All decorative ‘flare’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches.
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Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 is now live! This major update to Star Citizen’s persistent universe is now available in your launcher. Alpha 2.4 introduces the first iteration of in-game persistence and shopping, as well as major changes to the controls, updates to the ship roster (including making the massive Starfarer flyable in-game), bug fixes, balance updates and more! In short, this is our biggest and most important update since Star Citizen Alpha 2.0.
You can read all about the new systems below, and find a complete list of changes in the 2.4 Patch Notes here.
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Star Citizen Alpha 2.4.0 welcomes the Stafarers to the skies! Not only has the base Starfarer become flight-ready, but the Gemini variant is being introduced as well and will be hangar and flight-ready too! These massive tankers have multiple decks and crew support for seven people, making it our largest flyable ship in-game so far.
If you missed out on your chance to pick up either the Base Starfarer or the Gemini variant, both are now on sale! These ships will be available on the pledge store through 6/20.
You can read more about the Starfarer in our original post here!
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In addition to the Starfarer duo, Alpha 2.4.0 introduces the MISC Reliant to the hangar!
With a larger cargo hold than the Aurora ES or the Mustang Alpha, the Reliant is a natural choice for anyone engaging in short-haul shipping. And that cargo space also means there’s plenty of internal room to expand, allowing the placement of medical systems, weapons racks and more. Ultimately, though, the Reliant is no transport: it’s a sleek and maneuverable utility ship more than capable of holding its own in combat!
You can read more about the Reliant in our original post here!
Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches. Ship types sold during limited sales will be available to earn in the finished game.
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This patch also brings another potential deadly weapon to your arsenal! Going forward, we want to put more emphasis on creating mechanically interesting ship weapons, rather than extra multiples of classics like the laser/ballistic cannons.
We are excited to introduce you to the Amon & Reese Pyroburst. The Pyroburst is a size 3 plasma scattergun, firing 8 proximity detonating plasma rounds per shot. This bad boy is great for a defensive loadout on a turret or a boom and zoom loadout on a fighter.
You can pick up the Pyroburst on the Voyager Direct Store here!
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That’s right, you read that correctly. Our Persistent Universe is finally persistent! The backend functionality has been completed and there are several things that you do in the game that will carry over between sessions. Many of these are detailed below, but include things like purchased items in shops, Alpha UEC balance, and hostility level.
Adding persistence is a huge milestone and a crucial addition to the game that will affect nearly every aspect of Star Citizen, and this is only the beginning! A ton of back-end work was completed in order to make this possible and we are looking forward to the updates to come as we continue to expand and flesh out this core foundation of the game!
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With this release we are implementing a brand new currency, called “Alpha UEC”. This currency exists purely as a test currency and is designed to test out economy balance, item pricing, mission rewards, and more. We’ll monitor the activity of the initial wave of Alpha UEC and improve and iterate on the features mentioned. At any point this currency, and anything purchased with it, can be wiped so that a clean slate can be instituted and we can begin a new cycle of testing. (Anything purchased with real UEC on the Voyager Direct site will still be available and will persist as it previously did.)
As well as rewards, you will now also be charged for services at Cry-Astro. This is an initial implementation so some services are “all or nothing” in that, for instance, you cannot repair specific items on your ship – you have to repair the whole thing.
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It’s time for a Shopping Spree! With 2.4.0. we finally release the first iteration of purchasable items in shops. We have a few different shops open for business with more to follow soon after. They offer a variety of merchandise that can be purchased with our brand new currency Alpha UEC. For this iteration, you can also use this interface to equip an item you’ve already purchased. Proper storage and inventory solutions will come at a later date.
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Casaba Outlet can be found at Area18 as well as Port Olisar and sells a variety of shirts, jackets, pants, hats and shoes. Each individual piece of clothing can be interacted with and purchased. Looking at an item in AR Mode displays the price, manufacturer, product description, and two Use Verbs: “Try On” and “Purchase”. “Try On” allows you to view how the item would look before making a purchase. Selecting “Purchase” will take the player to the purchase summary screen. The price of the item is listed, as well as a product description, the amount of credits the player has available, a button to confirm the purchase is present and a large “X” at the top right to cancel the purchase and close the window. Selecting “Purchase” will deduct the price from the player’s AUEC balance and equip the item on the player. Once the item has been purchased, you can come back to the shop to re-equip the item at any time with the “Equip” option.
Cubby Blast
Cubby Blast can be found on Area18 and sells weapons, ammo, medpacks, armor, and flight suits. The interface for interacting with items in Cubby Blast is very similar to Trying and Purchasing clothing at Casaba Outlet. For weapons, you can “Inspect” instead of “Try On.” The main difference here being when inspecting weapons, it will stay in 1P camera so you can get a feel for the item in your hands. In addition to weapons, there is also a variety of Armor Sets and several new RSI Flight Suits. (Treated in the same manner as clothing when it comes to the Use Verbs.)
Live Fire Weapons
Live Fire Weapons is the resident personal weapon vendor on Port Olisar in the space above Crusader. It too sells weapons, ammo, and medpacks. The interface for interacting with items in Live Fire Weapons is the same as Cubby Blast.
Garrity Defense
Garrity Defense is where you can go to purchase body armor and some of our brand new RSI flight suits. It is located on Port Olisar as well. The interface for interacting with items in Garrity Defense is the same as Casaba Outlet. Helmets and armor are packaged together into a single purchase.
You now have two outfits you can switch between – a set of clothing you can wear indoors and your flightsuit. You will wake at Olisar wearing your indoor clothing. If you plan to head out into space you will have to change into your flightsuit or risk explosive decompression in the airlock. You can change your outfit in two locations – in your bedroom with a new wardrobe, or at the valet units beside every airlock.
You will find a wardrobe in your bedroom which will switch your clothes between civilian and spacesuit.
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Crusader Security has noticed that its currently unmanned security post is regularly subject to trespass, theft and systems tampering. They are now contracting out the facility’s security to those they have noticed doing lawful work.
You should be rewarded for missions by the amount shown in the mobiGlas beneath the objectives for the mission.
Some mission reward bonuses such as the PI mission awarding a bonus the next time you go to Olisar if you complete the mission in the “good” way. And the security guard mission rewards bonuses for every trespasser you kill at Kareah.
You can now earn UEC by scavenging whisky and cigars. You will find these around Yela and also dotted around some of the ICC probe asteroid missions. There is a cheeky noodle based decay box in there too.
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With 2.4.0. we have released a new app in the mobiGlas that enables Port Modification Mode. This mode causes “Item Ports” to appear in the Hangars that you can use to customize your hangars in ways not able to previously. There are 2 different types of Item Ports currently: Ports that hold ships and Ports that hold flair objects. Clicking on an Item Port will bring up a list of available items via the player mobiGlas app. This list contains the following: the name of the currently placed item (none if the port is empty), a list of items the player possesses that can be placed at this port, the “Remove” button to take the currently placed item off the Item Port and place it back in the inventory, and the “Cancel” button to exit the item list without making any changes. The player can access the item list by selecting an Item Port, or by selecting the Modification App button from the front page of mobiGlas, however this method only allows you to place items if you selected an Item Port first.
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As mentioned above, ships can be placed on an item port just like flair, as long as the port is a ship spawner. These Item Ports can be found on the landing pads in each Hangar; interacting with one of these will bring up a list of ships the player owns (as well as other vehicles, such as the Greycat). In addition, once a ship has been placed in the Hangar it will have Item Ports on it for the weapon hardpoints, shields, thrusters, etc. These components can be swapped out and customized (as long as the player has components that fit in their place). It works in exactly the same way as placing flair; once you interact with an Item Port a list of items that can fit in that port will be displayed. This will allow players to change weapon loadouts, swap out missiles or ammo, and change shields among other things.
Hangar Selection
With this release we have transitioned the hangar configuration functionality from the website to the Main Menu. In the main menu (accessed by pressing escape on your keyboard, and clicking “Options”) you can select which hangar you’d like to load. For this release we’ve restricted the hangars to one stock bay each. In the future you’ll be able to use the Port Modification app to expand your hangar and add new bays.
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As Star Citizen has expanded, moving on from its early days as a Flight only space sim to bring in On Foot and EVA modes, the game’s control scheme has become more and more esoteric and disjointed – the intention then, with a redesign of the game’s default control mappings, was to re-evaluate the placement of the most important actions while also unifying them across all modes as much as possible.
Giving important actions more intuitive placement on each device was an obvious requirement – and this was what we tackled first – bringing MobiGlas for example, with its ever increasing usability, right to the fore. From then, we needed to delve into the unification. So how then do you start to bring things together across all 3 modes (Flight, On Foot and EVA)? For this we identified two very important factors to inform the design.
Firstly, we looked for commonalities between the three different modes of gameplay – this resulted in us viewing EVA as a possible cipher. EVA is the in-game bridge between On Foot and Flight – so we looked to see if it could also bridge the controls as well. From here the unification work was guided using the question of “When the player runs and jumps off a platform – should the jump button continue to push the player up?”. We said “yes” and developed on from there.
Secondly, we felt that the old mappings weren’t the best at utilising 6DOF, so we wanted to see if there was a way to improve in this area at the same time. Improving the ease in which a player could move between the 6DOF actions as well as making it possible for the player to layer these movements together (without too much trouble) were the key points we identified to improve 6DOF gameplay.
Before moving on to show what has been unified, let’s first dig down a little into what it actually means to unify the controls. As we worked through the unification process, we realised there were two different types of unification to consider: Global and Contextual. Breaking these two ideas down should hopefully explain our approach in more detail.
Global unification covers both the consistent placement of actions that exist in all modes – for example, previously, changing the camera view on gamepad was different for Flight and On Foot modes – and also the grouping of actions sensibly for the device across all modes – here the example is making all the keys used in movement always be the same in all modes.
Contextual unification carries this idea further getting sensible matching keys for similar actions that exist in the different modes. The best example here (that also demonstrates how much Global and Contextual overlap) is sprint from (On Foot) matching up with boost (Flight); two different actions that make perfect sense to go together and create a unified “go faster” movement key.
Expanding this idea further still, we have the grouping of keys in the same mode contextually. The example here being Free Look on [ Z ] and Look Behind on left [ ALT ] + [ Z ]. These actions were considered related because they activate different ways of viewing the game.
And also – carrying unification on to the very extremes – we wanted to explore the potential for keeping these contextual actions grouped between devices – so that when we paired actions together on the keyboard mapping we would consider, could they also be paired on the gamepad?
Clearly then, this was always going to be a complicated process – but one that if we could get right would help remove some of the control boundaries SC had created over the past year. Moving on then, lets outline the unification achieved.
Global Unification
These actions are consistent across all modes (per device):
• Movement
• Pause & MobiGlas
• Contacts, Chat and 2D UI Cursor
• Interact / Use
• Cycle Camera View
• Freelook / Orbit Cam
• Modifiers
Contextual Unification
The tables below show which actions have been paired up between each device.
Keyboard:
On Foot / EVA
Flight
Move Forwards / Backwards
Throttle Up / Down
Strafe Left Right
Strafe Left / Right
Aim Up / Down
Pitch Up / Down
Aim Left / Right
Yaw Left / Right
Lean Left / Right
Roll Left / Right
Jump, Strafe Up
Strafe Up
Crouch, Strafe Down
Strafe Down
Primary Attack
Weapon Group 1
Weapon Stance / Walk
IFCS mode shift
Reload
Reticle Focus
Sprint
Boost / Afterburner
Use Item
Launch Countermeasure
Cycle Item
Cycle Countermeasure
Melee
Missile Lock / Fire
Force respawn
Self-destruct
Change Fire Mode
Decoupled Mode Toggle
EVA Brake
Spacebrake
Gamepad:
On Foot / EVA
Flight
Move Forwards / Backwards
Throttle Up / Down
Aim Up / Down
Pitch Up / Down
Aim Left / Right
Yaw Left / Right
Weapon Stance / Walk
IFCS mode shift
Select Firearms
Targeting
Sprint
Boost / Afterburner
Change Fire Mode
Automatic Landing
Primary Attack
Weapon Group 1
Use Item
Launch Countermeasure
Force respawn
Self-destruct
As you can see by the tables, it was a lot easier to do the contextual unification with the keyboard than the Gamepad (due to its obvious limitations for a game as complex as SC). In fact, the Gamepad’s problems were essentially this fundamental clash between the unification we wanted and the potential detriment to player usability. And, as our revisionary design process went on, there were plenty of times where it felt like we were punishing QA with our unified schemes…
In the end then, compromises were made on the Gamepad. As mentioned earlier, on the keyboard we made sure that Freelook and Look Behind were on the same key – Look Behind being the modified version of the same key – as we felt like it made contextual sense to do so. However, it was determined that the Decouple Toggle was a more important action than the Look Behind – so we made the Decouple Toggle the modified version of Freelook instead (activated with the combined press of [ LB ] + [ R3 ]). The thumbstick clicks being better placement for important actions due to the player not needing to relax the sticks during a dogfight.
Another example of this on the gamepad was the choice to make Roll the primary action on the [ LS ] X-axis instead of Strafe Left / Right – which would have matched with on foot and EVA. The decision ultimately was that Roll was more useful in Flight – relegating Strafe Left / Right to the modified version of the [ LS ] X-axis.
As for the keyboard, while it clearly had more real-estate to play with, there were still limitations to find ways around. For us, the importance of not having to move the keyboard hand away from the movement keys was pivotal. And it was this that the keyboard placement was built around; what do we need to fit around WASD to make SC easier to play?
We believe the new Keyboard and Mouse layout makes it easier for the player to potentially strafe up/down, strafe left/right, roll left/right, yaw left/right, pitch up/down, fire weapons, fire countermeasures, boost and more simultaneously… without shifting the keyboard hand position. A big factor in this improvement was to bring in [ SPACEBAR ] and left [ CTRL ] as the strafe up and down keys – so that the thumb and pinkie fingers could be used as part of the movement controls.
Obviously, allowing the pinkie and thumb to come into play in this manner was done to match things up with the on foot and EVA modes, but there was more to it than that in the end. Selecting these keys, freed up some more keys near to WASD for other actions – allowing us to rethink which pivotal controls should be within easy reach.
Clearing other actions off of the [ F ] key has allowed us to pin this key down as a contextual “interact” action. This means that in all situations the player can think of the [ F ] key as the only way of initiating or activating – clearing up another problem we had with our old USE key being used to strafe down. Also, in the long term, we’re going to need to lean on this key even heavier as we expand upon the player interactions via the Inner Thought system.
We then chose to utilise the [ R ] key for the reticule focus action – meaning the closet targeting action was the one that allowed the player to lock onto the thing they were looking at. Hopefully simplifying things on that front too.
These changes did pose one fairly complicated issue; what to do with spacebrake? Since we had opted to move it off of the space key for the strafe up action. I think it’s interesting to walk through the problems this created, and the controversial way in which we looked to fix it that we ended up dropping.
The functions of spacebrake are first to slow the ship throttle to 0 and then second to return to the starting throttle when released. Trouble was, double tapping [ S ] would set the throttle to 0 as well, so the only thing spacebrake was adding that was unique was the return to previous speed functionality. After considering this, we wondered if it was not better to place the action behind a modifier to free up space for other actions. However, when we tried putting it behind the modifier on [ X ], the feedback was overwhelmingly negative – due to how often the key is used by SC players. Here’s the feedback from our QA:
“This is such an awkward and counter-intuitive key combination to press, for something that a player would expect to be able to do instantly and in the heat of combat maneuvers. It discourages the use of space brake. And it is much more difficult to press in intense situations such as maneuvering and combat.”
Community feedback also confirmed this strong dislike! So we were left with no option but to look at installing the action back as a non-modified key press. The problem now of course, was that we didn’t have a place for it. Thus, another round of key juggling was needed. This actually resulted in the moving of the freelook key to [ Z ] and the landing mode back it its original place on [ N ].
I think it’s also worth addressing our decision to put the Gamepad throttle on the on the [ LS ] too. While some might point to this as an example of the unification going too far, we think that would be overlooking the benefits of the unification and of having an analog control of the throttle. Using the relative analog control on the [ LS ] means we have more granularity over the control of the throttle. As it was, the gamepad used a digital throttle the same as the keyboard – which we felt was not really making the best use of the anaolg controls at our disposal. Some have likened this new setup to be like a “mini HOTAS” which we are pleased with.
Leaving [ CAPSLOCK ] empty was, at first, something we didn’t think would be possible – giving up a key so close to the movement actions. We wanted [ CAPSLOCK ] to be free since SC is a game, that as it grows, will rely more and more on in-game communication. We really wanted to avoid the frustration of the “accidental shout” if it was possible.
Those that peaked ahead to the mappings might have spotted the Tab key being empty – this was done with a view to new control features coming soon. We definitely didn’t want to get stuck without a place for something we’ve deemed to be so important to S42…
Hopefully then this report has helped to explain just how much work has gone into this controls revision process as well as highlighting the improvements we’ve made to make the controls in SC unified for 2.4.0.
However, if you’re really reluctant to change then we’ve still got you covered with our new legacy mapping profiles. So as part of this redesign we made sure to include the old control schemes as loadable profiles – we’ve created layout_gamepad_Legacy and layout_keyboard_legacy mappings that can be loaded in in the Advanced Controls Customisation menu or by using the command pp_rebindkeys in the console. Just press [ ` ] and then type in pp_rebindkeys layout_keyboard_legacy or pp_rebindkeys layout_gamepad_legacy to revert back.
NEW CONTROL LAYOUT
Throughout the course of Star Citizen's development, we have made lots of changes to our control scheme. In this, 2.4 provides another major revision to our controls. To help, we've put together this handy PDF file that Citizens can use to help with the adjustment.
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We want to thank all of the incredible PTU testers for their patience and dedication in helping us get 2.4 out the door! We are very proud to have such a supportive community and could not have done it without them!
Since 2.4.0 was pushed to PTU, 492 Evocati accounts (our NDA test group) logged in 26,502 times over eight builds, providing 1,401 bug reports of various severity levels.
In total during 2.4.0 testing, where PTU 1st Wave and all Subscribers were added, 8,582 accounts logged in 185,009 times over the twenty builds of 2.4.0 on PTU, adding 3,086 bug reports… and 65 accounts logged into all 20 builds!!
This has become an instrumental component to testing a build before it goes to Live. We’ll be adding to our Evocati and PTU ranks later this summer, and the best way to get involved is by helping contribute to existing bug reports on the Issue Council, or adding new reports if one doesn’t exist!”
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This month’s Subscriber Flair is the Aegis Sabre ship model! This realistic ship model from Takuetsu Starships, the most trusted name in ship models, is the thirteenth in a collection of Star Citizen’s ships. Display your Sabre with pride, and then collect other models to complete the display.
If you’re an active subscriber, the flair will be attributed to your account today. If you subscribe over the weekend, the Sabre model will be attributed to your account on Tuesday June 14th! More information about subscriptions can be found here.
Please note that the models will be distributed to your accounts today, but they will not show up in the hangar until Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 is available on the live service. Sabre owners who purchased the ship during the initial concept sale will recieve a limited edition version of the model in a unique livery. This will be distributed in a future patch.
As most of you know, we’ve been working hard to launch Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 this month. The patch is currently on the PTU undergoing testing from our backers. As they can attest, we’re battling some blockers largely related to networking. We’re making good progress, and will keep you updated… we’re as eager as anyone to see our backers battling it out aboard Starfarers, shopping for clothes and earning in-game currency. Meanwhile, development goes on for all aspects of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, whether they’re intended for Alpha 2.4 or a future release. Without further ado, here’s May, 2016 straight from the developers that lived it!
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West Coast, Best Coast
Hello Citizens of the Stars. Once again it is that time where we share what our developers in the City of Angels have been up to. Needless to say, getting 2.4.0 out the door has completely dominated all of our schedules. Ensuring we release a quality product to you is always our top priority; however, doing so requires quite a large amount of attention to detail when you are attempting to create one of the most technically advanced games ever. So let us recount what each team at the CIG-LA office has been up to during what has been an unusually overcast-weathered month of May.
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Much of what is happening in 2.4.0 is based upon what the Engineering team has been laying down tracks for. Shopping, persistence, bug fixes, and so much more. While Mark Abent has been focused on the 2.4 Phys Controller and Seat Integration, he and Paul Reindell have been helping the Engineering team in supporting the Persistence and Shopping features.
Ariel Xu has still been poring over his Port Editor and Loadout Editor and has recently implemented simulation parameters into the Loadout Editor. This will allow simulations between similar assets such as collision proxies, ropes, etc. These kinds of internally-built tools help streamline the design and engineering process.
Chad Zamzow has started working on Coolers and Heat Sinks, updating the technical design document and has started testing the system in ships along with testing the functionality of how IR and heat signatures can be tuned. While Patrick Mathieu has done a code merge for the Seats and Controller managers, he has also had a hand in several other systems such as the Energy Control Manager (for power plants), Flight Controls, and the game’s event system. Chad McKinney wrote a technical design doc for the engineers on Signal Pipes after he worked on the Entity Health components (essentially the wear & tear functionality of components that are being sync’d with Tech Design). Chad has also been helping the QA team by providing custom builds for QA to test very specific parameters of the game. Flight Engineer John Pritchett has also been hard at work, currently in the UK office working on positional controls for capital-class ships.
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Being a Technical Designer is much more than coming up with game design ideas. A Technical Designer has to know how these systems and designs are able to function within the game based on certain parameters such as game engine limitations, resources, etc. With those things in mind, Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome has started testing the Power Plants and Shields 2.0 systems along with designing an overview of how overheating/heat spiking will affect ship components. On the ship side, Kirk has also been working on the Origin 85x and coordinating efforts with the Engineering team on how heat and wear will function in terms of design.
Along with ship systems, as many of our astute readers know, the Tech Design team also performs the designing of how ship functionality will operate in-game. Calix Reneau has started working on the F7A Hornet, the Prowler, and space stations while Matt Sherman has been working on the white box for the long-awaited Drake Herald all while getting the Reliant flight-ready.
Matt has also been working on supporting the newly-revealed Buccaneer and has also added some much needed updates to the Carrack design brief. There is a touch of Exploration he has been peering into but let’s wait until next month’s report so we can report on what he has accomplished thus far.
The LA Tech Design team was also joined by a new member, Stephen Hosmer. So stay tuned for next month’s report to see what our newest Tech Designer will have accomplished by then.
Art & Animation
The Art team was joined by our new Character Art Director, Josh Herman, who brings quite a bit of experience with him in regards to characters and delivering the highest of quality.
CG Supervisor Forrest Stephan has not only been working on clothing support for the character team for 2.4.0, his efforts also look steps beyond what we are currently delivering and extend out to 2.5.0 and further.
A large number of the artists have been dedicated to building the upcoming Caterpillar. Gurmukh Bhasin and Justin Wentz, our ship Concept Artists, have been doing exterior passes of the Caterpillar. This included adjusting the Command Module, turrets, decals, tractor beam room, engines and cargo, as well as the materials pass. On the interior side, Daniel Kamentsky and “Jin” Hyun have been busy with the interior cargo module.
The other half of the CIG LA Art staff continues to work on character art. Omar Aweidah and Cheyne Hessler’s bespoke character hair is currently in progress and looking fabulous while Jeremiah Lee’s costume concepts have been perfected and approved to move into production.
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As we have explained in the past, the Global Tech Content team is a difficult one to categorize because it extends into everything we do at CIG at a global level. We had a new Associate Tech Animator join the team and are excited he’s here! Erik Link started this month and will be working with our animation team so stay tuned for next month’s report to see what accomplishments he has contributed to the team. But for now, Erik has been working on cleaning up Mannequin and digging deep into our systems to help increase our deliveries.
Last month we reported Gaige Hallman had been working on the clothing volume system to determine how clipping will work. While a few related bugs have popped up, Gaige was pretty swift at getting them resolved and has been working on asset rigging for the Shubin Miner uniform, while John Riggs has been working on fixing the Vanduul Hand Geo and Skeleton just to name a few.
Matt Intrieri, apart from working on asset validation tool, he has started on the Tech Art white box for the Drake Herald while Patrick Salerno has been working on the Reliant grey box Tech Art. Last but not least, Mark McCall completed working on skinning and implementing the RSI Pilot Flight Suit Jetpack.
Narrative
Continuing from our last update:
Squadron 42, Squadron 42, Squadron 42.
Yeah, we were on full-blast for the past month. Both Will and I were over in the UK to help out with the pick-up performance capture shoot. We got to have some familiar faces back to the set as well as some new actors join the show. We were thrilled to have on set to play the role of . It went better than any of us could’ve imagined and was spectacular to watch this character who’s been kicking around for a while, finally be brought to life in such a dynamic way.
Otherwise, on the PU front we’ve been delving into things that shan’t be made public yet, so unfortunately there’s not a lot to tell.
Now, back to the mines of Squadron 42.
Until—
Oh, if you haven’t heard, there has been a revamping of the Ask A Dev forum thread. We’ve just started to dive back in and answer your questions, but if you had a question that was still unanswered from the old Ask A Dev – Lore thread, feel free to repost it in the new one and we will do our best to get to it, progress permitting.
As I was saying, until next month.
Quality Assurance
This month the CIG-LA Quality Assurance team was all hands on deck and focused on all the new 2.4 features, including the new PU Clothing, and the shopping system, a vast amount of persistence and performance testing, and help troubleshoot stability issues. Saitek was gracious enough to provide us with a Saitek X-56 Rhino H.O.T.A.S. peripheral so we were able to put the controller through its paces after a very short fight over who got to use it first. However, the most exciting thing this month was the privilege of an early look at preliminary large scale solar systems with procedural planets, going from space, to atmosphere, and eventually landing on the ground. At this point the terrain is visually pretty sparse looking, but this early on, the excitement is about the technology itself. There’s nothing quite like flying through and around canyons in an M50!
Conclusion
There you have it folks; that was the month of May in a nutshell for us at the Los Angeles branch of Cloud Imperium Games. It should go without saying that there is much more going on behind the scenes to make all of these milestones possible and we can’t wait until you see what we unveil next.
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Game Dev: Bigger in Texas
We’ve continued to crank away on 2.4.0 through the month of May. We’ve generated 145 builds from the build system; we deployed 98 internal server builds and published 14 of them to the PTU for external feedback. Everyone in the studio has been working night and day and we’ve been making a lot of great progress to support the many technological and design changes that are part of this version. We’re very excited to see this version continue its march soon to the Live server, and as you can imagine teams are already hard at work on 2.5 and beyond.
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The merry month of May has been a productive one for the Austin Dev Team. We’ve spent most of the month wrapping up our tasks for 2.4.0 and planning ahead for 2.5.0. The Design Team has been polishing features in 2.4.0, specifically Shopping and Port Modification, so that they are in tip-top shape for when 2.4.0 goes Live. Robert Gaither has jumped over from QA to help out with placing all of the item ports in the hangars so that you guys are able to customize the layout of your flair objects and ships. He’s been meticulous in making sure that the item port placement makes sense for each type of flair and linking up the item ports so that placing larger flair and ships cancels out the ability to place smaller flair and ships in the immediate vicinity.
Lead Designer Rob Reininger has been polishing and fixing bugs with the Shopping experience, in addition to planning for several features coming down the pipe. We’ve got a final design for “Kiosk Purchasing” in front of CR and are awaiting feedback. This feature will allow for purchasing of items that are too large to display in a conventional shop, such as ship components, ship weapons, and the ships themselves! We’re also putting focus on designing additional phases of “Try On/Inspect Mode” where each type of clothing asset will have a specific camera record that “zooms in” to specific parts of the body depending on what you’re trying on. So for example if you’re trying on shoes, the camera will zoom in to the feet. There will also be specific “Try On” animations for the character as well so that the character can check himself out while he is trying on the latest and greatest swanky apparel.
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Speaking of new swanky apparel, both Rob and Robert have been working with the Character Team to create briefs for and schedule in additional assets for future releases. Our goal from this point forward is to have new clothing assets ready for every new release. Sometimes these will just be material/texture variants of existing assets but sometimes we’ll have brand new assets from all-new clothing lines and manufacturers. Our major focus for 2.5.0 will be to have some more grungy frontier clothing ready for you guys.
Designer Pete Mackay has been iterating on the ship pricing formula he’s been working on. He’s also been designated as the Design Owner for Game Analytics going forward as well. Pete has been talking back and forth with the Gameplay Engineering Team, the Server Engineering Team, the DevOps Team, and the Platform Team to nail down the best approach for capturing and displaying game analytics from various aspects of Star Citizen. We want to know how you guys are playing so we can focus on the things you like the most and get you more of what you love, and tracking game analytics is the best way to do that.
The Backend Services Team has been furiously smashing bugs with the Persistence Backend all month in an effort to get it ready for release. This is the most massive change to our core technology we’ve had since the debut of the Large World tech, and with that comes a lot of hiccups that need ironing out. The team has been doing a great job though and we’re in the final stages of polish on this before release. We’re now looking ahead to 2.5.0 and beyond. Our near-term taskload includes Persistent UEC, which will allow us to actually use UEC as part of Persistence instead of just our test currency Alpha UEC. Ian Guthrie at Wyrmbyte has also helped us create an Analytics Service for Gameplay Engineers to hook into to provide the data that Pete Mackay needs as mentioned above. As always, we’ll be knocking out bugs with Persistence as we see them as well.
The Art and Animation Teams are trucking along with their longer-term tasks. The Ship Team is still up to their eyeballs in the work for the Hornet F7A and the Herald. Jay Brushwood has been on the set of the mocap shoot at Imaginarium the past couple weeks capturing new enter/exit animations for all the ships, which we’ll start getting in pretty soon so you guys can get in and out of your ships more quickly! Daniel Craig has wrapped up his work on the updated 300i enter/exit animations and will be moving on to the Avenger next. Our PU Team has been supporting S42 with implementing background animations. They’ve specifically been working on animations for the Mess Hall scenes and interacting with Ship Terminals. They also helped us out in a pinch by getting in some new “Weapon Inspect” animations that you can see in action while inspecting the weapons in the shops. Oh, and that death animation that happens for when a player enters an airlock without his spacesuit on? You can thank Vanessa Landeros for that!
Emre Switzer has been doing a lighting revamp for several areas of the game. He’s already tackled ArcCorp and will be moving on to Crusader next. He’ll also be touching up some of the ships as well, like the Reliant.
Lastly, we wanted to reach out and give a hearty thanks to Mark Skelton for all of his effort and devotion to this project and especially this studio. Mark has moved on to a new project and new chapter, but we wish him all the best in his future endeavors and can’t express enough how sorely he’ll be missed. Thanks Mark!
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April’s 2.4.0 testing continued well into May with the build making its way to the PTU. As of this writing, QA has deployed 14 builds to the PTU since the initial release to the Evocati testers.
With the assistance of the testers on the PTU, we’ve been able to reliably reproduce a number of various issues which resulted in Code 7 disconnects. This has greatly assisted us with identifying the various causes of these disconnections, which has allowed the Network Engineers to address them as we identify them. As a result, a significant number of these specific disconnects have been corrected since the start of the PTU. We’ve also seen a number of server/client crashes fixed, as well as improvements to the Port Modification system, and a large number of fixes related to shopping. Not to mention, enough improvements in item persistence to allow us to begin persisting the database across multiple builds.
Internally, we’ve been gathering lots of server/client performance data for the Engineering team to analyze to see if there’s any improvements that can be made in the short term to help with performance while we wait on the larger improvements coming later.
We’d also like to welcome Tori Turner to the QA Team, who has been assisting our Squadron 42 testing team.
That about wraps up this month, aside from continuing 2.4.0 and Squadron 42 testing there’s nothing much new to report… well, aside from preliminary testing for Procedural Planets, as well as the first forays into the Solar System map…
Game Support
May was another busy but solid month for the Game Support Team.
As everyone knows, 2.4.0 has been not just our focus, but the entire company’s focus. Chris Danks and Will Leverett spent the first part of the month with Evocati Test Flight, helping get bugs into Issue Council and then into our dev pipeline. As 2.4.0 managed to get into a state where we needed more people, we opened up to our PTU 1st Wave testers, and then Subscribers.
To build any community, you have to dedicate time and energy, and we’re very proud of the fact that CIG has allowed Game Support to do just that with both Evocati and PTU testers. We’ve put a lot of effort into making this successful, and we could not be more pleased with how awesome our volunteer testers have been. It’s really through their passion for this project that we have had such fantastic results which have helped us tremendously in our efforts to complete 2.4.0.
As a reminder, for those wanting to participate in Evocati or PTU, it’s possible through being an active member of the Issue Council. We’ll be adding to both Evocati and PTU ranks later this summer, so jump on in at https://robertsspaceindustries.com/community/issue-council!
We were also thrilled that our friends at Turbulent visited us for a week in Austin. We got to spend a healthy amount of time on a variety of topics, not the least of which is Issue Council improvements. We’ve identified a handful of requests that we’re going to start developing on, some of which came from the community, some internally. We’ll be very excited to get those out!
We’re also growing in Austin, Texas! We’ve been interviewing candidates for a Game Support role to help with various tasks such as account security, technical support, and our publishing process, and we’ll be excited to have another hand to improve the level of service we can provide.
IT/Operations
More progress was seen on the patch reduction size project in the month of April. As previously mentioned, this is a big overhaul so it’s definitely going to be summer before we get to the point where we can roll this out to everyone but we’re hoping to start seeing real world use of the new system soon for internal testing. This month has been all about carefully incorporating the changes which support the new patching system into our build pipeline without affecting regularly scheduled deployments. This is no small task but we are making progress on schedule as we had hoped.
As we work through the build pipeline we have found that it may be possible to obtain some further optimizations in the build process. Much in the way we are breaking out data in to its smallest parts which will allow us to deliver more granular changes within our patches under the new system, we’re now identifying ways we should be able to increase granularity in our build process. If this works, we may be able to compile portions of the build down to certain individual changes further reducing dependencies on other aspects of the larger build. In other words, by reducing dependencies we might be able to kick certain types of build changes out in seconds where normally we would have to wait minutes or sometimes hours for that type of fix.
We certainly have more discovery and testing to perform but hopefully we will have much more to report in this are as our work on our huge patch project progresses.
LiveOps/DevOps
This month we have been super busy keeping up with the dev teams work on persistence. We’ve delivered 18 publishes to PTU along with countless deployments for QA and individual use dev testing. Literally, countless deployments because at some point we lost track during the late nights. Our primary build system cranked out 145 builds generating a total of 18,350 gigs of data. Alternate build systems aren’t tracked but are doing almost as much work considering that we’re now requiring code pre-builds prior to code being checked in for the testing and production builds.
April has also been a month of spring cleaning for us. We’ve reworked a number of internal tools and docs and we’ve completed our planning for our new publish orchestration system. The goal of this project is to make our publishes more automated and configurable. Currently we have a decent system which is fairly dependable but the addition of persistence has shown us that we must be able to make a myriad of configuration changes quickly and easily rather than manually. Our new system will enable all of this for us and be much more extendable meaning we can handle changes much better than we can today. While this may not show up as a neat flashy thing that people see in the game, we’re really happy we get to do this work because it makes the job of publishing Star Citizen so much better in the long run.
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Forging Ahead
Greetings Citizens,
Another productive month in Manchester! Chris spent some time with the team this month working on Squadron 42, and we’re very excited to be getting closer to sharing more information on that part of the project. Here’s a report from each department about what we did this month:
Concept Art
Ahhh the month of May, everything is blossoming and so is the teams work – we are really getting into a groove here and the concept team are pumping out a lot of super high quality work. We’ve done a large amount of work for future ships this month, these aren’t needed for Sq42 but are needed for the persistent universe and to keep on expanding the roles in the games, we have 4 unannounced ships/vehicles in concept right now and they are almost all complete, it’s hard to choose which will be my favourite, they are all really exciting in their own way!
We’ve also continued to work heavily on ship items, mainly power plants, coolers and shield generators – look out for the Gorgon Industries – it’s got some serious bite Weapons are continuing both on FPS and ships, working out upgrade paths for all the different sizes of ship guns and how to be efficient with our designs but also give the fans what they’d like. Props and prop dressing has continued, the list of required props is getting longer by the day so we will take on additional resources to fill that gap so that Sq42 can look its best. That’s all for now folks!
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The last few remaining art bugs for 2.4 have been ironed out, hopefully you guys will be playing it before too long as we’re looking forward to seeing what you guys think of the new features. As always the team is hard at work on Sq42 development, not too much information can be told but we are ending the Greyboxing phase for the Shubin interior levels, finishing out Final Art on some other undisclosed locations. We are still pushing forward on Final Art for our VS level, everything from lighting, materials, atmospherics, props, terrain, rocks, and buildings are being worked on. That’s all for this month folks, enjoy 2.4!
Props
This month has been a heads down and getting things done month. After wrapping up 2.4 requests and bugs the team have been focusing on either ship items (formally components) or props to add narrative to Squadron 42. Because of the way we approach the props anything we create can be used anywhere in the game, even if we theme particular props to tell a story in one area we can then override the material and reuse the asset in another area, this means we get a bit more reuse for our time investment and it reduces art fatigue.
Ben Curtis has been spending a lot of time on documentation this month, now we have the new shader tech mentioned last month it’s time to get thorough documentation together and update some of the old ones. We have a few new starters over the next month so it’s important to have everything easy to find and refer back to, as we get more resources in the future this becomes more and more important.
Looking forward the whole team will be focusing on the ship items for a couple of sprints to make sure there is plenty of content when the feature goes live. It is going to be a busy month but we can’t wait to get all the content out to the players so you can start really customising the performance of your ships and making them your own.
Spaceships
Work continues on our ‘big guns,’ the Idris, Javelin and Bengal. As we reported last month, interior work on the Idris has largely wrapped up and we’ve moved to building some story-specific Squadron 42 variations… but we can’t talk about those just yet! The Javelin and Bengal exteriors are ongoing, with the latter’s team benefiting greatly from the work done on the former.
Towards the smaller end of the spectrum, work is ongoing on the F7A Hornet, which will be the hero ship for Squadron 42. We’re going for updates to the Hornet that make it clear this is a different, military-specific version, and so far the results are great! We’ll share more of that as Squadron 42 gets closer. We also completed work on ‘pods’ for the Argo transport which will let you use it for a number of different utility functions.
On the concept side, we are finishing up work on one of the ships you’ve been waiting for: the Drake Dragonfly “space motorcycle.” We think we’ve come up with a plan for a very cool, very SMALL ship that’s going to work very well alongside some upcoming game systems. More on that soon! We also pitched several designs for Aegis’ next ship. Can’t reveal more yet, but it’s a tough one!
Graphics
This month the graphics team have finished off a number of features and fixes which we hope will be in the backers’ hands very soon.
The first of these is a major upgrade to the particle lighting system. Previously the particles were lit by a different system to the rest of the game, and while this was cheaper it had many visual problems such as lack of shadows and incorrect brightness or colour for some light types. We’ve now changed it so that it uses the new tiled-lighting system and so matches the rest of the lighting much better, but we’ve also added fully volumetric shadowing. This means we get accurate shafts of light passing through particles which looks very impressive in our tests and we can’t wait to see what the artists can do with this.
The tiled lighting system in general has also had a major upgrade, partly to allow the particle lighting, but primarily to achieve greater performance on modern GPUs. This has been deactivated in recent public builds but we expect it to be enabled in the next major release. While looking at the lighting we’ve also started to improve the quality of rectangular area lights. Real-time renderers need to make many compromises to achieve any form of area lighting in real time, but we’re hoping to improve the results of these because sci-fi environments so often use rectangular lights.
Our work on the various high-dynamic-ranges features continues with the completion of the light-linking feature to allow realistic levels of brightness and glow from our lights. Next we’ll be focussing on the exposure control system to make it better approximate the complexities of the human eye and brain’s amazing ability to adapt to environments which high contrast or very low light levels.
Some other more minor changes include: uncapping the GPU texture budget so that GPUs with more memory can benefit from higher texture resolutions and less likelihood of seeing any ‘popping’ from the texture streaming, completion of our internal render-profiler, continuation of our major UI refactor mentioned last month, and various bug fixes with culling.
Engineering
For the engineering team, much of this month has involved 2.4.0 and helping get it into a state where we can finally release it to live. Bone has been finishing off the port modification system, allowing to customise your hangar and change your ship loadout from inside the game, and it is now complete and is in the final stages of bug fixing and polish. Similarly the shopping is all in and working and again we’re just fixing up any bugs and polish that comes along.
Our network team have been up busy fixing up the disconnection issues we’ve been finding on the PTU build. Unfortunately these have been pretty gnarly and hard to track down and fix, they’ve been coming from the changes required for persistence not playing well with the current networking system. One change required of persistence is being able to reuse entity ids, which the engine was never really designed to do, and as a result we’re having to deal with the consequences of that. Long term George is working on a new message queue system which should be able to deal with all these problems a lot better.
In-between the bug fixing and polish Craig has spent some more time on the carrier takeoff and landing, Steve has been making more progress on the Object Container system and also our entity component system, which breaks down an entity’s update into smaller individual blocks which can easily be reused. It will help clean up a lot of the codebase as well as helping on the performance side. Sadly for the UK office he’s now leaving us and moving to our sunny LA office, our loss and their gain.
Gordon’s been doing more polish work on the cover, as well as the vaulting and mantling. Romulo has been doing the player refactor and moving armour over to the new Item 2.0, as well as some weapon polish. Jens has been working on player moving and the head stabilisation.
Audio
This month, will try to keep this a bit snappier just because there’s a lot to cover. Apologies for flitting between bullet points and paragraphs!
Darren Lambourne has been busy with:
Setting up new variable boost layer for thrusters on many ships
2nd Pass on BEHR Laser Cannon S5
Reworking and fixing anim sounds across several ships, including Connie pilot/co-pilot seats. General stock-take of missing audio
Beginning setup of the AEGS Idris audio scheme
General bugfixing across several ships
Luke Hatton has been working on:
The cockpit interactive user-interface sound, adding sounds for the power distribution triangle and shield distribution
The Aurora series now have their own pass-by whoosh sounds and should be more easily distinguished when flying past you
On the FPS side, sounds for hitting targets with projectile weapons have gone in, along with kill confirmation sounds for both friendly and enemy characters
Stefan Rutherford performed something akin to open-heart bypass surgery on the Wwise project side of things – he generally maintains this, ably assisted by Jason Cobb. We’ve put a lot of thought recently into how the game will be mixed (both for S42 and the Live release) and as part of ensuring things work and scale this needed doing. On top of this, he produced new FPS weapon sounds and editing up the recent weapon recording session material.
Both Phil Smallwood and Bob Rissolo were on-set at Imaginarium to continue with recording duties for our monumental Squadron 42 cinematics. Our lovely new dialogue rig, the D1000 got its first major run out, which Phil’s been debugging a little, smoothing any rough edges. Both returned to master and edit the resultant dialogue.
Matteo Cerquone has mostly worked on Squadron 42 ambiences, with Ross; assisted with checking fidelity of sounds affected by a wholesale conversion settings change in Wwise (part of a general optimisation pass), and cleaning up old Foley events in the character tool.
Ross Tregenza did:
A lot more work on the Music Logic system – it now has huge web of fully functional states combined with a growing web of momentary stings, and all new music in place, it’s also beginning to expand beyond space-flight music into FPS & EVA
Squadron 42 level ambient sounds – the levels are advancing well with Ross and Matteo starting to add a load of ambient audio to the spaces, lots of levels really starting to come alive there.
Battle-chatter – working with the AI guys to start getting the battle-chatter dialogue systems up and running properly
Simon Price has continued laying down pieces of the dialogue pipeline, improving the scalability of it over the last month. Most recently he’s been working on migrating dialogue data over to use external sources. Perhaps that doesn’t seem hugely exciting but it’s part of the overall ethos of keeping things sensible and not overloading the Wwise project with duplicated structure.
Sam Hall has been working on a system for dynamically loading audio assets, to ensure we only have loaded in memory what’s absolutely necessary. Different kinds of sounds have different requirements as to how resident they tend to need to be; some kinds (such as ambient sounds that aren’t required to synchronize too much) can stream in, and any kind of latency isn’t perceptible or appreciable. Others, such as gunshots that the player triggers, need to be ready to go instantly. So after sorting through what needs to be resident and what doesn’t, it’s been a question of ensuring the system can bring in audio assets to memory as soon as they’re needed in each case. For a game such as ours it’s important we only have loaded, what’s important to the player; loading everything won’t be an option while scaling up of the universe continues apace.
Sam’s also been adding more music logic events and parameter tweaks to improve the dynamic music experience. And of course has been fixing audio bugs as they’ve arisen.
Graham Phillipson’s been busy on the in-game VOIP tech, we’ve actually had something that we could demo internally as a result of this which went down well – of course, we’re really keen on getting this out to the community. Adding to the ability for the community to, well, commune, I think it’s going to be a huge benefit for everyone and it’s been great to hear it in action. Standard audio bug fixing duties and audio system back-end stuff too, much as usual. Graham added the ability to assign parameters to Audio Trigger Spots which gave all the sound designers much cheer. Though this seems a small thing in the grand scheme, it ensures we’re not just creating new objects in Wwise for subtle contextual changes to audio in the game; it allows us to add change at the point where the change is required rather than, again, duplicating contexts at source as well as at the destination.
Ewan Brown is a new Senior Audio Programmer and has been settling in, getting to know the code-base and how things fit together, providing tool support to the likes of Mannequin. There’s a lot to pick up on and he’s going to be assisting Sam and Ross with their musical endeavours too.
Jason Cobb has been busy with the following:
Developed audio build validation scripts
Bug fix various voice leaks, documented two test cases for fixes needed for Flowgraph audio triggers to play correctly with zones
Bug fix support for hard-coded mat_water material fx
Started development game audio inventory script
Various wwise project upkeep, optimizations, support for Stephan’s environment re-org effort
Area-based mix state markup for multicrew ships. 90% complete
Investigated situation for markup of single-seater ship interiors.
And that’s all for the moment, please do ask more questions on the forums and we will try to get the whole audio team answering where applicable. Thanks for listening!
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Changing the Worlds
The weathers not sure what it wants to do out here in Frankfurt, sunny and hot, overcast and raining, last month had a fair share of it all. The office grew by 2 people in May, Janine helping out with production and David joining the weapons art team. We’re just about at capacity in the office so we officially started an expansion. When we moved into the office space last July the owners of the building put the adjoining space on hold for us for a full year, one of the perks they offer to new tenants. At that time we didn’t know if we would have any need for it, but thought it was a nice gesture.
The team has also been doing some excellent work not detailed below on the procedural system… they would rather let you see it in action than spoil all the details now, so stay tuned on that front!
This month we also kicked things into gear with Gamescom, it only makes sense for Frankfurt to help out as much as we can since we live here. Not too much can be said at this point, but we’ll definitely be there in August.
Cinematics
This month we had our 2nd performance capture shoot for SQ42 at Imaginarium Studios in Ealing London that complemented and completed scenes in the earlier chapters.
Last summer was our main shoot that gave us approx. 75% of all needed material for SQ42’s story. With this new shoot complete and another final shoot upcoming in July we will have collected every bit of performance! Highlight of this shoot were scenes with the Idris’ quartermaster handing out big guns as well as an in-universe spectrum show with a furious and most importantly hilarious host!
For the shoot the Cinematic team built some of the needed environments to be used for live-mocap and coordinated efforts to get all needed level segments, characters sorted in time for live-mocap to be effective. (Live-mocap is a process where we can see the motion data live in our engine on actual in-game characters inside the actual scenes/levels)
Michael, our Lead Cinematic Designer, has finished a first pass on an important, longer cinematic piece that happens in the middle of the story campaign.
The Cinematic animators have been providing support to the Gameplay team in the UK while they wait for data to get back from the shoot. They’re also finishing up sorting the quad cam video data from last year’s p-cap shoot. When that’s done the animators on the Cinematic team will review the p-cap shots with the quad cam data and make sure that the animations are playing out as they are intended.
AI
Subsumption editor has been updated to version 0.901 and we started to implement some more functionalities exposed now in the tools for the designers. First of all we created some new Subsumption tasks to allow designers to use the following functionalities:
1. Querying the Tactical Point System
2. Move to a specific cover location
3. Shoot from the cover the NPC is in to his attention target
We exposed a way for designers to suggest the next activity or subactivity for a given NPC. We also completed the first pass to support Action Areas. As we explained in the monthly report from April, those are the elements in the world that allow designers to mark areas with specific information: a multicrew space ship, for example, might have an engine room, a hangar, a control room and so on. Action Areas allow the NPCs to reason about the environment to fulfil their tasks. Those game elements are also used to notify the NPC when another NPC is entering/exiting the area or to re-route specific events that are intended for the characters present in the area. We also implemented the basic code to handle Subsumption events, designers can create those specifying different properties (for example if the event is something the NPCs should see to perceive it, if they should hear it, if there is a max range in which the event can be received, and so on) and Subsumption keeps track of all this data.
We also completed the first pass on using the Usables/Interactors as navigation links. This unification step was required since Squadron 42 and Star Citizen are not only using the classic navigation links to allow characters to jump, vault, and so on. We also have links to connect the navigation through the usage of items (for example passing from room 1 and room 2 may require the AI to open a door) and these items can also be used by the players, making everything even more complicated. Using the Interactors makes sure that an NPC that opens a door doesn’t require any different code to synchronize the action with other players or other AI characters, making all the code flow much more consistent.
Regarding behaviors, we are currently embedding specific “mental states” to allow the normal NPCs behaviors to cope better with cinematic scenes and in-ship state (piloting a ship, controlling a turret, and so on)
Regarding the ships behavior we are almost done with the first pass to improve the behaviors of the ship assigned to restrict their movement into specific areas. We currently have missions where spaceships need to guard specific environmental elements or where ships cannot leave specific boundaries to avoid being destroyed.
Currently boundaries where always considered as a soft restriction on the ships behavior, but we are now expanding the ships behavior to correctly handle a strong spacial restriction.
This month we also spent time on improving stability and performances of the live game, so that all of you guys can continue to enjoy each release of Star Citizen.
This month the weapon art team finished two new ship weapons and did extensive work on the weapon material library. On top of that we are currently modelling a new ballistic submachine gun and doing the final touches on the Scourge Railgun detailing and texturing. The Railgun is meant to be a visual target for all the new weapons to come, so we’ve taken some extra time to take it to a gold standard level of quality.
We’ve also been joined by a new starter, David, bringing the weapon art team size up to 4 people now.
Design
Level Designers have been working on finalizing the layout for the Outlaw Base, it’s had a first art pass and will come back to them for a mark-up phase before release. This base is also scheduled for a tiered release so there will be a lot of back and forth between art and level designers as areas get released an new ones get added. The guys are also working hard on the Truck Stop base which is a nice place for pilots to stop to refuel, grab a bite to eat, get some supplies before they head out on big journeys. Another area in which level designers are working in is adding landing sites on procedurally generated planets.
The system designers have finalized the Power Distribution system which once implemented should power all our ships from single seaters to capitals and even stations. This system will allow players to configure how power travels within their ships, which components get power, how much do they get and where do they draw it from. At the same time it should allow more nefarious players to sabotage said system. At the same time the Looting, Inner Though and the Usable/Interactor systems are also fully designed now and are heading into production. A lot of work went into ensuring that all our usable props and animation metrics for them are properly standardized so we don’t have to do the work twice and everything will fit together once it’s in game.
On the AI side we are designing a system that can generate archetypes and loadouts quick enough to fill an entire galaxy without us having to manually build each individual NPC. Basically by defining rulesets and tag sets the system will be able to create said archetypes matching their gear to where they came from, what their job is, what the dress code is in the area they are in, what rank they are etc. Besides that, there is also a lot of work going on in designing the tools we will need for the brains and logic of our new Subsumption based AI.
Both system and level designers have been planning out the work for the next year and the upcoming releases to make sure we have a more realistic picture of what can be done with the allotted time.
Engineering
Renderer refactoring: On the Renderer side, we did some housecleaning and optimizations. Based on the refactorings from last month to increase the object count, we started to simplify the data upload to the GPU. Previously the CryeEngine system is based on reflection, so that the code could find out what data was needed on the GPU and only upload this data. While this sounds like a solid idea, finding out what was needed was more expensive than a straight data upload. So we began to remove those reflection code paths in the time critical areas. This also improved the readability of the code, as we can now see what the code does and not the logic to find out what to do. Related to this change, we also ensured to only upload the same data once to GPU. Previously it uploaded a data buffer for each object, and then uploaded the same data again if the code decided to use instancing. This is now fixed.
Data Patcher: On the Data Patcher (the tool which will be responsible to create the data for the engine to use when we switch to incremental patching), we made a little progress by better defining how to store the data. Not much reportable progress here as much work is about infrastructure discussions.
Optimizations: To further optimize the streaming code, we added timeslicing support to it again. This way the cost to update the distance to objects not visible to the player is done less frequent.
Tag System comes into the ZoneSystem: Initial support was written to support storing tags inside the ZoneSystem. A Tag is a small string which we use to give context information to an entity object. For example if we want to know if something is a chair, we can tag it as a chair. This way the AI system can ask all objects and find out if they are chairs. We already have such systems inside the engine but those are lacking spatial information, so they can only answer: is this object a chair, but not “find me all chairs around me”. This lead to some in-efficient solutions as the code had to brute force get many objects and check their type. To overcome this limitation we are moving the support for tags into the ZoneSystem, our spatial position system. This required some changes and new systems:
Storing and comparing a string is not very efficient on a computer (but very convenient for a human, thus we need it), so we implemented a Trie to allow us to very an efficient way to map unique strings to a fixed integer range. (We wanted to get an integer range instead of a hash as a range allows us some better broad phase checks and more efficient data storage)
Since not all data types which we stored inside the ZoneSystem require tags, we made the whole zone system more flexible to allow the client code to specify the properties to store per object type. This also reduced our memory usage in crusader by 50MB.
We implemented a specialized allocator for the tags so they can be efficiently culled by the low level zone system, which is implemented in SIMD, so the tags must follow a certain size and alignment.
And as a last thing, we implemented code to allow filtering tags by a DNF (Disjunctive normal form), which is a fixed format and can be used for efficient checking of arbitrary boolean expressions.
Runtime Skel-Extensions: The character customization system in Star Citizen is internally using an engine feature called “skinned attachments”. With skinned attachments it is possible to replace every deformable item on a character (i.e. cloth, shoes, spaces suits, helmets, etc) and even entire body parts such as faces, hands, or upper and lower body parts. Each skin-attachment has its own set of joints that are automatically animated and deformed by the base skeleton. It is also possible to use skinned attachments that have more joints and different joints then the base skeleton and it is possible to merge all types of skeletons together, even skeletons from totally different characters. That means you can have a minimalistic base skeleton which can be extended by an arbitrarily complex skinning skeleton. In the original CryEngine this was an offline- or loading-time feature, because the entire process was pretty CPU intensive. For Star Citizen we turned this into a runtime-feature that allows us to extend a base-skeleton anytime while the game is running, no matter if the character is alive and playing animations or in a driven- or floppy-ragdoll state. This means that you don’t have to know in advance the type of joints you might need in the base skeleton nor do you have to carry extra joints around just in case you might need them. Instead the system allows you to add new joints at will and whenever they are required.
Full-Body Experience: we also invested a lot of time to improve the full-body experience in first person. Our main goal was to make the head-bobbing customizable. In Star Citizen the head-bobbing is a natural side-effect of the mocap data, because third- and first-person are using the same animation. To make the controls as smooth and precise as possible, we implemented a new IK-solution to eliminate all unwanted effects from the 3rd person body animations on the first person view and weapon handling.
Tech Art
Frankfurt TechArt is always busy with RND and actively supporting any discipline who needs help. This month we were helping with Eye stabilization for FPS , which will stabilize camera movement while playing in FPS, the results so far have been really good. We’re also supporting feature or RND for the itemport IK system for game, it’s moving positively as well.
On our DCC[Maya] pipeline front it is becoming much more stable but still needs a bit more support as we keep updating or expending it. We were also fixing bugs and supporting weapon Assets on all fronts like rigs, updating rendermesh, entity setup, Mannequin setup etc.
Overall TechArt is participating for new features as well as keep supporting daily operations.
VFX
The past month the Frankfurt VFX team has been working on Squadron 42 single player missions. This covers almost all aspects of VFX such as ambient/environment effects, scripted action effects and even some cinematic effects. This also requires a fair deal of collaboration with the individual level designers and artists. Once they are done designing and building a section of the level with props, VFX can then move in and decorate it with the appropriate effects. Everything from fire and explosions to blood and water.
Quality Assurance
This month in QA we’ve been working closely with our in-house Engineering team to test progress on the procedural planets, as seen in the Pupil to Planet trailer. With such a large scale planet you can imagine the number of issues we encountered throughout our testing. Including, but not limited to the buggy insisting on driving on its z-axis, defying all laws of gravity!! We also spent some time checking all characters currently in Star Citizen and Squadron 42 for issues that might be blocking our cinematic developers. As a result, we were able to identify multiple Squadron 42 characters that had definitely seen better days. Sean Tracy, Ali Brown, and Okka Kyaw jumped on board to assist and we were able to resolve the issues quickly, so that our cinematic developers will be able to continue to create amazing cinematic sequences for Star Citizen. Lastly, we spent the remainder of the month assisting Chris Raine and Chris Bolte with gathering profiling and concurrency data for the PTU servers. The community was a great help and rallied together to load as many players onto the PTU servers as possible so that we could collect data with a hi-load server in order to contribute to resolving the framerate drops the public has been experiencing in Crusader. May has by far been our busiest month in QA, but we would not have expected any less as our universe grows larger each day.
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We Aim to Misbehaviour
From supporting Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 to working on some exciting content you’ll be seeing in the coming patches, we had a busy month at BHVR! Here’s the skinny…
Engineering
For the engineering team, this month went by very quickly. A lot of effort was put on getting 2.4 out of the door, working hard on the leftover nitty gritty details.
We mainly polished and debugged features like the shopping system and cry astro.
The good news is that with release 2.4, we are establishing the foundation for really fun features that will be implemented for the next releases.
Design
With no surprise, this month was almost all about shopping in both Port Olisar and Area18, getting features ready for 2.4.0 live release. This means, sorting out the last remaining bugs and working on improvements like for example; adding NPC shopkeepers or fixing some load out issues.
Level Designer Jesse Kalb, helped out re-design and implement the new port modification system for the flair items in the hangars. The game has many flair objects, so we had to work with Turbulent on getting things working right with the new design. Hopefully, players will enjoy placing the flair items and customizing their display cases.
On a different topic, Technical Lead Level Designer François Boucher, led the way for the creation of the CryEngine level structure and its components for the next map we are currently working on, the Pirate Base. With the whitebox map, hot out of the oven, from our friends in Frankfurt, we prepared the map so both Design and Art teams could work on their respective sections. This means, setting up landing pads, airlocks, doors, elevators, player spawning and finding a sweet spot for this base in the Stanton System.
Francois is also busy setting up the ship components shop that is going to open soon on Port Olisar.
Finally, the design team also started working on the shop designs, layouts and whiteboxes that we are going to find on the Pirate base. The mood is going to be different on the Pirate base and so will the shops. More to come, looking forward to further share with you guys!
Art
It was a very exciting month for the BHVR Art Team, because we began production on new maps.
One of them is a new pirate space station, which we mostly concentrated our efforts on the global aspects of the map like: composition, orientation, basic dressing and evaluating the new extra modules that will be required for this map.
Next month, we will move to final dressing pass, color balance, decal placement and polishing.
The second map, is a new ship parts shop that will be available on a future release. This shop has great character, so we have spent a good chunk of time working on the dressing and first pass lighting.
Next month, we are moving on debugging and polishing.
For the props team, we continued supporting the new shopping system. Mainly working on item racks and shelves.
We have also completed several new props that the environment team is extremely happy to be able to use now.
Finally, let’s not forget the improvements and debugging work that was done for the upcoming 2.4 release.
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The Turbulent Power!
Greetings from sunny Montreal where Star Citizen’s web team have been hard at work on everything from Buccaneer surveys to changing how you log in to the game! Here are some specifics on the projects we were working on this past month.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
For those that aren’t familiar, Multi-Factor Authentication, or MFA, is the type of security many people use with modern MMOs and web accounts, where you need to use a special key code or something texted to your cell phone to access an account. It keeps your data more secure by making it much harder for anyone to break in and assume your identity. We’ve had MFA in the works for quite a while, as we know you want to keep your ships and characters safe! We’re in the home stretch now, as we are close to completing the development of it for the RSI website. Once the QA phase starts, we will be working with CIG to test it and then roll out to the community. At the same time, we are continuing to work on MFA support for the game launcher itself, which will be especially important as we move more aspects of Star Citizen from the web to the game world itself.
Communication Platform
You may know this better as ‘Organizations 2.0,’ which we pitched earlier in Star Citizen’s development. Instead of going with a simple update to the current Org system, we’ve opted to develop a purpose-built communications platform that can be adapted for many aspects of the game. Development continues on the new platform, which includes completely new chat and forum systems for the first iteration. We have set up a server for internal testing, but we’re still a few months away from a beta launch. When the time comes, the Evocati group will get the first access to kick the tires!
Game Launcher
3, 2, 1… launch! We have been working with the team at CIG on the new version of the game launcher/patcher. The new version will support multiple environments (e.g. PTU, live) and multiple games (e.g. Star Citizen, Squadron 42), and will allow for background patching. In the first phase, the user interface will look like the current one, but we will be able to add new functionality and design in subsequent phases that the current patcher wouldn’t be able to handle. This is an exciting step for how the game ‘works,’ although we know it’s probably not as thrilling to the community as seeing a new ship or planet.
Sales
I guess you could say, the Bucc stops here! We assisted CIG in launching the next great pirate fighter, and all our metrics say it’s a hit! To support the Buccaneer, we built a ‘Drake customer survey’ site that will determine what bonus weapon everyone who purchases the ship will get. We took inspiration from the classic Ultima series for this, trying to come up with Star Citizen’s version of the fortune teller’s quiz used for character generation. After all, immersion isn’t just for the game! This month was also the month where backers could reap the rewards of our one-off operations: we distributed coupons to all those of you who took part in the April Fools “Big Benny” reveal, all the entrants in the Shubin recruitment programs, and also everyone who joined in for the latest Free Fly promo.
Behind-the-Scenes
In preparation for the release of 2.4.0, we have been working with CIG to test the platform side. For example, if a user makes changes to their inventory on the website, they should be reflected in the game too. There are many different scenarios to test, so it’s been a collaborative effort between us and CIG’s QA team. This is one of those areas backers probably don’t think too much about, but is necessary for the move to a true persistent universe. It’s great seeing your ships in the inventory of the website… but it’s a lot greater having the game track them, their upgrades, their damage status, their location in the world and so on.
Also in May, Turbulent sent a small strikeforce to Austin for a series of face-to-face meetings to discuss various issues, such as server infrastructure, analytics, persistence, and the Issue Council. It is possible that some BBQ was consumed after hours, and we’ve had ongoing discussions with CIG about IT infrastructure, and improving performance. As you would expect, this is a complex subject, but we hope to have implemented some new measures by the end of summer.
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Don’t Forget a Snappy Title, Jared
This train is just about to the station. I won’t hold you up with a long, boring intro, suffice to say, I could write a long, boring intro if I wanted to. I could do it, man. But I won’t. Because I know you’re in a hurry. Uh oh, is this becoming a long, boring intro anyway? I’d better move onto the next section before that happens. Quickly. Let’s go…
Day-to-Day
Each day I come to work with some of my favorite people in the world. And Thomas Hennessy. This month was a struggle with Ben and Alexis gone back east for two weeks on Bereavement Leave, but we pulled through with a newfound appreciation for the amount of work the two of them do each and every month. Between Ben and Alexis being gone, and Sandi going to the UK, it was a rare few days this week when the whole team was together, but my main man Tyler Witkin helped out from the Austin office, calling me on Skype each day to keep me company, and help shoulder the load while folks were out.
Basically, this section is just so I can say how much I like the people I work with. I’m in a mood.
Broadcasts
This month’s 10 for the Developers episodes in lieu of Chris being in the UK covered a wide range of topics and hosts. Sean Tracy, Forrest Stephan, Adam Weiser, Omar Aweidah, Eric Keiron Davis, Gaige Hallman, Mark Abent, Randy Vasquez, Dave Haddock and Ben Lesnick all stepped up to step in for the Chairman this month. We are extremely grateful each and every week for the time and effort our developers put in stepping away from their work to communicate with the community. We quite simply going not do it without them.
Around the Verse continues to diversify it’s offering as we approach the 100th episode on June 30th. We explored the Nexus, Tamsa, and Min systems in Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We interviewed folks like artist Cheyne Hessler and the makers of Voice Attack and HCS Voice Packs. We ventured into the Wonderful World of Star Citizen to highlight the tremendous work fan-organization The Imperial News Network does week in and week out. With Ship Shape, we explored the whitebox design of both the Drake Herald and the Drake Caterpillar. And we sat down with designer Matt Sherman and Concept Artist Jim Martin to for an unprecedented exploration of the Drake Buccaneer concept ship. Things certainly came up Drake in Around the Verse this month.
Reverse the Verse, our weekly informal livestream with the fans survived the absence of Ben and Alexis for two weeks (if only barely) and the May Subscribers Edition saw questions posed to our Design and Tech Art members for a full hour.
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As another month of development passes, so does another month of stories, content videos, and community accomplishments. This is a section we wanted to include to highlight all of the content creators, streamers, and more! For short, YOU!
First and foremost: PTU Testers. We want to take a moment to express our appreciation for all of our PTU testers who were patient and eager enough to write thousands of bugs and feedback posts over the course of May! As many of you know, this was our first time utilizing the focus-test group titled “Evocati”, and it was a smashing success! We look forward to collaborating together on future patches/content! Thank you so much!
Twerk17 continued his early morning streams that not only entertained us, but helped us greatly! The Design and QA team in the UK studio have utilized Twerk17’s early morning schedule to watch/analyze game-play and bugs! Thanks for being awesome Twerk!
While not Star Citizen related, a couple of different families acquired miniature co-pilots! Congratulations to STLYoungblood’s family and NighthawkZale’s family for both adding a +1 to the citizen count!
Streamer/entertainer/developer Geekdomo underwent a successful surgery, and we are all very happy to hear he is doing well!
We could easily write enough to make this section alone longer than the entirety of the monthly report. This community has really grown into something meaningful. We are all connected to each other not just as backers of the same game, but as dreamers of the same universe. Some may be pirates, while others militant UEE soldiers, but we share one goal in common: stepping outside the box of conformity and traditional game publication in order to try and bring a living, breathing universe that we have always wanted to play to life. This community has become a safe-haven for us sci-fi geeks and we love it. We want to give a huge thank you to everyone who has shown their support and patience for the team and this project as we continue progress on making the best damn space sim ever! We sincerely could not do it without you!
The Wrap-Up
Looking Ahead
Building Star Citizen is hard work, but it’s the best job in the world. Every day we work is one day closer to our dream: the massive persistent universe of Star Citizen and an unparalleled single player cinematic experience in Squadron 42. We know there will always be setbacks, difficulties, challenges we didn’t predict… but we’re privileged to fight this battle alongside an incredible development team and an amazing community.
Our next release will be Star Citizen Alpha 2.4, which is being tested as we speak. Alpha 2.4 represents another important step towards our goal, with the introduction of persistence and the first part of the in-game economy. We’re very excited to have players earn credits in the game world instead of buying them through Voyager Direct, which has been a goal for a long time. We’ve already seen what players are doing with the Starfarer, our largest ship launched to date, on the test servers and we can’t wait to see what happens when everybody can start boarding.
We are also heading into ‘convention season,’ with appearances planned at Gamescom, DragonCon and our own CitizenCon. We’ll be sharing more details about these events shortly and how you can interact with the team both in person and remote. There’s a lot we want to talk about and then even more we want to get into your hands. We’ll keep smashing bugs, creating worlds and telling stories… and we’re happy to have you along for the ride!
“The ‘verse keeps getting bigger, but some things never change. Whatever you got, no matter how much or how little, there’s always someone waiting to take it from you. You either let it happen or you fight. Don’t know about you, but I’m damn well gonna fight.”
- Dosh Mallory, famed frontiersman, 2656
Greetings Citizens,
Another Concept Sale, another Question & Answer session. Since Friday, we’ve been collecting questions from the dedicated Q&A post here and today our designers working on the ship will answer 10 questions for the community. Tune back in this Friday to see the answers to 10 more questions.
Drake Interplanetary builds starships for the way you live, and we are pleased to add the Buccaneer to our expanding lineup of craft offered to legitimate businesses in human space. Intended to complement the Cutlass/Caterpillar system, the Buccaneer was developed based on careful examination of actual after-action reports and extensive pilot feedback. What did all of our research tell us? You want a ship that can maneuver and pack a punch without breaking the bank.
Special thanks to Matt Sherman for taking the time to answer these questions for us.
The original blueprint that was released has been updated to the image above due to having some inaccurate information in the chart. Blame Lando for not updating the temp version to the final version.
Question & Answer
How is the Buccaneer expected to perform in combat, compared to other ships?
Built to hit above its weight-class, the Buccaneer brings a notably more potent gun-loadout to lighter ships like the Avenger and the Gladius. Beyond this the Buccaneer would be about the same if not slightly weaker in durability compared to the F7C Hornet. Against something like the F7C-M, the Buccaneer would definitely be less durable, though able to bring a comparable gun-loadout. Matched up against a Sabre, while it would have comparable guns, the Sabre would definitely have the stronger Missile loadout, hull durability, and be emitting notably less signature than a Buccaneer. Compared to something like a 325a, it would be able to deliver a heavier hit, but lacks any of the interior accommodations the 300-series provides.
Is there a bed on board the ship? If not, will we be able to add one eventually using the modular components mechanics?
No, the Buccaneer is not designed for live-in operations and will not have any sort of dedicated bed/sleeping area.
Does the Buccaneer have Quantum Drive? Jump Drive?
It has a Quantum Drive stock, though we’re still undetermined if it will also include the Jump Drive attachment as stock equipment. If it doesn’t, you will absolutely be able to buy/install one to make the Buccaneer fully Jump-Capable.
Are the S1 pylon mounts meant to take guided missiles or dumbfire rockets?
The S1 mounts will be capable of firing full guidance missiles. While the exact count in the launchers may vary from the concept (currently shows 12 total) into the working ship, they will be a part of the Buccaneer’s combat-toolkit.
Does zero actually mean zero in regards to cargo? Or can we still smuggle some small capacity of cargo? Trinkets? Small treasures?
Zero is zero, there is no latent cargo capacity to the Buccaneer. We are actively planning out how we want Smuggling mechanics to work, but those wouldn’t be ship-specific aspects, and any form of storage they would offer will come at a direct trade-off.
Will having this ship (or any Drake ship for that matter) inherit any negative faction points by default due to the manufacturer reputation?
No, overall, Drake is still seen as a reputable manufacturer, regardless of what purposes their clients decided to put their ships into. They won’t be subjected to a back-end systemic bias or penalty just for owning one.
Will there be any bonus/advantage to using this ship in conjunction with other Drake ships? (i.e. easier docking/refueling/etc.)
No, there wouldn’t be any raw statistical advantages to flying the Buccaneer with other Drake ships. While we want the Drake line to work and feel like a family of ships, you should still feel like you can get the most out of your ship without being forced to fly with a specific composition.
Can we replace the bottom turret with any other equipment, possibly for cargo, electronic warfare, or interdiction?
We’re definitely looking into a few other equipment options for the S4 hardpoint, including an Interdiction-specific weapon, but at this time, those are still more at the napkin-idea stage so we’ll need a bit more time to fully develop them out before we can say for certain what options will be available.
Could you explain more about how a turret will function on a single seat fighter? Will you be able to turn it backwards while you fly forward?
Yes, we anticipate this being accomplished through use of the look-behind camera view. If you want to see just how this would play out, the current Hornets and Mustangs can also turn their canard turrets behind them to fire in Look-Behind.
There appears to be a space behind the pilots seat that looks like room for an additional seat or potential space for small cargo. Will there be any function to this space?
There will be a few components the Pilots would be able to access from this space with the most notable being a full size weapon rack available. It won’t be any sort of discrete cargo space, but you will have enough space on the rack for at least 3 standard FPS weapons up to the size of the Sniper Rifle. As for the possibility of an additional seat, the Buccaneer is intended to be a single-seat fighter. We do not anticipate a change to this in the future, or for any potential variants.
What would the loaner ship be for the Buccaneer while we await it to finish development?
As with all single-seat ships in the game at present, we intend to provide an F7C Hornet as the loaner.
“The ‘verse keeps getting bigger, but some things never change. Whatever you got, no matter how much or how little, there’s always someone waiting to take it from you. You either let it happen or you fight. Don’t know about you, but I’m damn well gonna fight.” - Dosh Mallory, famed frontiersman, 2656
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The problem: you’re conducting the mineral survey that’s going to make or break your org, holding in your Caterpillar just off an asteroid belt. Everybody’s counting on this: your crew, your org mates, your families back home. But you aren’t worried: a few more deep scans and you’re going to strike it rich. Suddenly, the screens go red: bogeys all around! Looks like Vanduul want a piece of the action: you.
The solution? The Buccaneer, the latest and greatest utility fighter from Drake Interplanetary. The Buccaneer has been designed from the ground up to fly and fight the way you live. No leather interiors or hyperpillows here: the ‘Bucc is a scrapper designed to maneuver and fight above its weight class. This rough-and-tumble frontier fighter can be maintained in the worst of conditions in order to keep real, working space crews alive.
Drake Interplanetary builds starships for the way you live, and we are pleased to add the Buccaneer to our expanding lineup of craft offered to legitimate businesses in human space. Intended to complement the Cutlass/Caterpillar system, the Buccaneer was developed based on careful examination of actual after-action reports and extensive pilot feedback. What did all of our research tell us? You want a ship that can maneuver and pack a punch without breaking the bank.
The Buccaneer is all of that… and more: it’s a ship with a bite that’s every bit as mean as it’s silhouette implies! Featuring five gun mounts, two missile pylons and countermeasures, this is one fighter that won’t be pushed around! With a Buccaneer in your hangar, you can rest easy knowing your concerns are being protected.
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In the Verse
When Drake Interplanetary set about developing a dedicated fighter, they didn’t do it in a vacuum: they wanted a ship that would work alongside their entire lineup. This newest entry to the Drake catalog is an agile scrapper, something intended to take hits without breaking the bank on repairs and maintenance needs. The Buccaneer also needed to provide ample support to either the Cutlass or Caterpillar while also having the range of travel to safely cover a Herald. To meet these goals, the engineers at Drake opted for a single-seat, maneuverable fighter built expressly for combat, with plenty of capacity to alter its loadout to quickly move between close-range fire support and long-range escort. A purpose-built ship, the Buccaneer is ready to stand toe-to-toe with any other fighter in its size class.
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In the Game
The Drake Buccaneer is intended to offer a civilian alternative to ships like the Hornet and Gladius. It has been developed with an eye towards working alongside the Drake Cutlass, offering pirates (and others!) a sturdy, maneuverable fighter. The Buccaneer will also feature as an NPC aggressor in Star Citizen’s persistent universe and future single player campaigns. While Drake has designed the Buccaneer with an eye towards accompanying Cutlasses and/or Caterpillars on raiding parties, it is also an effective single-user fighter that measures nicely alongside the other models already In service. We intend the Buccaneer to be an agile, hard-hitting ship that’s a joy to fly… with an attack aircraft-inspired face that only a hard-fighting frontiersman could love!
Drake Interplanetary Market Research
Every Drake Buccaneer sold during this concept sale will include a special weapon add-ons package courtesy of Voyager Direct! The bundle (an UEC 10,000+ value) will include a weapon add-on currently available in Star Citizen, which can be used immediately on other ships. This bundle is included free or charge for every Buccaneer sold during its introductory offering.
What’s in the bundle? We can’t tell you… because we don’t know yet! The team at Drake Interplanetary has put together a multi-day Market Research Quiz intended to tell us more about Drake owners’ interests AND to decide which of two packages will be awarded. Stop in every two days to vote, and come back at the end of the sale to learn which package Buccaneer owners will receive!
Please note that the vote is restricted to registered Star Citizen Backers.
The Drake Look and Feel
We had a chance to sit down with Concept Artist Jim Martin, who has not only been with the project since the very beginning (he created the visuals for the Vanduul Scythe) he has also worked on every Drake ship to date. Below you’ll find a personal message from Jim, as well as an interview from this week’s Around the Verse!
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I had the chance to return to the Star Citizen team for another “Drake” design!
The Buccaneer is a small rugged fighter that fits into the Drake design aesthetic. It’s a practical ship with a specific role. Nothing fancy, the Drakes are reliable and solid.
We started the process of design by looking at the style guide for the whole Drake line, and what the core design themes are. I roughed out a sketch pass doing a spread of small thumbnail drawings. The important thing is to get the ideas down on paper and see what jumps out at you. It became apparent that this design was really about engines, a cockpit, and weapons. And the design challenge was about a practical arrangement that stays utility, not too fancy or sleek.
A second drawing pass led to some rough 3D models, and we we were able to get Chris Robert’s thoughts about the design direction of the Buccaneer. He helped us to rethink some of the volumes, style, and the geography of the ship components.
The final phase was to take the design to a detail pass, working out the surfaces, plating and structure, all the things that make the ship come alive. The cockpit was kept “minimal” and thinner for visibility, and of course a framed canopy in keeping with the Drake design. The wings are weapon platforms like a military helicopter, the engines are large and proud like an A10 Warthog, the landing gear is nested underneath but not hidden.
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I really enjoyed designing this little ship. To me it vibes like an underdog that you underestimate until it blows you up!
Jim Martin
Concept sale
About the Sale
The Buccaneer is being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar or to fight in Star Citizen. The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add an Buccaneer poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Buccaneer mini ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Life Time Insurance or these extras.
If you’d like to add one to your fleet, they’re available in the pledge store until June 6th, 2016. You can also view a detail of the Buccaneer in the Holo Viewer in the Tech Overview of the ship page! The bonus weapons package will be revealed on Monday, June 6 and will be awarded to all backers who have purchased or upgraded to a Buccaneer.
As with every Concept Sale, we’ll be doing a Q&A post. For the Drake Buccaneer, we’ll be taking questions here in this thread and posting the answers next week. Look for the Comm-Link Schedule next week to find out when that post will go up!
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
Additionally, please note that the Buccaneer will be entering the ship pipeline now, it will ultimately be released after other concept ships have been completed. All decorative ‘flare’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches.
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I’m Callie C. This is StarWatch. But who cares?!? The only thing that matters to me and probably you too as soon as I tell you, is this juicy junket that is literally just this minute burning off the comms. You’re hearing it here first, watchers: Bo Lynn and Julie Marks as of 15:03 SET have had their baby! Congrats to the happy family!
This is my slam, people. This must be what it would feel like if I had a baby of my own. Like all of you, I have been following this pregnancy closely for what has seemed like forever, but was probably closer to nine months. The highs! The lows! The drama! That slip on the ice patch at the New York Lantern Ball, that whole drell juice incident and who is ever going to forget those weird stretch fur jodhpurs. Seriously. Remember those?
Well, put all of that behind you, because the ride is finally over, folks, and the ’verse is now the proud recipient of a brand new Baby BoJu. Tips are still flooding in about this bouncing bundle of joy, no pictures yet, but word is that she’s healthy, already on her way to signing a modeling contract, and that they have decided to go with the name Rosé … or Salute … or even Talliwager. Come on you tipsters, make up your minds! If you’re just going to send in random names, why not go with the prettiest name ever created and say the lucky babe is going to be called Callie. Which, I might add, is a suggestion I’ve already taken the liberty to comm directly to the new parents themselves.
For those of you who are frantically doing the math out there from today’s date, yes, nine months ago was when Julie was on tour with Voice On High and Bo was on the other side of the Empire filming Death First. Now this may appear at first to lend some credence to all those rumors that were flying around about Julie having a torrid affair with Niko during the tour. Especially when it seemed like Niko forgot how to play ‘Linger Longer,’ a song V.O.H has been performing for 5 years, simply because Julie came on stage to sing with them. The excuses of “having a late night” didn’t do anything to help dodge that flaming ball of awkward.
But as exciting as it is to speculate whether the baby is going to have Niko’s hazel eyes or Bo’s blue, I think that it’s vital that we celeb devotees, or celebotees — Oooo. I like that. Winnie, make a note to make some celebotee tees — So, like I was saying, we celebotees, t-shirts pending, have to make sure that as much as we want to get the scoop that we respect some boundaries. Since the announce I have been seeing the calls for people to acquire DNA scans of the newborn to confirm the rumors one way or another, and this is not cool. I want to ask everyone out there to please, please not do that. There are limits. This is a baby.
Speaking of, let’s move on from the birth of a Human to the birth of possibly a new fashion trend. Without any more ado, Nisco Hobbins! Get your well-dressed butt out here. I am pleased as always to welcome our resident fashion expert back to the show.
Nisco Hobbins: And as always, Calcee, you are lucky to have me.
I love it when you pull the claws out! Let’s start with the usual, Nisco, please put me out of my misery and tell me who you are wearing. It is absolutely crystal. And why do I feel like I want to salute you?
Nisco Hobbins: That would be my new jacket, Calcee. It is the center objet d’art from Derion’s new Gambit collection. Its faceted angles and contoured lines are meant to be reminiscent of a Naval war fleet in flight. Believe it or not, but all the materials are sourced from actual battle sites.
What?!?
Nisco Hobbins: Seriously. The spun-metal is completely made from spent cartridges and all the accent beading is made from real rubble. To have history turned into fashion like this is just groundbreaking.
Stunning. A statement piece in so many ways.
Nisco Hobbins: Show support and all that.
Totally. Now, Nisco, when I got the comm about you coming by, I read the words but my mind couldn’t comprehend them. You’re here to talk about Casaba Outlet?
Nisco Hobbins: Totally.
Did you hear that? That was the sound of a billion StarWatchers suddenly spitting out their drinks all at once. Pray tell, my dear Nisco, why are we talking about Casaba Outlet? It’s not for their latest two-for-one deal, is it?
Nisco Hobbins: I know. I know. Casaba Outlet. Regular clothes for regular people or whatever. Great for not being naked, not much use for anything else. But it seems they want to change that ’cause they’re taking a real stab at making themselves relevant in the world of fashion in sort of an interesting way. It’s all part of their new “Our Clothes, Your Look” campaign.
Okay. Spill.
Nisco Hobbins: A lot of times these companies try to hire a fashion designer to do a special line and you just end up with watered down blah that your grandmother gives to you as a gift on Citizen Day.
I still remember when Olsen Hendrick did that line of “everyday” dresses for Looks4Life. On what day would you ever wear any of those?
Nisco Hobbins: Definitely up there on 30th century tragedies. That’s why I was quite pleased to hear Casaba has gone a completely different route and hired celebrity stylists to start taking pieces from their normal selection of CityLights, Escar Limited, DMC, whatever, and using those to create looks worthy of wearing. They’ve got people like Den Linton who does styling for Asper Renon, Sash Aberdeen, Opal Nill, and Irkma Punjamal who has dressed everyone from your Bo Lynn to every member of Local Diction.
And they just take stuff off the rack? Like regular pants or whatever?
Nisco Hobbins: Exacts. Like a CityLights Rhodes jacket paired with some 78 pants from Escar. Normally a yawn, but it is kinda amazing what these clothes can become in the hands of a professional. Head to toe, they feel completely different. Accessories, how they hang, the hair. All of it comes together to create something pretty brill. The best part is that all the details are right there on the spec, so you can create it for yourself. I, for one, am actually thinking about hopping a shuttle and seeing what I can put together myself. The challenge of it is almost half the fun.
It’ll be quite the coup for Casaba if they can start drawing in the likes of Nisco Hobbins. Count me in.
All right, watchers. We need to take a quick pause and reset. Nisco, stay right there. All of you stay right there. StarWatch will be back in a flash.
Weapons are continuing both on FPS and ships, working out upgrade paths for all the different sizes of ship guns and how to be efficient with our designs but also give the fans what they’d like. Props and prop dressing has continued, the list of required props is getting longer by the day so we will take on additional resources to fill that gap so that Sq42 can look its best. That’s all for now folks!
