Um alle Funktionen des Forums nutzen zu können, sollten Sie sich registrieren. Wenn Sie schon regstriert sind, sollten Sie sich anmelden.
Datenschutzerklärung: Hier
Einstellungsmöglichkeiten zur Privatsphäre finden Sie in Ihren Einstellungen.
Einen maschinenlesbaren Export Ihrer Daten können Sie in Ihrem Profil anfordern. Hier
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
From time to time we like to open Star Citizen up to our fans, and provide access to ships they might not otherwise own. This is not only a great chance for players to try new ships out, but it helps provide additional testing for those ships, too!
In addition, it can be a great way to introduce new players to the growing universe of Star Citizen as well. For the next week until April 25th, we’ve enabled Free Fly access to all accounts in celebration of PAX East. While we won’t be there this year in person, any chance to celebrate Star Citizen sounds like a good idea to us! For the next week, anyone with a Star Citizen account will have access to the Aurora LN, the F7C Hornet, and the Mustang Delta. This Free Fly event gives new players access to three unique parts of the Star Citizen experience:
Star Citizen Alpha 2.3.1 – Also known as Crusader or the “mini-PU,” this is the nucleus of the world we’re building! Featuring multiple space stations and environments, scripted missions, places to explore and more, Alpha 2.3.1 is your first look at a much larger universe!
Arena Commander – Arena Commander is a ‘game within a game’ that we’ve used to develop our flight mechanics and ship combat balance. Take on human opponents or an AI swarm in single seat fighter.
Social Module – Interact with other players while you explore our first landing zone, ArcCorp! The Social Module is intended as a starting point for our world building,
You can register for an account here to get started. If you already have an account from a previous Free Fly, you’re all set! Just log in via the Star Citizen launcher and we’ll see you in the ‘Verse!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We’ve issued another minor patch for Star Citizen Alpha 2.3 this week, focusing on a set of specific bug fixes identified during testing. Thank you as always to our talented backers who have helped us drill down on and now eliminate these bugs! You can find a complete list of changes here.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
April 15th is TAX DAY in the United States. For some, a time of dread where the government takes their money… for others, a small reprieve! If you’re in the latter group, we’re celebrating tax day UEE-style, with surplus military ship designs. We’ve brought back several limited ships through April 22. All four ships are currently flyable in the Crusader mini-PU. So if you’ve been waiting for a chance to crew a Retaliator or to zip around in a Super Hornet, this is it!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
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.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Would you rather pick up something a little more physical? We’re having a limited sale on Star Citizen track jackets! The remaining stock has been discounted AND will ship with a free Star Citizen playing card/notepad bundle. You’ll be the envy of all your friends dealing Star Citizen cards in a handsome jacket. You can find the offer here.
Want to meet the team making the game? Check out the personal Twitter feeds below!
PLEASE NOTE: These are the personal feeds of Cloud Imperium Games’ developers. The statements and opinions expressed do not represent Cloud Imperium Games, and should not be taken as the final word on any element of game design or planning. The following developers are willing to connect with backers and share information about their lives when possible:
Your monthly report is here. But first, a small patch! We’ve just issued Star Citizen Alpha 2.3.1 to the live servers, which includes a variety of bug fixes and balance changes. You can access it via the launcher and you can read the complete patch notes here().
If you’ve played Star Citizen Alpha 2.3, you already know that March was a month for REALLY BIG SHIPS! We launched the hangar-ready Starfarer this month, along with the long-awaited Xi’An scout… and there’s plenty more to follow! Today we will be checking in with all of our studios and outsource partners to see what the team was working on in March… but first, we’d like to share some of the fruits of that labor: some of the work we’ve been doing on seamless EVA transitions that you’ll be seeing in an upcoming patch. Check it out and then read on to find out the work that went into making this a reality!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Hello everyone!
Can you believe that a quarter of 2016 has already come and gone? But what a quarter it has been, has it not? Just look at what we have accomplished over the past month; the Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al, the Starfarer, and let us not overlook the biggest of them all – Intergalactic Food Delivery. With 2.3 also being released, we introduced a plethora of features and fixes, all of which can be found in our patch notes.
This is a global effort for every branch of Star Citizen but each branch contributes to the whole picture. So let us take a look at what CIG Los Angeles has knocked out of the park this month.
Engineering
The CIG-LA Engineering team was bolstered with reinforcements! We had two new Gameplay Engineers join our ranks; Patrick Mathieu and Chad McKinney. We are very much looking forward to their contributions to Star Citizen!
Work continues on the new interaction system being spearheaded by Allen Chen and Mark Abent which is in the early stages of implementation by being incorporated into the ship seat interactivity. Our newest team member, Chad McKinney, has jumped in head-first by helping Allen on the doors and ramp interactions. While this system is something we have mentioned in the past, it is making steady progress and we can hopefully begin implementing components in a near-future release.
Chad Zamzow has been testing the new Shield Emitter system which is currently in the implementation stage of development. This new feature will add greater dimension to how shields function; especially when it comes to larger capital-class ships which will have multiple shield emitters. This will give ship engineers greater control over how much energy gets routed to a particular shield’s facing in order to maximize protection given a certain situation. Although great progress has been made to move this feature closer to release, there is still quite a bit of work left to do in the future.
But saving the best for last, our Engineering Lead Paul Reindell has been fast at work in bringing persistence into Star Citizen. For those who may be unfamiliar with the term, persistence refers to certain game parameters remaining active even if the player logs off. This includes allowing players to acquire items through the in-game shopping system. Whether you are purchasing snazzy new threads to make your space pirate look more…pirate-y, or you have your eye on a deadly new pistol, the end-goal is to make sure the choices you make in-game will persist and not reset each game session. It may sound like the kind of thing you can just take for granted in gaming, but when your items and inventory are as intricate as they are in Star Citizen, it’s actually no simple matter!
Tech Design
With the last couple patches, aside from tackling bugs it is clear the Tech Design team has been hard at work to bring you the best ships we have ever produced. Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome worked hard on one of the most anticipated ships, the Xi’An Aopoa Khartu-al, now flight-ready and available for you to go forth in alien style. To continue this momentum, Matthew Sherman has been working on getting the MISC Reliant hangar-ready and Calix Reneau has been working diligently on the whitebox of the Drake Caterpillar.
On the component side, you may have seen the new component class added to the Holotable. Power Plants are the latest component we are allowing ship owners to swap out, and as you might expect, power the various systems of your ship. Two new power plants, the AEGIS Regulus and Amon & Reese OverDrive, have been added and can be used to swap out the standard “generic” power plant your ship comes with.
As more components are introduced to the game, we cannot wait to see what customization options you will opt for as you pursue your chosen career path in Star Citizen.
Art
Ships seem to be the hot ticket item this month, and it continues on with the LA Art team. Concept Artist Gurmukh Bhasin is busy concepting the Drake Caterpillar Cargo module while our newest Concept Artist Justin Wentz completed the concept art for the Caterpillar’s crew habitation quarters. The next step is to model the habitation based on Justin’s concept which is currently tasked to Art Lead Elwin Bachiller and Associate Artist Daniel Kamentsky.
On the PU side, our newest character artist is creating the pristine materials for the Navy jumpsuit, Jeremiah Lee is doing a 2nd concept pass on the light armor, and Art Supervisor Forrest Stephan is creating the pristine materials for the flight suit helmet as well as clothing for the Persistent Universe (PU).
Technical Content
The Global Tech Content team is truly a jack of all trades team that has its fingers in everything from Star Citizen to ship development to characters to the PU.
Tech Content Director Sean Tracy has been working on developing the tech for character customization. Just another step on the road to creating an immersive persistent in-game universe. Along with this tech, the artists have been using this to prototype how character customization will function. Associate Rigger Gaige Hallman has also been hard at work on the PU side of the game, creating clothing template layers. What this does is allows each article of clothing to occupy a certain amount of volume. This will ensure that various articles of clothing can co-exist without clipping into each other as long as they are properly fitted to those geo volumes.
To give an idea of the diverse challenges the Tech Content team faces, Senior Tech Artist Mark McCall has created a test level called GearValidator. This level’s sole purpose is to test and ensure the landing gear of our ships will function correctly. After running through a series of tests, a report is provided that lets us know whether or not a particular ship’s landing gear is performing as it should be.
Part of what made the Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al able to be released in 2.3 was Matt Intrieri’s work on getting so many Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al -related bugs fixed in a relatively short amount of time, but we also are aware there is more fixing and tweaking that still needs to be completed before we are absolutely sanguine with the ship. Associate Tech Artist Patrick Salerno continues to review and add LODs to normalize the mesh count on legacy ships; he’s currently progressing through the 300-series.
QA
CIG-LA QA’s primary focus was the push for 2.2 LIVE release and subsequent 2.3 PTU and LIVE Releases. In addition to standard sanity and smoke checks, the team also focused on:
Xi’an Khartu-al flight performance.
Starfarer hangar readiness, and preliminary flight performance.
Early testing of persistence features.
Investigating server stability and performance issues.
Gathering ship feedback, with this month’s subject being the Drake Cutlass.
In addition, Eric Pietro began training for his new role as Animation’s Tools Specialist, with his goal being to ensure that the animations tools are functioning properly, and suitable for all animator needs.
Narrative
Lead Writer Dave Haddock is home from Manchester! Dave spent the month in the UK looking over the whitebox levels with the Designers, allowing him to determine what additional dialogue might need to be included. Since then, Senior Writer Will Weissbaum and Dave have been hard at work putting everything needed together so that we can make sure Squadron 42 really brings you into the world of Star Citizen. Before flying back, Dave also got to sit in on Chris’ final editorial selects session, closing out the last lingering odds-and-ends from the previous performance shoot.
Aside from juggling News Updates, Galactic Guides and Portfolios, Associate Writer Adam Wieser has started naming the massive amounts of components/items/clothing that are being developed, writing the subsequent item descriptions as well as compiling a glossary for some of the more unique terms in an effort to standardize the language within the company. To give an example, if someone says a ship is an ‘interdiction ship,’ we’re all in agreement what qualities or aspects that term.
Aside from continuing her wizardry with organizing the internal wiki, Cherie: Destroyer of Worlds™ has been processing all the incoming scientific data for the various planets and stars and has kicked off the final batch of scientific data to our fantastic science consultants. She has also started compiling an initial list of potential entries for the Galactapedia as well as a chronology of events that have already ‘happened’ in the universe.
We had our alien language specialist, Britton Watkins, down to visit the office. After designing the Vanduul language for our shoot with Andy Serkis, Chris wanted to discuss next steps for Vanduul as well as the other languages. Hopefully, more news about that to come, but should be very exciting.
Until next month…
Production
The Los Angeles Production team has been overseeing the hiring of new staff for the development teams. We have increased the number of artists and engineers, but we are still looking for designers, writers, and more engineers. While ramping up the number of developers in Los Angeles does help provide an increase in available resources, we want to make sure we are being smart about our strategies.
In order to ensure that Production is in sync with the other regional offices, we recently had Global Head of Production, Erin Roberts and Producer Ricky Jutley visiting from the UK office to discuss strategies for the PU with Todd Papy, Tony Zurovec, and Chris Roberts. While generally email or video conferencing are the usual methods for communicating trans-Atlantic, sometimes it is hard to beat face to face communication.
Senior Producer Eric Davis has been not only overseeing the development milestones for 2.3 and 2.4, he has also largely overseen the ongoing construction as we move closer to completing the new office in Los Angeles. Associate Producer Randy Vazquez has been managing the tasks for Tech Design and Engineering while Associate Producer Mark Hong is responsible for managing the tasks for Tech Content and Art as well. While that list is simplified each one of those items contains a mountainous amount of individual tasks, milestones, schedules, reports, and other related responsibilities.
In Conclusion
As you can see, we have not been idle this month (nor have we ever been idle). We are very excited the Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al is being enjoyed. We know how long you have been waiting for it and we are proud of each new ship we release. Although mainly focused on by our compatriots in the UK, the Starfarer’s hangar debut was also another milestone we were excited to complete. As mentioned earlier, we cannot wait until you see what we are doing with the Caterpillar, Herald, Reliant, and more. While we are proud of our accomplishments this month, it also reminds us we still have many more milestones to reach for. See you next month!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Howdy Citizens,
March was a very exciting month as always. We made lots of publishes to the PTU and deployed Star Citizen Alpha 2.3.0 to the live server! We’ve had a number of visitors, and a number of travelers, and a great deal of cross-studio collaboration at all levels. We also had a blast at the Bar Citizen event at the start of the month, and we look forward to hosting more events like this in the future! Here are detailed updates from each studio lead:
Development
The major focus during the month of March here in Austin has been Shopping! By this I do not mean that we all went to the mall together to pick up the hottest fashion trends, but rather we focused on driving the features to completion that are required to get the shop environments functional for players. Lead Designer Rob Reininger has been driving various subfeatures like the Single-Item Transaction UI and flow and the shop environment item setup. Pete Mackay has been driving the pricing of all the various items that we will be selling in the shops. This has required much coordination between our Design and Community teams in LA and our Design Director Todd Papy and Pete has handled it just swimmingly. We’re now implementing the established prices into DataForge where they will exist statically until we bring our formulaic solution online. The items will be able to be purchased with a new currency we’ve established, internally called Alpha Currency. This currency exists for the sole purpose of testing out these prices and balancing the game, and will exist separately from UEC or REC. At any point we’ll be able to wipe Alpha Currency and start fresh if something goes awry, and this will help us nail down final pricing numbers before we go Live.
Along with the Shopping frontend comes the work being done to support the Shopping backend. The Server Team here in Austin has been setting up the ability to add/subtract Alpha Currency in game and handing it off to the UI and Design teams in the UK to use for the shopping interface and providing alpha currency rewards via completing missions. This work is part of Persistence as a whole, which made significant progress this month. We finally integrated Persistence into our main development stream, which means we can’t go back to the way things were before and Persistence is here to stay. With that comes a lot of issues and bugs that need fixing, and now our Server Team is working hard to fix those up so we can get our main development stream running smoothly again.
One additional feature that we’ve developed this month is the Port Modification View. Jeff Zhu did the programming work to rebuild the hangar code from the ground up, and we are now able to access various “Item Ports” around the hangar to customize the layout of our ships and hangar flair. No longer will the ships be organized in the hangars via the website, but instead you’ll be able to walk up to a bay in the hangar and choose which ships go where in game. This is an exciting new feature and we’ve been having a blast playing around with it. We’ve now passed this off to the UI team to dress it up in a mobiGlas app. Look forward to seeing that feature very soon!
Our Animation team has been supporting in various areas of the project, per usual. Jay Brushwood has been doing a lot of R&D on cockpit comparisons for the male and female characters. We want to make sure we are smart about how we approach this task so that we don’t grow our animation footprint exponentially. The Ship Animation Team has also been providing assets to Programming to help R&D various features such as different enter/exit speeds for the cockpits and allowing for two separate entry points for ships. Our PU Animation Team has been helping with defining metrics for various interactions in the game. From dining at a booth, to standing/sitting at a computer console, to serving champagne on a tray, each new animation requires some thought into how we implement assets to fit with existing metrics. If metrics aren’t established, we have to help create them so the Props Team know what dimensions their assets need to fit. Our Lead Animator, Bryan Brewer, has also been supporting Foundry 42 in implementing locomotion sets for various characters for Squadron 42. He’s making rapid progress and it’s nice to see some more of these characters come to life.
Lastly, our Ship Team here in Austin wrapped up work on the Xi’an Khartu-Al this month and we released that to be flight ready with 2.3.0. It’s a gorgeous, unique ship so major props go out to Chris Smith and Josh Coons for that accomplishment. Those guys have now moved on to the Hornet upgrade and the Drake Herald, respectively. Chris will be bringing the Hornet up to our current standards and optimizing the ship for performance considerations. Josh has been working on the whitebox model for the Drake Herald and will continue that into April.
Live Operations:
QA
Star Citizen QA in Austin has been very busy this past month. With assistance from our other QA teams in LA and UK, the Austin QA successfully completed 18 deployments to our Public Test Universe as well as 5 deployments to the official live environment. The team was very happy to share the new features in Star Citizen Alpha 2.3.
This month we have a few new faces on the Austin QA team. A big welcome to Jesse Mark, Don Allen and Scott McCrea. We are happy to have them aboard. This month has also seen some movement in our ranks. As Senior QA, Tyler Witkin has shown the ability to foster positive interactions with our community. It is only natural that he transition into our Community department. Tyler is now our newest Community Manager! Andrew Hesse has been doing a great job as QA Lead for Austin and we are proud to announce his promotion to QA Manager. Andrew will manage the Austin QA studio as well as assist with QA future planning. Marissa Meissner has been doing an excellent job since she was brought on as our Information Specialist. Marissa has proven her ability to lead and ensure day to day tasks are completed. Marissa has worked on many tasks including fully documenting our processes and workflows, managing the Issue Council, being a liaison to Community and In Game Support and managing our patch notes process to name a few. Marissa will be our newest QA Lead in the Austin Studio where she will ensure our day to day tasks and requests are completed with utmost diligence. Congratulations to Andrew, Marissa and Tyler!
Most of the month of March was occupied by testing the new features that were implemented into 2.3 and 2.3.1 including the hangar ready Starfarer and flyable Khartu-Al or Xi’an Scout. QA also spent time testing the newly added FPS weapons and ship power plant components as well as verifying the many bug fixes included in the update.
Our dedicated Squadron 42 tester Andrew Rexroth has been working closely with his counter-parts Liam Guest and Lee Jones in our UK office testing Squadron 42. Squadron 42 testing is ramping up with Andrew testing 5 separate levels each with many story driven objectives. We are also in the process of moving more testers over to Squadron 42 testing. Katarzyna Mierostawska is currently being trained to assist in this effort and more testers will make the change to Squadron 42 in the very near future.
Todd Raffray has taken on testing the very beginnings of Persistence. Todd is working very closely with engineers Jeff Zhu, Ahmed Shaker, Jason Ely and Tom Sawyer to ensure each aspect of Persistence is understood and properly tested as it is implemented. Todd is also making sure this process is clearly communicated to our other teams so we are all on the same page in terms of testing this very significant feature.
We are incredibly excited for the upcoming release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.4. With our combined efforts across 4 studios, QA will continue to provide the quality testing the upcoming releases will require. Thank you to everyone that have provided feedback and contributing on the Issue Council. Your help goes a long way to ensuring we create the best damn space sim ever. See you next month!
Game Support
March was a great month for Will Leverett and Chris Danks in Game Support, if for no other reason than they got to work onsite together! Will spent two weeks in Manchester with Chris, as well as the Customer Service, Quality Assurance, and Production teams. There was a lot of time and effort put forth into making sure we’re aligned in how we help players, training on new tools, and planning game server admin tools for what we’ll need to help build, test, and support the Persistent Universe.
We saw 2.3.0 testing through PTU all the way to Live, and we’ve coordinated with Ahmed Shaker and Jeffrey Pease in DevOps to test additional versions in order to isolate and identify the causes of AI overspawn. We’re thankful for those playtesters who have been able to dedicate time towards tracking this down, and we’re resolving new issues with each patch because of it.
We’ve begun a process to collect website bugs in addition to client/server/launcher bugs on the Issue Council this month. We were admittedly not sure what results we would get, but the results have been extremely favorable and we have started to get those bugs into the dev cycle.
Game Support has also continued to refine how we utilize the Public Test Universe (PTU). We’ve gotten a heck of a lot of value out of PTU, and it’s now essential to the development of Star Citizen. In addition, we’ll be updating our PTU list of players for 2.4.0, so make sure you’re staying active in PTU and on the Issue Council as that’s how we invite our players!
IT/Operations
In March we’ve seen major progress on the patch reduction size project. This project touches multiple teams including IT, DevOps, and engineering teams in Frankfurt as well as Montreal. We’ve finished the low level changes to how data can be read by the engine and we’ve built out the initial data stores for the project. We have also started the first steps toward modifying the build pipeline so that builds can output to the new data format.
Very early patch testing has proven that our new patching methodology is working with test data so now it’s on to building out the rest of the pipeline and rebuilding the core functionality of the launcher patcher. Because this is such a large re-write, we’re taking this opportunity to build out an entirely new launcher patcher which will be loaded with new and improved functionality and controls when completed.
While we are super excited to advance this project to the players as quickly as possible, we still have much to do and we must do it right. This change will impact the way builds are consumed internally to the dev teams and QA as well so we have more work to refactor internal delivery systems as well. So far though, we’re seeing every indication that all teams are in sync and the project is on track.
LiveOps/DevOps
This month the team has been working as hard as ever on deployments, build system, and performance profiling. We’ve delivered 18 publishes to PTU (up 10 from last month) and we’ve completed 5 Live publishes. Major work was completed on a new test build system which has turned up some stunning results.
The primary goal of our test build system is to provide a functional test bed, even if modest on resources, where major changes or refactoring can occur without impacting the existing build pipeline. This is a tall order considering our production build system is massive consisting of 120 cores (240HT) with 1.5 TB of RAM combined across the stack. Our test build system is much smaller with 36 cores (72HT) and 128 GB RAM. The major difference is that the test build system is running local storage consisting of Intel’s NVMe drives to perform the compilation steps rather than sharing storage with all other systems on the SAN. We expected major improvements in storage performance but what we got was nothing less than amazing.
In some, not all cases, the test build system is performing jobs with 80% reduction in time. It all comes down to storage and I/O rates as we’ve seen in every test we’ve done. Highly I/O dependent operations such as PAK file compilation are demonstrating 4x speed increase. It’s still not feasible to use the test build system as a production build system replacement but when not in use in active testing these impressive results show us that we could use it for special builds and one offs which do come up several times per month.
Special props go out to Ahmed and the rest of the publishing team for keeping up with the larger number of deployments to both our PTU and Live environments while running all the performance profiling multiple times per day. This is important work and we wouldn’t be able to do it without the support of those backers helping us test on the PTU environment. We’ve been gathering a wealth of information which has become invaluable to the engineering team as a whole. Chris Roberts himself has taken a keen interest in the server profiling work so thanks again for everyone who has been helping with this effort.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Hello Citizens,
We always start these notes saying that it was a busy month… because it’s true! Let’s jump into what happened this past March…
Engineering
On the FPS side, Gordon has finished up most of his work on the cover system, the last piece was procedural cover which allows you to slide and shoot around edges, and has moved onto the vaulting and mantling mechanic. First stages of this are going well, working with the animators so we can do procedural alignment of the animations. We’ve also changed the markup so it’s now a normal entity in the zone system. This then gives us all the advantages of the zone system so vaulting in a moving spaceship will work seamlessly. Jamie has been doing some work on the grenades as well as general bug fixing. Romulo has been carrying on with improvements to the weapons including interrupting the reload and general balance.
Craig’s improvements to the landing are progressing nicely and has completed the 2nd stage of the implementation which is a much simplified way of using the automatic landing. He’s now moving on to the 3rd stage which involves landing inside another ship. The easy first bit of doing the landing once inside is now complete, the slightly harder task of getting the automatic landing to work whilst the ship you’re trying to land is moving is the next job. Dave has started implementing the radar and scanning mechanic, he actually did a lot of work previously getting it working whilst in a ship scanning other ships, but he’s now extended it to also work in FPS mode. A lot of the work actually ends up being on the UI side, so he’s been working closely with Simon and Zane to get the UI working nicely. Rob is working again on the conversation system and integrating it with our Subsumption system, which is what is going to end up driving it going forwards. A conversation can be seen as just another task, so for the obligatory bar tender example, task 1 he can have a conversation about what drink a customer want, task 2 mix the drink, task 3 serve the drink, task 4 have a conversation about how the customer’s day has been, and so on.
Steve’s been continuing work on the Object Containers and we’re nearly at the point where we can use them to set the ships up, we’re using the Retaliator as a bit of a test bed. Unfortunately we have hit a slight snag on the networking synchronisation side which means we need his Spawn Bundle system to make it work correctly, so now he’s moved over and is concentrating on finishing that up.
Graphics
This month, we’ve looked into our facial animation tech, fixing several cases where the wrong detail level would have been selected, and made improvements to the data compilation step, vastly reducing the number of vertices that need to be stored and processed. We’ve also been working on a performance profiling system that unifies all the important data into one screen, with built in filters to let us see what we have too much of, where it is, and which team is responsible for fixing it.
We’ve built a system for linking lights to emissive surfaces, so that the luminance of the surface is automatically calculated from the intensity of the lights that are linked to it – this means that turning a light off can implicitly make the light bulb stop glowing, and gives the new optical effects (mentioned in last month’s report) physically plausible light units to work from.
We’ve done a pass over the particle effect shaders, adding an HDR temperature gradient option to let us have hot fire and dark smoke within a single particle, fixing conservation-of-energy when viewing particles from different angles, and correcting animated particles to warp smoothly from frame to frame.
Work has continued on rendering gas clouds, and we’ve started responding to bugs and feedback from the art and design teams. We’ve also revisited the tiled lighting system, to push past the last few performance hurdles that are stopping us from switching over and deprecating the older system.
Ships
Ship team have been as busy as ever this month. The Starfarer that has been months in the making finally went into players hangars. The team is also happy to have successfully delivered the unique X’ian Khartu-Al, allowing players to fly this.
We have also made incredible progress on the Idris and Javelin. This month we managed to get the Idris bridge, Gravity Room, Armory, Cargo Room and Escape Pods done. On the Javelin we got through the Bridge and the entire Engineering Deck.
Specifically to S42 we are very impressive with how the Bengal is shaping up. Wrapping up our final texture sheets on the exterior and creating the building sets needed for the interior. Bringing the Bengal up to the quality our community has come to expect from Star Citizen is very important to us.
Finally, we are making progress on the Drake Herald and Caterpillar as well as the new Hornet F7A for Squadron 42. All of these are now in full production and we look forward to being able to share more on the progress of these soon!
Environments
This month has seen another big push on SQ42, including one level which is now being moved into Final Art Phase. The whole facility is locked in terms of content and layout which will include terrain based traversal [blending with procedural content], maintenance bays, habitation sections, technical areas etc. It will be a full living, breathing environment by the time we are finished with it which is perfect for a sandbox based experience. Other locations of the campaign are progressing nicely, the guys are Greyboxing out the areas and translating the elements from the concept art into 3D.
Weapons & Levels
A lot of planning the previous month has really been helping get a good flow of work from the concept team, we are tackling both Sq42 content and in the gaps tackling areas for the PU too. Gary has spent a lot of time on the Xi’an Transport ship interior, Jort on Space station interiors and exterior configurations, Dan on components and Javelin hangar, Stu on ship weapons, Sarah on ship components and props, Gavin R on a new small ship, Miles on the second pass of Behring FPS weaponry we need for sq42, integrating a more visually interesting rail system and designing the ‘family’ (sniper, CQB, shotgun etc). We also took a trip down to Lionhead Studios who are sadly closing to see if any of their staff would be interested in the project – fingers crossed for a few more team members!
Character Team
Some of the eagle eyed will have noticed new character outfits in Nathan’s Starfarer video, the quality is really quite excellent! Mike has been working on Bridge crew outfits and Jon on the Vanduul, with having Chris in the studio it makes for much faster iteration, pushing and pulling and really getting this race to where Chris wants it.
QA
As always it’s been a very busy month here in QA at Foundry 42. As soon as we pushed 2.2 to Live we were hard at work on 2.3, making sure the epic Starfarer looked as good as it should and the Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al was as fast and nippy a scout/exploration vehicle as it should be. Time was devoted to missile balancing, bringing those staple implements of dogfighting back into the fray as useful parts of the players arsenal and testing new changes to the EVA system, which I have to say is looking so good now! Our dedicated Squadron 42 testers Liam and Lee have been playing through new chapters as they have been integrated into the builds and put the Devastator-12 shotgun and the Arrowhead Sniper rifle through their paces.
Just around the corner is 2.3.1 which we are beavering away at, checking that infinite loading screens are vanquished whilst trying our hardest to shoo (excess) pirates away from Yela, hopefully making it as smooth an experience for you guys as possible and it should be ready soon™!
With every new PTU push Adam Parker gathered much appreciated feedback from the backers on PTU, which helps us immensely. I’d like to thank all of our backers for the help they provide QA with their feedback and Issue Council reports, especially the guys and gals who put in massive amounts of time and effort on PTU helping us find larger scale issues that are otherwise too cumbersome for internal team to reproduce. Your input is really invaluable, a huge thanks to you all!
We have also had three new additions come into the QA fold, so please welcome Wayne Owen, Michaela Oliver and Ray Warner to the team! All three have industry experience from Sony Computer Entertainment (Wayne & Ray) and Traveller’s Tales (Mici) adding further strength to our already formidable QA force! They have settled in and are quickly becoming part of the family here.
Right now we are testing the last areas of 2.3.1 whilst gearing up for 2.4 which has some very exciting additions that we can’t wait to try and break so you guys don’t have to!
See you in the ‘verse!
VFX
The VFX team have been focusing on Live release priorities this month, including hangar-ready Starfarer (man that thing’s a beast!) which requires lots of subtle interior effects. A lot of this is preparation – putting in the groundwork – for later flight-ready tasks. We’ve also been supporting Caleb in Frankfurt who was tasked with the majority of effects tasks for flight-ready Scout – no doubt you will read all about that in the Frankfurt report!
Away from live release, our new VFX artist Staffan has been getting to grips with weapon effects – we’re working on a couple of new ones and have been tidying up some existing effects too.
We’ve also been working closely with the graphics engineers to finalise several particle lighting improvements. We are really happy with how our particles “behave” now in all lighting conditions (a crucial factor when working on such a complex universe with so many lighting variables). Related to this, we have been testing how our particles hold up with the new bloom and flares settings applied. Hint: they look really lovely; things like sparks, and other “hot” particles look so much more natural now. We’re really looking forwards to showing off these improvements in later live releases.
Design
March was another busy month in the UK design department.
In terms of ships, we have a Starfarer flying around in the game now and what a beast it is! Hopefully we will be seeing a working refuelling system coming online very soon, but there is still work to do there in a number of areas. The Argo is getting very close to finished and the Javelin Destroyer has landed on the tech design table. We have seen some funny Idris landing videos doing the rounds this month as that ships gets closer to release. You would have to be a brave pilot to try to land a Hornet in there without Automatic Landing enabled, especially if it was moving. That said, we made good progress with the Automatic Landing system this month, and it feels great to land vertically on a station now, but we are still tuning the horizontal landing system, and waiting for the new UI to be implemented.
The first pass on the controls refactor is going in for 2.4.0, so you we see a much better unification between the various game modes, FPS, EVA and space combat. We are looking forward to getting any feedback on this.
From system design, we got the mobiGlas refactored design signed off and into production. Also, the Holotable updated design is going into the engineering and UI teams hands for final implementation.
S42 is still getting the bulk of our design resources and the levels now locked down from design/art layout standpoint. The mechanics are filtering in and the NPC AI is getting more robust so we are starting to get a better feel for the play spaces.
Thanks again for the fantastic support as always.
Props
Props, short and sweet this month:
This month has seen a bit of a shift in priorities with ship components getting a few more resources and now we understand the feature better we want to make sure that when it goes live we have plenty of components to play with and customise your ships. There is going to be plenty of choices that should allow you to make your ship really feel yours and fly just how you want it.
Shopping has been the other big focus at the start of the month, we spent a bit of time bug fixing and doing some optimisations after getting some feedback and stats from our tech artist as well as putting the finishing touches on some of the props to make them work with the new tech that is being finalised.
Squadron 42 work is continuing, we made an effort to go through and do a really quick pass on getting placeholders in for any props we were missing so that the environment artists and designers can dress their scenes and we can make sure we aren’t missing anything off our plans.
Next month, a lot more ship components and with our new team members settling in fast a few more props!
Audio
CIG Audio has been busy as ever this month.
CIG Audio has been busy as ever this month.
Hopefully by now most of you will have enjoyed the Starfarer promo, including some beautifully produced music by Pedro Macedo Camacho for that. For the ship’s sound design itself, Darren Lambourne has been busy working on the thrusters and interior soundscapes, still work in progress but hopefully befitting such an impressive ship. Luke Hatton has been giving many ships a review to ensure all is working as it should be and that the audio is ship-shape!
Matteo Cerquone has been supporting the procedural Foley system and content for that, and is also responsible for a large part of the Xi’An Scout’s sound design – quite different to the usual ship schemes I’m sure you’ll agree.
Ross Tregenza has been keeping on top of all things musical as usual, both for the Persistent Universe (while I’m writing this report, I’m listening live to another orchestral session that’s being undertaken to ensure Star Citizen’s music is performed live as much as possible; Ross is attending to that in person as I’ve not been able to this time round); and we’re also getting rolling with music for Squadron 42 too. We’re hoping to get a new level of interactive score into the live release soon, following in the tradition of Chris Roberts’ work in Wing Commander. We’ll be taking a huge mass of material to a studio to mix with a film score mix engineer in the next month which should elevate this material even further.
We had an exterior gun recording session in March, which took place in Copehill Down in the south of England in conjunction with Steve Whetman (aka AudioBeast). We’ve worked with him a number of times now on gun recording sessions and are now getting some lovely outdoor gunshot material through from this latest session – will take some time to edit and process, there’s a lot of channels we captured from multiple perspectives. Stefan Rutherford headed that session up from our side, ably assisted by Matteo Cerquone and Philip Smallwood. We’ll compile some photos and material for your reference and enjoyment, of course.
Phil Smallwood has been training up with Bob Rissolo to assist him with all things dialogue related, puts us in a good place to deal with the Squadron 42 workload, as well as the vocal requirements for the persistent universe.
Jason Cobb’s been busy working on ship explosion debris cloud sweeteners and providing a lot of support for the build process where audio is concerned, and assisting in Wwise tech support wherever possible. Stefan, myself and Jason have been looking at ways to re-structure the Wwise project to benefit procedural and linear-style mixing.
All the audio programming team have been working on various bugs and optimisations, as well as looking to progress the Ship Computer dialogue system (Sam Hall); the in-game VOIP-style system and procedural/automated Foley/footsteps (Graham Phillipson); and we’ve had Simon Price digging ever deeper into dialogue pipeline tools and systems.
Our general aim is to keep improving all things audio, from tools, workflows, pipelines on our side, to the content and overall sound that you hear and appreciate on the player side. Do keep asking questions and providing feedback on the Ask A Dev forum, that’s always hugely valuable to us.
Thanks for listening!
Animation
We’ve been working on the core locomotion – start stops and steps to improve player movement and responsiveness. Additionally, pistol aimpose exploration to strike a balance between first person and third person is working nicely together and the initial implementation of railgun animations has gone in so that we have a functioning weapon. The next stage will be to bring them up to final. There has also been support for ai animation – guys checking vents and reacting to sounds and the like. Finally, testing and feedback of new tool suite that is coming online is continuing!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
The Frankfurt office is continuing to grow in size and pick up momentum on all fronts. We grew by 4 people this month and have another few additional contracts started. It’s exciting to see the internal progress, from pushing tech boundaries on the Procedural Planets, to the realism on the cinematics and facial tech, etc. We’ve received a few personal letters and gifts from fellow citizens recently, things to help fatten us up. The team honestly appreciates all the support, it’s a constant reminder of how cool the project is and how fortunate we are to be working on it. Here’s a portion of what we’ve been working on over the past month.
Weapons
The weapon art team finished modelling a new ship weapon and is currently finalizing materials, textures and decals for it. Two more new ship weapons and a bunch of new FPS weapon concepts are also in production and should be ready to be shown off soon.
Engine Code
Following up on last month’s mesh data compression for normals and tangent frames we started work on compressed vertex index support for meshes.
We did additional work on atmosphere rendering as well as research into large scale soft terrain shadows for planets.
We worked on a lot of trackview support and feature requests for S42 and did further improvements on the WAF workflow.
EVA – After we got the base functionality of physicalized EVA working, we started to make the transitions between gravity and zero-gravity areas as smooth as possible. One aspect that made this a bit tricky is the extensive use of ragdolls as player characters in EVA. In Star Citizen ragdolls are usually not dead, they are just another way to animate a character. When running on ground a player model is a so-called “LivingCharacter” animated mainly by mocap-data. In EVA it’s a “DrivenRagdoll” with a simulated articulated body. And for all other modes where the player is either unconscious, paralyzed or heavily influenced by physics we blend to a “FloppyRagdoll”. The difference between floppy and driven ragdolls is mainly how we use the artificial muscles to control the joints.
The player can do all kinds of actions all the time (running, jumping walking, floating, aiming, shooting, reloading, etc.) and whenever we transition from animation to physics and back to animation we have to ensure that we preserve the velocity and inertia of every single joint. This works pretty well when leaving the gravity area. It also works when entering the gravity area and the feet point towards the ground plane. But if the player approaches the ground plane in the wrong angle you can expect a lot of spectacular crash landings. In such uncontrolled cases we simply switch to floppy ragdoll, let the player crash to the ground and as soon as the simulation comes to rest he will automatically stand up again. If such a crash landing happens in first person view, then the player will experience everything through the eyes of a simulated ragdoll … and that might look pretty disturbing and painful Because all simulated, mocapped or keyframed animations are shared in first- and third-person view, we were able to use the same system in both view modes. This is the first time we worked with a player model where a large part of its motions are coming from physics and we feel that we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with this kind of physical simulations. This is an ongoing task and we hope to show more improvements in the next months.
Optimizations – We did a good amount of work on optimization this month, to make our universe as large and as interesting as we want we need a good amount of objects in it, therefore we optimized various parts of the 3DEngine to increase our supported object count. We now support hierarchical culling for most of our culling operations in the ZoneSystem. This approach allows us to utilize the spatial structure which we use to speed up our visible culling even more: When we know that the bounding box of a group of objects is fully enclosed inside a camera frustum, we no longer need to check all individual objects against the camera. The same idea can be applied to other checks like box/box overlaps or sphere/distance tests. We then looked into the streaming code. Before it was running in parallel but synced with the MainThread, this means our frame-time is affected by the number of objects around the player (as we need to update those). When we now increase the number of objects, the frame-time obviously gets worse. To help with this issue, we have now decoupled the streaming state update from the actual streaming request. This allows us to update the streaming state (the expensive part of streaming) fully in parallel to the MainThread without affecting the frame-rate. We then looked at our JobManger, which is responsible to distribute all this work over the CPU cores. It turned out that we could massively improve our thread communication and improve our load-balancing. This means we utilize more CPU cores in parallel while reducing the latency of those operations. The next focus is on the rendering side, and we’ll have more details on those next month.
As usual in this stage of development we also worked on various code clean-ups and bug fixes.
Environment Art
This month the Environment Art team focused solely on supporting the new procedural planet tech, doing some R and D on detailing the surface of the planet by procedurally scattering geometry such as boulders, rocks, and pebbles.
QA
April has been a busy month full of Automation testing setups for Chris Speak. Chris has been designing automated tests for AI spawning, death, and ragdolling after being killed by ship weapon fire. These tests also test ship pathing using Kythera Navsplines. When AI are spawned in, the automated test will run to check if the AI spawn in correctly. A ship will also fire shots at the spawned AI to verify weapon damage is being taken and that the AI dies correctly with proper ragdoll physics. The test map is still a work in progress, but will be an asset to the testing process once complete. Melissa Estrada made her final preparations for her transfer to the CIG-DE studio at the end of this month, and will be joining Chris Speak on the QA team as a QA Engine Specialist starting April 1st. She is looking forward to continuing her work on the EditorMonkey, which runs a python scripted automated test of the Editor Sanity checks as well as becoming a 2nd QA point-of-contact for in-house Developers to reach out to when needing specific in-house tests done for new features, and bug fixes.
Tech Art
Tech Art worked on expanding our animation pipeline and focused on the Asset Manager, where we will be populating all our assets. Also supported other departments, finalizing a new rig for the weapons team, bug fixes, etc. And of course we’ve been supporting other teams and fixing bugs is out daily routine.
Cinematics
Cine Environment art built some more close-up geometry for an Admiral to admire on our Skydock scene where a spoileriffic super capital ship is currently being built. For a scene that hearkens back to the days where you had to install a speech pack for your Wing Commander II, Robert our part time cinematic environment artist has created additional set pieces and props that we can’t discuss just yet. We also started up work on Shubin station performance capture scenes that involve Old Man & Graves (who looks awesome!) Those scenes will take a while and will involve lots of blending between pcap and AI locomotion as they traverse big parts of the station on foot. We finalized 1st pass on a part of Chapter 3 scenes and are still working on more of Chapter 03.
We also have 2 new starters in our team which brings us up to almost full staffing. We now have a Cinematic Producer and another Senior Cinematic Animator!
Design
Our Level Designers are hard at work building major landing areas that will be used in the Persistent Universe in the future. Port Olisar is getting a lot of work done and a brand new Shopping District will get added to the existing facilities. This should allow players easy access to NPCs, shops, utilities and will make the place feel a lot more alive than it is right now. We are also adding a pirate/lawless base where players that have been a bit “naughty” can respawn after dying or where they can just dock without getting shot out of the sky by the law enforcement. This area will have its disadvantages when compared to a law abiding station of course, so players who do wrong will have to support the consequences. (Remember that the area around Crusader is UEE space. In an unclaimed or unrepresented system, the opposite might be true!) Another area that is receiving a lot of attention is the Hurston landing zone. This will consist of a large planetary settlement cantered around the Hurston family building and its gigantic strip mining operations. This area right now has gone through its layout phase and is moving towards the first art pass.
System Design has been busy this month with setting up the ground work for a lot of AI features. A lot of code work has come online in AI and we managed to do a lot of behaviour prototyping, focusing mostly on their perception and reactions to seeing and hearing events, aiming precision and out of combat activities. At the same time we pushed designs forward on systems that are adjacent to our AI, especially our interactors which define how our AI interact with objects in the world for everything ranging from sitting on a chair or repairing a computer to opening a door or even turning on an alarm. Since all our interactors will also be usable by the player we are looking into how these will be used and how the player will handle interactions with objects that have multiple ways that they can be used. To cater for this we have decided to use the same Inner Thought system that we also use for dialogue selection as it seems to be a really nice fit. Another system we’ve pushed forward is the Loot Generation which will handle how loot spawns across the world (that’s not to say ships will be spewing out gold like a typical MMO, but there will be salvage and other benefits for scoring kills.) We are trying to build a system that encourages exploration rather than staying in one place and farming resources. We want you to have to search through the vastness of space for the areas that have not yet been discovered as those will most likely provide the most rewarding looting opportunities.
While pushing these new systems, we also spent some time refactoring some old systems that were not quite up to par with our vision of Star Citizen. We’re currently talking about the Quantum Travel which will get a major overhaul to make it a challenging part of gameplay where people who are good at it and know what they are doing will be able to enter QT faster (perhaps before being interdicted; see below) and travel for longer distances in one quantum navigation. At the same time we are introducing the concept of Interdiction to allow players to interrupt others from just leaving in the middle of a battle whenever they feel like it. There will be multiple ways of stopping a ship from entering QT ranging from simply damaging them, all the way to specialized weapons and deployable devices focused on stopping ships dead in their tracks. Another system receiving a bit of love is the Power Distribution. While we have worked on this in the past, the system is being reworked a bit now as we are starting to implement it into our first capital ship, the Idris. This system will handle all of the power and every consumer on board from your big laser cannons to the tiniest light bulb and dictate how power is routed throughout the ship, where it comes from, where it goes to and what happens when there’s not enough of it to go around.
AI
This month we actually progressed on multiple areas, let’s start with the character movement. We developed a functionality to allow level designers to pre-place paths on the level that can be followed by the NPCs. As an example, this is going to be useful for creating patrol paths behaviors!
We enabled the new perception system in the build! After the first use we exposed some properties to correctly customize the events received by the different NPC when hearing different audio stimuli and we also exposed some more properties to designers so that they will be able to correctly customize perception properties directly in the different NPCs archetypes. We introduced some new components to control the weapons in use by the different NPCs. This central component will take care of installing different controller to use different type of weapons. If you think about the case in which a character wants to throw a grenade we will need to predict in a different way the shooting direction compared to the case in which the character is equipping a normal rifle. We also use this component to control the character accuracy so that we can create more or less skilled NPCs.
On the behavior side we introduced three main assignments, Defend Area, Combat Move and Hold Position. Those are basic “high level” commands the level designers can use to create some interesting gameplay situations in their level!
A lot of progress has been made on the Subsumption side. Subsumption currently support the following functionalities
An entity can have an activity associated to it
Each activity can be composed by several subactivities
The selection of subactivity is now correctly following their priorities and relative probabilities
We introduce the basic support for events
We created our internal expression parser to correctly evaluate any mathematical or Boolean expression inside the pre-requisites of an activity or a task
We developed some basic debug draw functionalities
We introduced the following new tasks
Sort Objects
Pop Objects
Communicate
Compute
Compare
Converse
We developed a functionality to reserve an entity to use it or interact with it and allow other NPCs to know that object is reserved
On the ships side we have worked a lot on improving stability and the flying behavior of the ships, we also started the refactor of the ships behavior to allow the support of multiple crew members inside a ship.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Hello Citizens!
Here’s the latest from what the BHVR team has been doing in Montreal.
Design
This month, the Behaviour design team continued working on shopping and setup Casaba Outlet using the new dynamic spawning system for items. Now, we have items the player can actually wear, as we were working with placeholders before. It required a lot of setting up shelves, spawners and data setup. Now we’ve got a long term solution that we are going to use for more upcoming shop locations. That was a great effort between Bhvr, Austin, LA and UK.
2.3.0 release brought its usual share of hangars and Area18 bugs but nothing we haven’t seen before. We also helped design and setup the extra-large hangar in Revel and York, making sure that new expansion worked with the existing system and the Starfarer spawned correctly when a player owned one. Again, great collaboration between us, Turbulent and the directors.
Finally, we were handed the next hero landing zone whitebox: Hurston in the Stanton system. We are at a stage now, that we clean up the level and connect all the shops to the main paths. We replaced the CryEngine designer meshes for placeholder assets, which respect metrics and setup the level with proper layers and naming conventions. Overall, polishing the level design and getting the map ready for the art team.
Oh yeah, we are also helping and adding new content to Crusader and Port Olisar. It’s great to be able to chip in on every front! Good times!
Engineering
This month, it was all about shopping and figuring out the best way to give you a perfect shopping experience. This feature has many elements that required a cool collaboration between us and the other studios. Which, so far, has been a lot of fun.
We created a new AR-based shopping interface for clothes and personal weapons. Also a Catalog-based shopping system for vehicle components.
With the different types of clothes that you can buy, we had to create a tryout camera to enable the players to preview them on their character.
There was also work on a new shop inventory and layout randomizer.
We updated the CryAstro services UI and flow recode. Finally the most important task is hooking everything to the persistence.
Art
This month we took the time to polish the Market area in Levski, to give it a really nice ambience that we hope you guys will love once is released.
Of course we had to spend time with optimisations and debugging, to ensure a good map performance. With this in mind, there was a lot of work on the tech art side to profile all potential optimisations that can be applied to Levski.
We`ve also polished the shops facades, to make them look unique and to attract the player’s attention as you explore the map.
On the flair side, we began working on the next space plant.
Finally, we spent some time debugging the new Rebel & York bay area for the Starfarer.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings from sunny-but-windy? Wait, actually snowy… nope sunny! Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month:
Ship Stats
We are in the final stages of the design phase for the new ship reference matrix, so we will be able to start development soon. Grouping all the ships by chassis, and switching the layout so that you can see everything on one single page… you’ll be able to select the chassis you want to compare, and view each ship’s production status. This will greatly reduce the left-to-right scrolling, and enable you to easily view all the variants for each chassis. Please also note that, while we are working to improve the ship stats page, different ships are in different stages of development, and some of them have been updated to draw from the new component system and others will not reach that stage until they are further down the pipeline. That means that some of the information may still be temporary or early concept values, and they will definitely need revisions once designers start integrating actual ItemPorts and hardpoints into each respective ship’s in-game assets and collecting information on out what works and what doesn’t. Those values can’t solidify in the ship stats page until that happens, and even then we’ll need to iterate the ships based on feedback from the Live build and Arena Commander testing data. “Subject to change” doesn’t mean we’re changing our minds carelessly or frivolously – it means that during development, they’re going to get multiple balance passes on the road to final launch, which is what it’s really all about.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Our development of multi-factor authentication is ongoing, and we are now in the static integration phase. The first iteration of this feature will include two options for all members: sending the authentication code by email, or by a specifically-designed and -skinned Google Authenticator. In a future release, we will be able to send the code by SMS directly to your phone.
Communication Platform
We have been working on a rough prototype for a new communication platform, which will merge forums and chat systems into a single-page module. Our prototype has already started testing and we’re actively refining its interfaces to make it as easy and intuitive to use as possible. Among other things, we are coming up with novel ways of filtering and organizing conversations and topics. Expect to hear more about it for the next few months!
Ship Happens
This month was very exciting for ships. A new concept ship unveiled, the Esperia Vanduul Blade was announced with a concept sale. This light Vanduul fighter joins the ranks of the Scythe and the Glaive, as Vanduul weapons being used by humans against their creators. March also saw a free-fly week, which included all flyable ships to anyone who created an account, giving new and veteran players a like a chance to try out some new ships. To celebrate this huge free fly, we had a ship sale, putting all flyable limited ships on sale.
To close out the month, when 2.3 went live, the Xi’An Scout and the Starfarer went for sale, for which we developed a dedicated promo page with a few new modules like a browsable magazine-like layout. We’ve since already reused it on the much anticipated Big Benny’s food delivery menu. With 2.3 the Scout is now flight ready and the impressive Starfarer is now in the hangar for the first time!
Sales
March was also very busy for merchandise. First the new customizable Squadron 42 dog tags were put on sale. Next Starmap posters were offered up, giving people a chance to own a very cool poster of the Star Citizen Universe that’s been in the works ever since the Kickstarter campaign! Finally in preparation for this year’s CitizenCon, tickets went on sale for our most anticipated event of the year, this time in Los Angeles.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Hello Citizens!
I’ll start with a little introduction.
Tyler Witkin here, or better known as Zyloh from the forums, and I am your newest Community Manager reporting in from under the bus in the Austin, TX studio! Yes! Two Community Managers! I am very excited to work closely with my new partner in crime Lando and the rest of the team to continue delivering you all awesome content and information. I am now back in Texas after a very productive and adventurous week of training in the LA studio. Throughout the week I worked closely with the team to better understand my new responsibilities, iron out the new role, and study the tools of the trade. There are some really great things planned in the coming months and I am very excited to dive in!
Can you believe we are already a quarter through 2016?! Let’s take a look at what went down in March!
Videos
We continued to put out our regularly scheduled segments and content (made possible by all the awesome subscribers out there!) and finished strong with a very informative 10 For the Chairman with Global Head of Production and Foundry 42 Studio Director, Erin Roberts.
March brought us the flyable Xi’an Scout and hangar ready Starfarer. We released a comm-link detailing our now largest hangar-ready ship yet, the Starfarer. The page delves into the massive hauler and includes a visually stunning video created by Nathan Dearsley accompanied by new music from the talented Pedro Camacho! Definitely worth checking out!
March also saw the release of a behind-the-curtains look at Squadron 42 with the talented Andy Serkis! We are extremely excited and fortunate to have him on board the cast for Squadron 42!
Website
The MVP section of the Community Hub is now fully up to date with AtV’s MVP winners. Make sure to check out some of the awesome content your fellow citizens are putting out there!
Live Events
While we did not attend any conventions/events in March, we announced details and sold tickets for Citizen Con 2016! Citizen Con marks the original October 2012 announcement of the Star Citizen crowdfunding campaign, and the event has previously been held in Austin, Los Angeles and Manchester. This year, Citizen Con returns to Los Angeles at the Avalon Hollywood on October 9th for an action-packed day that will celebrate the latest and greatest work our developers are putting out.
Perks
Space plants! March Subscriber Flair brought us the Tuserac Plena, aka the Terran Emperor Blossom, and in case you we’re worried about your Emperor Blossom being lonely, the Xi’An Space Plant stretch goal was awarded to all who backed before $49 million.
Additionally the servers were jam packed with new players and veterans alike for our Free Fly promotion that ran March 11th-22nd. It was great getting to see the level of camaraderie (and havoc) that took place whilst some of our experienced players welcomed the new crowd.
Coda
That’s all for March! 2016 is going to be a big year for Star Citizen and as always, we are dedicated and excited to continue communicating, sharing, and exploring this universe with all of you!
Around the Verse: Episode 2.26 - THE PROCEDURAL WORLD OF TODD PAPY
THE PROCEDURAL WORLD OF TODD PAPY
This week, we chat with Design Director Todd Papy, explore the streaming community with Captain Richard, and get an update on the continuing development of procedural planets.
Big Benny's has already established themselves as a foundation of the Star Citizen universe.. and now it's up to you to distribute their menus, make their food and deliver it to the far reaches of the galaxy! Take some time to noodle it over!
“With the gentle tap of a missile, the Vanduul fighter blocking my path shattered into a trillion pieces. I took a brief moment of satisfaction as the once-proud Blade’s atmosphere lit up with a distinctive, instantaneous flash. A bold attacker as any I’d encountered, for sure, and a sentient life cut short. But it was him or me, and I couldn’t stop to grieve over a monster set on pillaging my precious cargo. I punched my throttle, sending my Retaliator bomber ahead full and then glanced at my mission computer: blast damage to all my armor, a rear hull fracture preparing to become a breach, a loose missile on pylon three that needs to be ejected. Damn, they hit me harder than I realized. Then I saw the timer: five minutes, fifteen seconds. This was going to be a rough one: if I couldn’t make the drop on time, the pizza would be free.”
-Captain Ronald “Dagger” Gourami, SS Pepperoni Princess
Greetings, Citizens!
One thing we’ve learned in the past three years is that Star Citizen backers have unstoppable hungers. We’re talking about an enduring hunger for space combat, for exploration, for trading, for building their own stories in the universe we’re creating. It’s that hunger that has made the game possible… and now we’re going one step further. Because when you really drill down, there’s one hunger that’s even more important than all of these others put together: a hunger for hunger. That’s why we’re proud to announce that Star Citizen’s next career will be: food.
Of course, that makes perfect sense, you say. But how do we introduce food into a game with a very specific set of existing mechanics, most of which are based on the far less interesting experiences of visceral space combat action and futuristic sci-fi adventure? The answer is that we need to change the status quo, and to do that we have invested significant time and energy into rebuilding how Star Citizen integrates food on the most base level. The result of this system is a magnificent new core mechanic: GRUBBY HANDS. Grubby Hands is a complete, immersive technology system that accounts for meal development, preparation, delivery and more. What’s more, Grubby Hands functions alongside our existing physics grid tech, meaning that the game has the ability to do everything from flip pancakes at zero G to broil a steak at the center of a neutron star.
As many of you know, the stock CryEngine includes only limited built-in options for sandwich customization. And for an ordinary game, that’s fine. Titles like RISE: Son of Rome rarely need to render a sandwhich or a burger with more than four layers (a primary meat item, or PMI, a standard topping (ST) and two mirrored bread items (in game development parlance, Exterior Bakeslots.) For Star Citizen, however, we want to give players the immersive freedom to immerse themselves in limitless sandwich possibilities. Imagine a game in which you can build a hamburger with double the meat, an egg salad sandwich with two kinds of cheese or even roll your own wrap. Thanks to the efforts of our procedural technology team, it’s all possible.
What allows this immersive system to function is a highly complex (and very immersive) system of taste-nodes. No longer must a sandwich be built around a single PMI, or limited to inside a pair of Exterior Bakeslot containers. Instead, individual nodes featuring 64-bit precision will allow almost infinite combinations. Individual sub-items are given node markers and are then passed to the client to render on the fly; where previous games would have seen a sudden framerate drop trying to render, say, a slice of eggplant, Star Citizen shines. Thanks to an in-game mobiglas app tie-in, these infinite components can be classified, organized and positioned (with maximum immersion.)
And looking forward (and not to blow your mind all at once) we’re happy to say that this technology is NOT limited to sandwiches. Pizza toppings, fry frying, pancake mixing and even the French Toast Process (FTP) can be accurately simulated to within 1/100th of an immersion unit.
IMPORTANT NOTE: corn is not and will not be supported.
Delivery Career
Designing your own sandwiches is great, we know… but like the saying goes, a sandwich is meaningless until you do something with it. Star Citizen is a game about space travel, so it would not do to simply make you some sort of sandwich gardener. Space food must tie directly to the game’s overall economy system, and we must give our many culinary-minded players an endgame. To that point, we have created an immersive career concept that we believe will carry all of our work to the next level. The system, developed by our top designers over the course of months of debate and discussion to try and create the most immersive possible food career, is as follows:
You put the food in your spaceship.
You take the food somewhere and give it to someone.
Balance Updates
In order to best support the immersive new Grubby Hands mechanics and our general change of direction, the following changes will be made to Star Citizen’s concepts:
The MISC Starfarer can now carry up to 50,000 STU (Standard Tasty Units) of marinara.
Squadron 42 is henceforth renamed Squadron 57, as a nod to the many varieties of sauces available to the player during the campaign.
The Drake Herald’s internal computer core has been replaced with a traveling oven capable of keeping pizzas hot and fresh in the deepest space (except stuffed crust, which gets weird when you reheat it.)
The M50 is now the Mmmmmm50, and we’re lovin’ it.
The Vanduul Blade, Scythe and Glaive are just three parts of an extraordinary nine-piece Vanduul Cutlery Set, available for a limited time for just three monthly installments of $59.99, plus shipping and handling. At that price, are we insane? Stocks are limited and operators are standing by!
The Shubin Mining Station is now a Shubin-N-Out Burger restaurant.
Something funny with the Gladiator, I guess.
The Carrack is now a kind of salad.
A fresh slice ham counts as a pet.
Players will have the option of collecting all five of the Banu Mother Sauces, which can be harvested from the distinctive sauce-glands of a Banu hive mother.
The Retaliator remains unchanged, with the exception of being renamed the RetalEATor.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Discover a day in the life of a Starfarer Captain
MISC is proud to present an inside look at what it's like to sail the stars aboard a Starfarer, and how from Captain to crew, everybody has an important job to do when living and working on a tanker.
This may appear to be a story about the men and women who crew our tankers, but don’t let that fool you. Aboard Clydesdale, a working MISC Starfarer, everyday is a new adventure as her crew undertakes their charge, to carry fuel and cargo to the darkest depths of space.
Outfitted and equipped with cutting-edge technology, the Starfarer is an important backbone of interstellar commerce. Yet to focus on the grandeur of the ship alone would miss the true beating heart of this tale, the men and women who operate these stout ships and their exhilarating lives on the drift.
06:13 SET.: Chronos System.
Chief Jack Conroy, Clydesdale’s First Officer, receives his morning briefing from the Boatswain. Don’t let their easy interplay come off as laziness or inattention: these are experienced spacemen with thousands of voyages between them, always keenly aware of their responsibilities and the constant dangers they face.
Meanwhile, in his personal quarters, the tanker’s captain, awakens from four hours of union-mandated rest after overseeing midwatch during the transit in-system. Jarvan MacGravy, or ‘Little Mac’ as he’s affectionately known by his crew, is now again ready to take the reigns. His quarters are an oasis, the lone respite on a crowded ship.
Old spacehands have a saying: never trust a ship that doesn’t break down. Repairs are a constant aboard a complex spacecraft like Clydesdale. With hundreds of systems working at any given time, those repairs require expertise in a variety of disciplines, including welding, electronics repair, programming, repainting and a thousand other tasks. The crew performs this work with a knowing smile: their pride in their ship’s efficiency is telling.
Deeper in Clydesdale’s innards, Chief Engineer Clayton Fitz monitors the massive reactor that powers the transport. As with any power plant, there is constant danger of everything from meltdown to system failure, but the truly great engineers won’t settle for baseline performance. Instead, they actively man stations such as this to maximize energy output, constantly trying to improve engine efficiency as little as one micron at a time.
It isn’t all sweat and toil! In Clydesdale’s shared crew quarters, the off-shift personnel prepare to bunk down. It’s spartan, but more than enough for those accustomed to traveling the stars. The Captain discourages talking politics and sataball allegiances here: games of Trigger, easy camaraderie and tall tales of adventure are the order of the day when off duty.
The klaxon sounds! Long range scanners have detected a slow-moving blip on a potential intercept course. Such incidents are, more often than not, false alarms. The last alarm was the passing of an errant comet. Yet even the most experienced of hearts still skip a beat when the shrill call goes off. Could it be pirates seeking a target of opportunity? Vanduul raiders dedicated to nothing but slaughter? Only time will tell as the crew springs to action stations!
Unlike a warship, Clydesdale does not carry a crew of dedicated turret gunners on hand to watch the stars at all time. Instead, engineers and spacemen fill this essential job when crisis arises. Don’t let the lack of military experience fool you, these emergency gunners each have hundreds of hours of experience. Some, like Junior Engineer Janel Cosca, have even passed extensive certification programs. Tense minutes seem like hours to whoever’s ‘in the pods,’ each knowing they may be the only line of defense against an unknown enemy. And then, finally: the all clear. It was an errant Hull C which had drifted off the normal spacelanes.
The ship is docked! Without further incident, Clydesdale arrives at her destination, Archangel Station, and sets down gently in one of the standard hangars. Buggies carrying inspectors and customs officials speed to the landing platform, where they are dwarfed by the massive vessel.
Before she can unload her fuel and cargo, a thorough Customs inspection is in order. Local security scan Clydesdale for contraband while Captain MacGravy outlines the fuel and cargo intended to be traded. The local TDD representative comes out to make a visual inspection and officially receive the cargo.
The stevedores go to work! Starfarers like Clydesdale are more than massive fuel tanks: an extensive cargo bay allows the ship’s quartermaster, Ralph Dion, to engage in all forms of mercantile pursuits. The crew and the groundside personnel continue unloading essential goods ferried here to restock local shelves.
With her cargo holds now a few tons lighter and her crew a few credits richer, Clydesdale is ready to finish her contract and deliver her precious supply of fuel to the station’s waiting storage tanks. Specially built for the task, transferring the contents of the Starfarer’s massive detachable fuel pods is a straightforward affair as Quartermaster Dion ensures that the business at hand is conducted quickly and more importantly, safely.
Deep inside the tanker, Max Bresh (nicknamed ‘Scrub’ much to her dismay) initiates the defueling process. Massive quantities of refined quantum fuel surge from the ship into the storage tanks buried deep within the hangar. A process seemingly as simple as drinking through a straw… but one that can be as dangerous as playing with a live grenade!
Outside the ship, the pneumatics whirr. An Archangel deckhand monitors the defueling process, ready to release the dead man’s switch at a moment’s notice should something go wrong. While the ship’s state of the art containers render the fuel as inert as possible, Clydesdale is equipped with secondary systems to provide an added degree of safety.
The fuel is delivered, and Clydesdale’s crew prepares for takeoff. In the hauling business, time is money. To stay profitable, you have to stay mobile, so Clydesdale has little time for liberties. Mere hours after she arrived at Archangel, the enormous tanker has picked up any critical supplies that are needed and pushed off towards the stars.
And so the day ends as it began! Captain MacGravy briefs Chief Conroy on the day’s events and issues orders for the next shift before heading off to catch some much needed rack time. Conroy’s already begun running the next shift through engine drills and gunner reaction time. As Captain MacGravy heads to his bunk, he smiles: he has a good crew, one he is proud to trust with his life.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The Starfarer is here! Star Citizen Alpha 2.3 introduces our largest hangar-ready ship yet. The MISC Starfarer is a dedicated tanker and transport… and a home away from home for a crew of seven, featuring turrets, a reactor room, escape pods, barracks, captain’s quarters and more! If you’ve ever dreamed about commanding a motley crew of space heroes, the Starfarer is a great place to start!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The Starfarer was initially designed as a tanker, and includes equipment for collecting and refining spaceborne hydrogen. There’s also plenty of standard cargo space, plus defensive weaponry that will make any pirate think twice before trying to board you! For the first time, you can explore the Starfarer in-game… and our engineers are currently working on implementing it in flight for an upcoming patch.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Hangar-ready sale
About the Sale
The Starfarer is being offered as a ‘hangar ready’ sale. This means that the ship’s geometry and graphics have been implemented in the game engine but that it has not been made flight ready yet. Please note that due to changes in the design, the Starfarer’s price has increased since the original concept sale. The price will increase again when it becomes flight-ready.
If you’d like to add one to your fleet, they’re available in the pledge store until April 4th. You can also view a detail of the Starfarer in the Holo Viewer in the Tech Overview of the ship page!
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.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Star Citizen Alpha 2.3 is now available! Pilots can access the latest patch on the Live server using the Star Citizen launcher. Alpha 2.3 adds the usual assortment of bug fixes and balance updates, as well as making our first capital-sized ship hangar-ready! The MISC Starfarer is now ready for boarding, and by a large margin it’s the biggest ship we’ve released so far. This patch also makes the Xi’An Khartu-al scout ship flight ready, with plenty of last minute balance provided by our intrepid PTU testers. The component conversion also continues with power plants moving into the new system. You can find a full list of changes and additions in the patch notes, and more information on the Starfarer in this special post.
And of course, you can find your 2.3 Patch Notes here.
Ship Update
Scouts Reporting In!
If you missed out on your chance to pick up either the hangar-ready Starfarer or the flight-ready Xi’An Scout, both are now on sale! The Xi’An Scout is a nimble long-range fighter-sized ship, whereas the Starfarer is a massive tanker with multiple decks and crew support for seven people! These ships will be available in the pledge store through Monday, April 4.
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.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We are happy to announce that Star Citizen Alpha 2.3 includes the new system for power plant components! We’re making two ‘general purpose’ power plants available in the Voyager Direct store today. These components power the systems of your ship. All current ships have ‘generic’ plants that replicate the power generated before the patch, and these two new designs are upgrades which can be mounted on all variants of the Avenger, Aurora, MUstang, 300, Hornet (except Super Hornet), Gladiator, Gladius, M50 and Merlin.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Remember, while there’s a lot to explore in Alpha 2.3 the game still just a portion of the Star Citizen experience! You can help the team improve future releases by reporting bugs and other issues using the Star Citizen Issue Council. The amazing feedback from Star Citizen backers is what has allowed us to interate on the PTU so quickly, and we’re eager for feedback about the Live release as well. You can access the Issue Council here.
Finally, we would be remiss if we not thank our incredible community of PTU testers for helping make this patch the best it can be! Your dedication is exemplary of the UEE’s finest defenders!
”Massive fleet actions, attempts at global landings to hold Tiber II itself, and even “clean slate” operations designed to simply eliminate the ability of the system to sustain military occupation have all fallen flat. Millions have died in these attempts, and the ever-expanding fields of wreckage are now legendary. Countless civilians, seeing the deadly battlefield debris as potential for profit, have made the same leap with similar fatal results.“
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 and artists working on the ship will answer 10 questions for the community. Tune back in on this Friday to see the answers to 10 more questions. Let’s jump right in.
Question & Answer
Where do you envision the Blade position compared to others Vanduul ships, we know it’s a light fighter but is it more of a “Gladius” or closer to a “M50”?
It’s a mix of the two, the Blade is lighter armed than the Gladius but makes up for that shortfall by being more agile. A Blade pilot’s best strength is to evade incoming fire and stay on its target’s tail.
My question is about the two different flight modes. Given the two other ships that have multiple flight modes (Reliant and Xi’An Scout) have had those flight modes regulated to landing only, what makes the Blades multiple flight modes different?
This was an error in the website listing, the folded mode is purely for storage/landing like the Scythe/Glaive and harks back to its Vanduul roots where hundreds of Blades would be stored inside larger carriers.
How well will the Blade perform as a racer?
The Vanduul have no interest in any competition that doesn’t see your enemy dead at your feet. That said, the Blade is fast and human pilots should take full advantage of that.
Will the gimbals be able to be taken off and the hardpoint become an S2 fixed, like other ships, or will there be some Vanduul caveat that doesn’t let you alter the weapons? Will it be able to take other human weapons, or will it have Vanduul specific weapons? If Vanduul weapons only, then how are they expected to preform when compared to other s1/s2 weapons?
Long term you’ll be able to mix/match race-specific weaponry provided you have an appropriate cross-species mount. For example you could take your S2 Vanduul weapons and with a appropriate mount attach them to any UEE ship. The specific penalties (if any beyond requiring another mount in your inventory) are still to be decided.
What sort of operational range should we expect from the Blade? It’s referred to as a “Scout.” Is it carried-based like a Super Hornet and Gladiator, or is it capable of longer range engagements.
Operationally, the Blade is short range and is almost unstoppable in a swarm, but without the support of its brothers, the Blade can be exposed and vulnerable. Only expert pilots should think about taking one out too far.
How does the attributes like maneuverability, emissions and armor of the Blade compare to other ships in similar role?
The maneuverability is intended to be beyond anything else out there which makes up for its lacking armor. Emission wise, it’s about the same, no real effort has been made to disguise or optimize it.
The ship is awful small, I’m wondering if it comes with a jump drive? Can one be added if not? Can it quantum travel or is it carrier based type fighter?
The Blade comes with a jump drive, as most non-snub craft traditionally do.
Are the “blades” (wings) rugged enough to be used in combat? Is the Blade suited for ramming, or is the sharpness just Vanduul aesthetic?
No, that would not be advisable. The Vanduul aesthetic for this ship is to strike fear into the minds of their enemies, not their cockpit.
How does the Esperia replica differ from the Vanduul original?
Like their Glaive replica it has been fitted with human-sized control interfaces to allow the naturally shorter humans the ability to control the craft. Some of the internal components have been replaced with more readily available components rather than Vanduul made ones.
Since this is a replica ship would the interface/HUD be more human based, or will it have the Vanduul interface fighting to break out under a hacked on human interface as the other Vanduul ships have had?
One of the many improvements Esperia have brought in since their initial work on the Glaive has been a solid human-centric interface. With the Blade being a replica rather than refurbished, there is no underlying Vanduul computer system trying to break through.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Start Transmission
Top your mug off and settle in for another serving of Clean Shot, the best source for the latest and greatest shipping and hauling news. Heading up this great big ol’ infotainment convoy is none other than yours truly, Craig Burton.
First off, I want to thank everyone for all their suggestions on my upcoming haul. As some of you less-than-regulars out there may or may not know, every year I try to find some time to get out from behind this desk and get behind the stick to run a contract myself. I think it’s important to drag some crates around the ’verse every once in a while, so that when I sit here and rattle off advice and wisdom, I’m coming at it from experience. Plus, it’s easy to forget that there’s a reason I got involved with hauling in the first place, and it wasn’t to be a famously handsome host. It was always about the flight for me. The quiet. The fact that sometimes the call of the black is just too hard to ignore. My dad used to say that his one week of retirement was the hardest week of his life. Even better was that my mom said the same thing.
Anyway, keep the comms coming. You’ve been giving me some great ideas on what routes to take and what gear to test. Starting to look more and more like I might be taking a Reliant Kore out for a spin. Figured I could get a firsthand look at all this new Xi’An tech MISC is going on about, and see if it’s actually worth a grain. Sure, the ’Lancer handles nice with the few upgrades they’ve done here and there, but the Reliant is a different beast altogether. That thing is alien to its bones. Almost like a Xi’An wearing a Human mask. Sure, it might be able to sneak into the wedding, but it probably wouldn’t be good enough to pass for the groom if you know what I mean. Stay tuned for more updates on the planning as the trip gets closer. Oh, and Skinny just reminded me, chime in if you have any thoughts on what QD I should bolt on.
Now, I know many of you were as dismayed as I was a few weeks ago upon hearing that the Cargolympics were canceled this year. Don’t get me wrong, with the Vega tragedy still fresh, I completely understand why the Cargo Handler Association might have been looking to take a year off out of respect. After so many of our best, brightest and beloved were cut down that horrible day, it’s hard to put aside that kind of pain, but I firmly believed, like a lot of you from the messages we got, that the ones we lost would have wanted the Cargolympics to carry on in the face of such trials. At its core, the Cargolympics were a celebration of Humanity. They took something laborious and mundane, and elevated it to an art. And bless us if that isn’t something real inspiring about us Humans; our ability to elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary. Beyond the crates and lifts, that’s what the Cargolympics was, and I’m proud to announce, will still be.
I just got word that the C.H.A. have reversed their decision and will be holding the 16th annual Cargolympics on March 25th. Thanks to a generous donation from sponsor Torreele Foodstuffs, an older shipping facility is being remodeled into a stadium on Titus right now. Fittingly, it will feature a memorial sculpture of former champ Terri Santos, who perished in the attacks. Full disclosure, Torreele is also a sponsor of Clean Shot, but even if they weren’t, I would be singing their praise. Not only are they shelling out the credits for a new venue and pumping much needed money and tourism back into the Vega system, they have sworn that all proceeds from this year’s event will be going to Operation Solace to help continue the relief effort. How about that? Tickets will be going on sale later this week, and I fully expect them to sell out in minutes.
If all of this wasn’t exciting enough, they have announced a new event for the 2946 games. A Load / Unload Relay where teams will compete to see how fast they can load a ship, fly a course, unload it, and repeat two more times. What’s interesting here is that it’s not just about the speed of the handlers; balancing the load will really affect how fast the ships will be able to make their way around the course. Plenty of the teams are still searching for some qualified pilots, so if any of you are interested, head to the C.H.A. spectrum for more info. Did I mention how excited I am? I am excited. Cargolympics, folks!
All right, time for our first break. When we come back, we’ve got a TroubleZone where we’ll see how the recent Vanduul strikes in Oberon are affecting routes, and I’ll take a look at a new cargo manager app that Skinny loaded onto my mobi this morning. Pretty excited to see how many bananas it helps me to fit into a Hull E. And then later on we will be talking to Special Agent Naron about how haulers can streamline their wait at scan checkpoints. Plenty more Clean Shot just few moments away.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Esperia Vanduul Blade: On Sale Now
Ship Details
The Esperia Blade is a Vanduul design produced by Esperia for military use. The Blade will be available as a concept sale from March 18, 2016 to March 21, 2016. Originally designed as an aggressor for Squadron 42, this Blade sale will allow it to be adapted for human flight in Star Citizen! The Blade is the Vanduul armada’s lightest fighter, focusing on maneuverability over shields and weapons. The Blade is the first concept ship of 2016 and the only additional
Vanduul ship currently being adapted for human flight. Watch for more concept ships from familiar manufacturers starting next month!
About the Blade
With over a quarter-millennia of recorded encounters, the Vanduul Blade is both one of the first of the species’ spacecraft encountered by the United Empire of Earth and one of the most common. A dedicated light fighter and skirmisher, earlier models of the Blade took part in the first raids on Human colonies in Orion. Although aspects of the design have been upgraded over the decades (and like all Vanduul ships, vary slightly from clan to clan) the modern variant has retained an extremely similar silhouette with improved control surfaces and more modern weapons attachment points. Tens of thousands of individual Blades have been destroyed over more than two centuries, and countless others have been tracked by Naval intelligence.
While the Blade’s more advanced cousins, the Scythe and its offshoots, have become iconic symbols of present-day Vanduul terror, the light fighter remains a hugely important supporting element of the Vanduul frontline fleet. The most notable feature of the Blade is its shifting wingspan, which ‘cuts’ between a streamlined travel mode and a more expansive battle mode. When in travel mode, the Blade lacks significant offensive punch but improves its direct speed and maneuverability; when in attack mode, the pilot has access to three forward-firing gun positions and a pair of missile racks.
For some decades, United Empire of Earth aggressor squadrons have operated replica Blade fighters produced under exclusive contract by Esperia, Inc. These spacecraft, produced in great quantity, have been used to train generations of fighter pilots for Vanduul engagements. Today, Esperia manufactures Scythe and Glaive clones for training and testing purposes, with most former Blades having been returned to the manufacturer for storage and disassembly. The so-called “Esperia Boneyard” (location classified) contains hundreds upon hundreds of used examples in varying states of disassembly. In the wake of the recent attack on Uriel, many of the Blade trade-ins produced in the past decade are being outfitted for frontier defense use, part of an extremely controversial program aimed at better-arming those threatened by alien attack.
About the Sale
This ship 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 fly 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 poster and then once the in-game model is finished, you will also be given an in-game scale ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Lifetime Insurance or these extras. Until the Blade is available in-game, owners will be granted a Vanduul Scythe loaner ship.
There will also be two Q&A posts next week: one on Wednesday and another on Friday. You can post your questions about the Esperia Vanduul Blade here.
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The ship itself and all decorative ‘flair’ 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.
Article Text
Greetings Citizens,
The text below is the same content included in the ‘news story’ images above. We are including the raw text here to assist backers who might have difficulty viewing the images, and those who wish to copy the text for their own reference.
ESPERIA SUPPORTS THE WAR EFFORT
Ship manufacturer vows to turn the enemy’s own weapons against the alien threat
KUTARAM, Terra, March 18, 2946 (Spectrum Link) – The recent horrific Vanduul attack on Uriel left thousands of Humans dead and missing, bringing fear to the heart of the Empire. With the Navy fighting bravely on the front, concerned civilians are looking to their own safety at home.
Effective immediately, Esperia, Inc., known for their accurate xeno-reproductions, will be making available their entire warehouse stock of ‘Blade-class’ aggressor fighters available for purchase by qualified members of the general public.
“The Vanduul War is not some distant threat,” Esperia CEO Charlotte Hussion stated, “to paraphrase Admiral Bishop: it is at our door. Vega. Now Oberon. Who knows what system could be struck next? Citizens and civilians need to be able to protect themselves against the Vanduul, and they need to be able to do it now before it’s too late. I am thrilled that Esperia has the ability to facilitate this important effort. These Blade light fighters are not only effective defensive tools, but more importantly, they are ready and available for purchase today.”
With the Empire’s safety and well-being in mind, Esperia will be selling the Blade at a steep discount, and have promised that a large percentage of every sale will be donated to the UEEN Veteran Relief Fund.
“With every purchase, Blade owners are not only helping to protecting themselves, they are helping to protect the brave starmen that are fighting for our way of life. Esperia may not have the resources of some of our competitors, but we have identified a very special situation where we can benefit the whole Empire… and give those Vanduul monsters a black eye or two in the process.”
The Blade
The current crop of Blade spacecraft available were manufactured between 2930 and 2940 under a lease agreement with the United Empire of Earth’s military. Per Esperia’s Naval contract, Blade have been returned to Esperia’s care as more advanced aggressor designs are manufactured at a 1:1 basis. While each of these Blades is already a veteran of Humanity’s war on the Vanduul, each has been restored to factory settings and features a full manufacturer’s guarantee.
Classified as a light combat fighter, Vanduul Blade are thought to exist in great numbers due to their more simplistic design and the more limited weaponry they mount when compared to craft such as the Scythe, Glaive and Void. For further information on the design, please see the series of declassified UEE naval review images attached to this press release.
About the Company
Esperia, Inc. is the Empire’s only dedicated manufacturer of wholly alien-designed spacecraft whose technical crews are the best in the galaxy at decrypting and piecing together xeno-technology. The company has provided half a dozen aggressor spacecraft models for UEE use, with manufacturing runs from several dozen to several thousand depending on need. In addition, Esperia’s line of exquisitely reconstructed Tevarin ships, like the Prowler, are lauded the Empire over by exacting connoisseurs and collectors.
Contact
Jayce Lassiter
Director of Communications
Esperia, Inc.
CL#446/99/A ROOM L
Asox Tower
Kutaram, Terra, Terra
Terra Gazette – EDITORIALS, March 18, 2946
OPINION: PEOPLE PLAYING WITH BLADES ARE GOING TO GET HURT
By Donald Wilfong, Editorial Board
Replica Vanduul Blade fighters provided at cost to certified frontier pilots? It seems like a win-win situation for all parties involved: much needed weapons for those under the Vanduul knife and a massive public relations victory for Esperia, Inc. Not so fast.
Arming unqualified civilians does not make the frontier safer. If these Blades aren’t wanted by the Navy then they should be melted down for raw material resources and not sold to unqualified private operators. Esperia tried this before, making surplus Glaive ships available to extremely qualified pilots… and look what happened (See 10.22.2945 article ‘Civilian Killed Flying Glaive’). Sure, some of those pilots went on to hit back at the enemy… but a whole lot of others ended up killed at the hands of incredibly complex spacecraft with a natural bullseye on them. If these new Blade pilots don’t get themselves killed during flight orientation, they’re going to be prime targets for both enemy vengeance raids AND friendly ships that panic at the sight of their silhouette. Even the Traffic Safety Board warns of this risk. What good is a defense that is going to get you killed in the process? The truth might hurt, but it’s as clear as day: not everyone should own a Vanduul warship.”
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
We hope you’ve been enjoying the Star Citizen ‘All Ship’ Fly Free event! Your efforts have helped us gain extremely valuable data that will improve ship balancing and other elements of the game in future patches. The Fly Free wraps up on Monday, March 21st… so if you’ve ever wanted to try out a rare ship and haven’t had a chance, now is the time!
To go along with the final days of the Fly Free, we are also making some of the limited edition ships available for sale again. These eight ships will be available in the pledge store through Monday, March 21st. If you’ve ever wanted a speedy M50 or a mighty Retaliator bomber, this is your chance!
Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this go directly to the game’s ongoing production. Ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
As you know, I like to use this space to highlight crowd funding efforts that I feel are deserving of your attention. Today, I’d like to point you to a project called Star Traders, currently in the midst of its Kickstarter campaign. Another space game? Yes. And like a lot of the games I love, it’s set in a distant future filled with starships, intergalactic trading and epic heroes. Unlike other projects I’ve written about, though, Star Trades doesn’t’ need an overclocked CPU or the hottest graphics card… because it’s a board game!
Star Traders follows the grand tradition of games like Risk and Solarquest by aiming straight at the heart of good game design: it’s simple to play but frustratingly difficult to master. The game is designed to function at a number of different levels, with the end result being a range of game types that will appeal to every skill level. With the most basic rule set, Star Trader can be enjoyed in an hour by all ages, while using the most complex options can make for the kind of legendary all-night game sessions that define the hobby.
Many of you already know the Star Citizen connection: the game’s creators, David Ladyman and Ryan Archer, have done master-class work in helping create our ‘Verse these past three years. David has been responsible for putting together our brochures, manuals and magazine, and Ryan is the artist behind many of our blueprint images and a lot of what appears in Jump Point (his UEE squadron patches are a particular favorite of mine.) I’ve also had the privilege of working with David on almost every title I did at Origin and on the Wing Commander film (he put together a technical manual published alongside the movie.) You can read more about David and his extensive history making games here.
I mention that connection because I believe it’s a key element of crowd funding: supporting good people. I can tell you from many years of experience that David (and Ryan) will go above and beyond to make their dream a reality, and that they’re true artists: interested in creating something new that others will enjoy. They’ve also scattered some Star Citizen Easter eggs in the game itself… and even asked Sandi and I to appear as characters. Good people, good game design and a desire to make something great. What better combination could there be? I’m eager to get my own copy and I encourage you to check out their video below, visit their project page and consider pledging if you enjoy great board games!
— Chris Roberts
P.S. – Don’t worry, David and Ryan aren’t going anywhere! Their work on Star Citizen happens on a contract basis, and so they’ll continue delivering Jump Point and all the art you’ve come to know. We don’t have any stake in Star Traders, but I know that it’s always best to let creative people pursue their dreams!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
On the fence about Star Citizen? Why not give it a try and see what we’re building! For the next week, we’ve enabled Free Fly access to all accounts… FOR EVERY CURRENTLY FLYABLE SHIP IN THE GAME OO-AH-AH-AH-AH! This means that anyone can jump in to Star Citizen Alpha 2.2.2 today and fly limited ships like the Scythe, Mustang Omega, and more! The Free Fly event gives everyone access to three unique parts of the Star Citizen experience:
Star Citizen Alpha 2.2.2 – Also known as Crusader or the “mini-PU,” this is the nucleus of the world we’re building! Featuring multiple space stations and environments, scripted missions, places to explore and more, Alpha 2.2.2 is your first look at a much larger universe!
Arena Commander – Arena Commander is a ‘game within a game’ that we’ve used to develop our flight mechanics and ship combat balance. Take on human opponents or an AI swarm in single seat fighter.
Social Module – Interact with other players while you explore our first landing zone, ArcCorp! The Social Module is intended as a starting point for our world building,
You can register for an account here to get started. If you already have an account from a previous Free Fly, you’re all set! Just log in via the Star Citizen launcher. This is the first Free Fly that includes Crusader, so there’s more to explore than ever before. For the next week. Free Fly accounts will have access every ship currently available in the game.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We’ve issued another minor patch for Star Citizen Alpha 2.2 this week, focusing on a set of specific bug fixes identified during testing. Thank you as always to our talented backers who have helped us drill down on and now eliminate these bugs! You can find a complete list of changes here.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Have you picked up your now-flight-ready Sabre or the hangar-ready Khartu-al Scout this week? Both ships are available for sale again through Monday, March 14.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
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.
Want to meet the team making the game? Check out the personal Twitter feeds below!
PLEASE NOTE: These are the personal feeds of Cloud Imperium Games’ developers. The statements and opinions expressed do not represent Cloud Imperium Games, and should not be taken as the final word on any element of game design or planning. The following developers are willing to connect with backers and share information about their lives when possible:
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
LIVE NOW: Star Citizen Alpha 2.2.1
Greetings Citizens!
Star Citizen Alpha Patch 2.2.1 has been released to LIVE and is now available for players! This patch includes key fixes to the 300 series ships and a number of server and client crashes.
Your launcher should show “2.2.1-328656” as the client version. It is strongly recommended that players delete their USER folder for the Public client after patching, particularly if you start encountering any odd character graphical issues or crash on loading. The USER folder can be found (in default installations) at C:\Program Files\Cloud Imperium Games\StarCitizen\Public.
Please review our current list of 2.2.0 Known Issues FAQ, and take full advantage of our Issue Council area of the Community site to report any bugs you encounter, as well as contribute to other players submissions.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
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.
We had an extra day this February, and we put it to good use! Star Citizen Alpha 2.2 is now ‘live’ and Citizens everywhere are making good use of the new features to expand their adventures around Crusader. Between the hostility system, physicalized EVA and the increased instance limit, things are hopping! An extra special thank you to our front line PTU testers this month, who helped us put out an astounding nine builds before we released 2.2! With 2.2 live, the team is eager to move on to features to be added for 2.3… but before that happens, we’ll take our monthly look back at Star Citizen’s progress for February 2016.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens!
We are back again with another month in 2016 that has come and gone. Time does seem to fly when you are having fun, doesn’t it? We are definitely having fun, but make no mistake, we are completely focused on getting more enjoyable content released so you can join our merriment within the black void of space.
With the 2.2 patch released, it is hard to believe it has already been a month since our last community update; not because time flies so quickly but because of how busy the CIG LA office has been these past 29 days (we definitely appreciate the Leap Year giving us an extra day to polish content). Just to give you an idea of what we have been up to, here is a breakdown of what each development team in the LA office has been up to.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The LA Engineering team has been elbows-deep in new technologies that are getting incorporated into Star Citizen. Starting with Allen Chen’s efforts, we have looked at how player interactions work in-game. For example, when planning out how a player will interact with an object, we realized that a single “Use” prompt was limiting us to a single predefined interaction with an object that didn’t take context into account. By allowing each object to handle interaction logic by itself, this reduces the amount of extra effort required to maintain all of the implementations. Allen has engineered the system so that each contextually possible interaction for an object will contain a localized string token that will be used by the UI to display the description of that action. This leads to a system that allows us to add, remove, enable, or disable interactions on an as-needed basis instead of a more cumbersome and error-prone ad hoc basis.
You may have heard us mention updates to the Shield system in our news updates, “10 for the Developers” series of videos, and other news outlets. While the Tech Design side is being handled by Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome, the Engineering side is being performed by Associate Engineer Chad Zamzow with oversight by Lead Engineer Paul Reindell. Chad has been working on implementing the “Shield Generator” item to the revised design spec. A large part of this consists of matching the new components to the new design which involves pulling power and converting that power into shield points to be pushed into the corresponding shield pipe.
In an effort to increase efficiency in our coding and to help provide the Tech Designers with more powerful tools, we have created our own in-house tool we call DataForge. This tool allows us to create data quickly within the game without the need for parsing. This database not only allows us to view data in multiple ways, it also loads data faster and ensures that the data are adhering to a specific schema.
Both Mark Abent and John Pritchett have been hard at work behind the scenes, performing various changes to our game data that have potentially long-standing implications to how our data functions. Mark has been providing support for projectile creation through DataForge while John has been working on tweaks to the Thrusters and EVA. Mark’s changes to the Projectiles provides our Tech Designers with a powerful option to create projectiles directly through DataForge without having to go through XML editing. Flight Engineer John Pritchett has been busy cleaning up Thruster effects to fix the thruster effect range, boost effect range, and adding transitional effects when activating Boost.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
With the 2.2 release imminent, fixing bugs for 2.2 was the utmost priority for the Tech Design team this past month. Although Shield system has been at the forefront of the Tech Design team’s tasks with regards to new content, our ships have been making great progress through the pipeline as well.
Tech Design Lead Kirk Tome has completed the grey box stage of the Xi’An Scout. If you have not watched the recent “10 for the Developers” featuring Mr. Tome, you will find an abundance of information and updates regarding the Xi’An Scout. While the grey box stage has been completed, the final tech design for the Scout is still underway. Furthermore, Kirk has spent a considerable time performing a re-factor of in-game masses. Starting with the ships, he has been researching a more accurate and proper way of calculating the mass.
Apart from creating a metric for Shield performance, Tech Designer Calix is in the midst of completing the white box tech design stage of the Drake Caterpillar. This stage includes determining where the components will be located throughout the ship, the layout, along with other important features such as the list of what weapons it will have, where they’re located and most importantly, the basics of how the Cargo mechanic will function. Finally, with our components constantly evolving, Calix is designing how Power and Cooling will function within our ships.
As mentioned in the Engineering section, with the creation of our in-house tool, DataForge, it allows the Tech Design team greater efficiency and flexibility when creating new items and experimenting with parameterization (laying the groundwork for future balancing passes). Tech Designer Matt Sherman is in the middle of converting all of our Projectiles from XML and setting them up in DataForge. Since this is an ongoing and evolving task, Matt is also responsible for grey box tech designing the MISC Reliant. This includes the metrics that comprise the Reliant such as its internal layout, placement of hardpoints and various components, etc.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
When it comes to the CIG LA Art team, there is definitely no shortage of exciting things to report. New ships and old ship revamps along with character updates have been a top priority for the Art team. Furthermore, the Art team has also been responsible for creating lots of new artwork across the game.
While Calix has been working on the white box tech design of the Caterpillar, he has been working hand in hand with 3D Art Lead Elwin Bachiller, who in turn has been working on the modeling white box based on additional concept artwork using updates to the Drake style guide, both created by Concept Artist Gurmukh Bhasin.
Moreover, the LA Art team has also been working on the MISC Reliant, having completed several milestones. Exterior LODs were completed by Daniel Kamentsky, while Elwin completed redesigning the cockpit. The changes to the Reliant’s cockpit include redesigning the UI in order to adhere to updated UI specifications, animation, and textures. These are all part of a “flight prep” pass completed by Elwin. The flight prep pass is a review of everything that is needed before the ship becomes “flight ready.” This includes doing a pass over the damage states, LODs, and other precursor tidbits before it is released.
On the Character side, Artist Omar Aweidah has finished creating high-poly geometry for undersuit armor and several UEE Navy item variants have been his responsibility.
Speaking of costumes, Jeremiah Lee is submitting a first pass for the Heavy Armor concept after completing an early design pass on the same. Like our spaceships, designing armor and clothing also go through a series of approvals and revisions before they are approved for creation. This ensures we are adhering to thematic style guides based on key manufacturer embellishments.
Tech Content
The Technical content team is the amalgamation of Tech Art and Tech Animation into a global unified team.
This team consists of Technical Animators and Technical Artists working together to bring together all of the Art, Animation and even Engineering proceeds into a cohesive “in game” asset or feature. Typically this includes complex problem solving across many different pieces of software, educating members of other teams on best practices for coordination and handoffs, constant performance profiling and even reactive bug fixes on release build content, just to name a few. This team also includes key developers that perform the rigging and animation implementations of both ships and characters.
On the ship side, recently-promoted Senior Technical Artist Mark McCall (congratulations on a well-deserved accolade) has been tackling animation bugs for the 2.2.0 release. These include fixes such issues as the Vanduul Scythe/Glaive firing animations, adding steps to prevent clipping animations of the Landing Gear through Mannequin, optimizing thruster setups and many other important fixes.
Meanwhile, Patrick Salerno is continuing the review of all ship LODs and normalizing the mesh count and more importantly density. Patrick is making a huge effort to ensure that performance is at the highest possible level across all of these ships and is currently reviewing the Mustang and Hornet along with each respective variant.
Senior Tech Artist Matt Intrieri is currently performing an LOD pass on various ship components which include the landing gear, escape pods, thrusters, intakes, and many other components. This is an ongoing task given the number of assets requiring his review. Associate Rigger Gaige Hallman and Senior Rigger John Riggs have completed rigging of various character assets that will become obvious to players once character customization comes online. Gaige has finalized the process of skinning vertices from the character models whilst John has completed the asset rigging and simulation setup for the UEE Navy BDU uniform. Next up for John is performing R&D for rigging the Vanduul – we can’t wait to see the results of this!
Narrative
For the most part, we’ve been focusing pretty heavily on Squadron 42. Lead Dave Haddock has bounced over to the UK for the month while Will’s been Skyping in to have daily meetings with the Squadron 42 designers to step through the game to see how the levels and gameplay have been progressing, to see if any changes have necessitated any additional pick-up lines from our higher tier actors, and delve a little deeper into the dialogue and narrative needs for the secondary (non-principal) cast members.
On the PU front, we’ve been working with Designers in Austin and the UK to flesh out more of the landing zones, provide lore support for ship components and help out with developing narrative in the Baby PU.
In the Starmap and Galactapedia arenas, Adam finished his review of the previously published Galactic Guides, resulting in a monstrous 120-page document outlining potential changes/disparities that would need to be made to bring either the Galactic Guide or the Starmap in sync. We will all sit down and go through each one to talk them out. Meanwhile, Cherie has continued to work with our awesome astronomy consultants to generate the scientific data while waging her epic battle with the internal wiki.
So that’s it for us. Nothing terribly new to report (that we can disclose at least), but continuing to chip away at the mountain of needs.
Quality Assurance
CIG LA’s Quality Assurance team expanded as we welcomed two new testers to the team after extensively reviewing applicants; Eric Pietro and Colby Schneider have joined Vincent Sinatra as members of the CIG LA Quality Assurance department – and their timing could not have been better. Considerable time was spent training the duo and getting them up to speed with regards to CIG’s QA methodologies, software testing theory, and acclimating them to our fun world. In a few short days they were ready to hit the ground running; the LA QA team aided our ATX and UK counterparts in testing the new 2.2 code for PTU pushes, as well as investigated a number of issues for Design and Development, including but not limited to:
The new Hostility Feature
Sabre Flight Performance & Equipment loadouts
New cooler component implementation
EVA adjustments and zone grid transitions
Ship entry animations
The transition from 16 to 24 playable ships in Crusader
Shield recharge times
The QA team also performed an audit of the mass for all ships, as well as a landing gear pass to ensure everything lined up to specs and was functioning correctly.
Conclusion
As always, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on behind the scenes here in Los Angeles. We are not only excited about you enjoying 2.2, we are also planning for the future and working on quite a large pool of features that are slated for later patches. We are only two months into 2016 and we are always looking at what is next, ready to face these challenges, knowing that the trust you have for us is greatly appreciated. We are proud to have you along for this epic adventure, in the game and out, and we hope you look forward to seeing the major developments to be released in Star Citizen in the coming months of 2016.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
February began with a push to get 2.1.2 to the Live server, and ended with a push to get 2.2.0 to the Live server. It’s been a busy month and we’ve made an incredible amount of progress on many fronts! The Persistent Universe team has been hard at work, and will have results to show in game very soon. QA and Live Ops have been working around the clock as always, and the global nature of our company and our community allows us to make continuous forward progress on our goals any time of the day or night. Enjoy some detailed reports from each team leader!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The PU Team in Austin has been making significant progress on several different features this month, the main one being PERISTENCE! Yes that’s right, the cornerstone feature of a “persistent” universe is indeed the ability to persist data across play sessions, and Jason Ely and the server team here in Austin have been making great strides into laying the groundwork on the backend. We are rounding the corner on this massive undertaking, having rewritten whole portions of the codebase to get this integrated into the game. The first feature we’ve been testing with is “Shopping”, and our first release with Persistence in it will utilize Casaba Outlet’s stock of shirts, pants, jackets, etc. to show off persistent gameplay. We’ve also been brainstorming other ideas for opportunities to utilize Persistence in gameplay, such as player health, ship/item health, currency, and reputation.
Having mentioned Shopping, let me elaborate on this feature a bit more. This month we’ve solidified the flow of Shopping Phase 1, and we’re wrapping up the tasks that are required to set up Casaba Outlet as a shop in game. This means setting up the clothing racks with items, tagging each item with the tags necessary to get it to show up in the UI correctly, and calling out variants for the clothing assets that have been made so the Character Team can schedule these in. We hope to populate the shop with enough to keep you guys engaged on the first release, but leave enough empty space to allow us to fill it with more varied clothing assets later on down the line.
Ship Artists Chris Smith and Josh Coons spent their time this month wrapping up Final Art phase for the Xi’an Scout. They’ll be moving on to the Herald next month, we’re excited to see what they do with it. Emre Switzer finished lighting passes on the shops for the Levski landing zone in Nyx, as well as for the Asteroid and Business Hangar. Mark Skelton has completed several style guides for clothing manufacturers within the ‘verse that will inform character concept artists and 3d modelers going forward.
Our Animators spent much of this month developing animations for use in Astro Armada and G-Loc Bar. We also did some work on various enter/exit speeds for the Avenger and Aurora, and we hope to carry this over for all ships into next month. Lead Ship Animator Jay Brushwood spent a couple weeks in the UK syncing up with the Ship Team there, establishing steps in the pipeline and ironing out kinks in the workflow and communication. It was a very productive trip, it’s always good for folks to get face-time with other studios when possible.
Lastly, work wrapped up on the Friends System 2.0, which transitions the Friends/Contacts system from Platform to our backend services. This new Friends System incorporates some much needed new features, such as the Ignore List. This has been handed off to our UI Team to schedule in and create the front-end work for this feature.
Live Operations
QA
When the month of February began QA was wrapping up our previous release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.2 to our Live environment. QA continued to investigate a couple of lingering issues as well as gathered public feedback. Shortly thereafter, QA began focusing efforts squarely on testing the new features which would be included in the next release.
Todd Raffray headed up an early test of the new Party System updates. Each feature improvement was documented and individually tested to ensure the updates worked effectively. QA was very happy to ensure that playing with your friends would be much improved in 2.2.0.
The team then began testing additional features that were slated to be included in 2.2.0. These included Monitored Space, The Hostility System, and the changes to the layout of the Crusader map. The team also created a list of must fix issues which was then delivered to production.
Each new system was meticulously tested by the coordinated efforts of each of our QA teams around the world. The day would begin with our QA teams in UK and Frankfurt beginning testing headed up by the leadership of QA Manager Phil Webster and Senior QA Tester Steven Brennon. As the day progressed, the testing would be handed off to our US QA teams headed up by QA Leads Andrew Hesse and Vincent Sinatra. The daily information hand-offs went very smoothly and contributed to almost 24 hour daily testing coverage. This coverage ensured development continued smoothly to help release 2.2.0 as soon as possible.
As new 2.2.0 features came online, they were added to our list of things to test for release. These included flight testing of the newly flyable Sabre, the hangar ready Xi’an Scout, ship cooler items and the new physically based zero gravity EVA.
Additional in-depth testing was conducted on the ship combat time to kill values for each available ship and weapon as well as a comprehensive pass on the ship landing and repair mechanics.
We have had some new recruits added to our ranks this month. Phil Webster has joined our Foundry 42 office in Manchester, UK. Phil comes to us from Sony. Phil will be fulfilling the role of QA Manager and is already doing great things leading the Foundry 42 team. Please welcome Lee Jones to our Foundry 42 testing team. Lee also comes to us from Sony and will be assisting our Veteran Liam Guest in dedicated Squadron 42 testing.
We also have 2 new testers joining our LA studio this month. Eric Pietro and Colby Anderson. Both Eric and Colby have industry experience and have already proven to be great additions to the LA QA team.
Senior QA Tester Christopher Speaks travelled from our Frankfurt studio to Foundry 42 and held training sessions for our UKQA team on the testing and use of the Cryengine Sandbox Editor.
Right now the team is working hard to get 2.2.0 out to the live environment as soon as possible. For the month of March, the team will be focusing on testing the new additions which will be included in Star Citizen Alpha 2.3.0. We are very much looking forward to the new content coming soon. See you in the Verse!
Game Support
February has been an amazing month for Will Leverett and Chris Danks as Game Support worked feverishly alongside QA, Production, and our PTU testers to get 2.2.0 branched, built, tested, fixed, and shipped out the door. To go from branching to full release in three weeks is amazing, and we think we can still improve the process to make it even better.
We spent quite a bit of time this month working on establishing our new protocols for PTU invite waves. This was accomplished by focusing on Issue Council engagement and previous PTU participation. From our perspective, 2.2.0 on PTU has been amazingly successful, and in no small part due to the passionate backers who were always ready to help. We’ve gotten amazing feedback that went right into the development pipeline, particularly through the Issue Council and structured playtests.
Many players have questioned why we did not roll out 2.2.0 to a greater number of players on PTU, or what the downside is to having more players involved. The answer is twofold: 1) cost and 2) 2.2.0 simply did not require additional waves for testing (in fact, sometimes having fewer is better). Each build download and every server costs money, and if we can avoid unnecessary expenditures while still accomplishing our development goals, that helps everyone in the long run. Additionally, bugs involving resource allocation and network bandwidth can result in errors that manifest quickly even with relatively small numbers of players. When bugs of this kind are involved, expanding PTU access often doesn’t help diagnose the problem, it just makes it worse – incurring higher cost for no benefit is just plain wasteful. In cases like this, bugfixes are investigated and applied while the addition of additional waves of testers proceeds at a much more controlled rate until it’s clear that the blocker has been addressed.
A very healthy 70% of the Wave One group participated in at least one build since 2.2.0 went to PTU, and we’ll cull the other 30% from the list in order to rotate in others who want in to help with active testing.
Aside from 2.2.0, Game Support was able to spend time on our service issues, getting completely caught up on our tickets (along with our colleagues in Customer Service) and we’re excited that we can provide quick turnarounds now to players who need individual support.
Related to that, Game Support will be working with Customer Service and Turbulent to assess different options for creating a true knowledge base that serves the players of Star Citizen. We certainly don’t want to roll out a drab, mechanical site, but instead provide a medium in which the community can interact, find solutions, and when possible, help each other.
It’s been a super productive month, and we’re excited to roll right into March on the road to 2.3.0!
IT/Operations
February has been about Data. We are working on an important project with the rest of the Operations teams and key Development team members in our Frankfurt studio to fix these huge patches once and for all. This project could take some time to roll out due to the depth of work involved but the project is too exciting not to mention.
Patch sizes have to do with the way the data is prepared for each version we publish. We know that patch differential between builds includes between 5-10% change for most builds. However, because the changed files are mixed with the unchanged files then compressed to larger pak files for delivery, even one small change in data can cause an entire pak file look different to the patcher due to the output of the compression scheme, which the patcher sees as an entirely new large file.
In order to correct this, we need to change a number of things including how the game engine reads data. We also need to change the build system and the entire delivery pipeline in order to do this right. Once done, we’re expecting to see major improvement in the size of patches between versions but we’re hoping for even more. Changes to the build system supporting this new approach should also allow us to do more incremental data builds rather than the much longer full builds. This would greatly reduce the time between developer fixes and testing, particularly for a game the size of Star Citizen.
LiveOps
This month the team has been working around the clock on deployments and the build system. We delivered 8 publishes to PTU with major improvements to the process allowing us to minimize downtime to moments from hours. Our analytics reporting has undergone major improvement in February both on the client and data side.
Our build system has been undergoing some substantial changes at the same time which leads to a tricky balancing act when trying to keep up with all the internal builds and PTU publishes. So far we’ve rolled out a new distributed compilation system which has shaved another 75-90% off the build times depending on build type, a new format for keeping track of data, internal and external automated crash reporting, as well as a completely new inclusion/exclusion system which helps us refine our builds down to specific testing goals.
We’ve also been working closely with the IT team and the rest of the Operations teams toward the goal of reducing our patch sizes. This task will likely trigger the largest set of changes introduced to the build system to date since we’re incorporating major changes to the build process as well as the delivery pipeline which will have positive impact on internal development as well as external patch delivery. In order to make all this happen while maintaining full support of the existing development schedule we will be building a completely separate build system which will run in parallel to the existing system. IT better crank up their air conditioners because we’re gonna smoke those servers!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Hello Star Citizens!
Between Star Citizen 2.2 and continuing work on Foundry 42, all of the Foundry 42 UK teams have been working hard and delivering excellent results. Keep in mind that we can’t share everything for fear of spoiling the events of Squadron 42… but there’s still plenty we CAN talk about.
Design
We have had another busy month in the UK design department. We are still working on the “new player experience” which is hopefully going to make the learning curve less steep for new backers. This not only encompasses a simplified UI set, but also has a refactor of the controls system to be more conceptually consistent across the various game modes such as EVA, FPS, and space flight. We are still working on mobiGlas, this is a biggie as it is one of the major aspects of both S42 and the PU so we want to get it right the first time around. Scanning, for both cockpit and FPS, is now underway, and we are looking forward to getting sub-targeting of components into the game soon.
Andrew and the Tech team have had a number of meetings about the various balancing issues and we are hopeful that you will start to see the positive results in the coming releases (not in time for 2.2 unfortunately).
The Idris is getting closer to a game ready state and we have enjoyed our first forays into the test universe with a design team crewing it.
S42 is moving along nicely and we are starting to see blockers shifted in a timely manner so the design truck can keep rolling.
Audio
It’s been a jam-packed month as far as CIG Audio is concerned. Apart from the usual bug fixes, we had a very nasty in-game distortion issue at the start of February that was extremely hard to reproduce, and near-impossible to profile. Thanks to our fantastic QA department, as well as Sam Hall, Graham Phillipson, Mikhail Korotyaev and our friends at Audiokinetic for assisting with fixing that, and the community at large who were hugely helpful in sending us data and user stories. Apologies to anyone who suffered from this but we reacted to it as fast as we could. Good came of it, in that we now have added some analytics for the audio system, so we can keep an eye on audio resource usage in the wild (again, thanks to Sam for pushing that out there).
Work continues apace on ‘Squadron 42’, and Ross Tregenza has continued with putting down as many audio foundations as possible, and keeping close eye on cross-discipline progress. All of the systematic elements we’re working on across the whole game feed into Squadron 42, but there’s still a lot of custom and bespoke aspects of it to keep track of and make sure we’re ready for, so that when the time is right the whole team will sweep across this module.
Ross also worked with Sam Hall on the monitored zone system audio which you’ll witness soon enough, it’s still in a relatively early stage where the audio is concerned and we’ll improve this further as we iterate upon it.
Bob Rissolo has been very heavily invested in the Dialogue Pipeline tools and database. This is quite a large project in itself, that feeds into the main Star Citizen experience but is again very important for Squadron 42 which is going to be very character dialogue-centric. He’s been mainly working with Simon Price, who’s joined us as a Consultant Audio Programmer.
Bob Rissolo and Phil Smallwood built up and tested out the dialogue recording rig extensively in a test shoot in mid-February, to make sure we’re up to the task of recording dialogue for performance capture sessions. For the most part it all worked as expected with only minor settings tweaks and optimisations required.
Sam Hall has submitted Version 2.0 of the Music System, including a visual logic editor. This shipped in 2.2.0 and was a ‘surprisingly smooth’ transition, at least so he says! Until we get some new content it might not be hugely obvious it’s there, which is a good thing in some respects. You want an in-game soundtrack and musical cues to sound as natural as it does in the movies, if not moreso. If it were to catch your attention unnecessarily, it could be more distracting than immersive.
Talking of new music content though: myself, Ross Tregenza and Pedro Macedo Camacho combined our powers and braved the (actually rather mild) Slovakian winter to attend our first orchestral performance this year, at the Slovak Radio building with the Slovakian National Symphony Orchestra. This provided us with new content for ship-based space combat, which will feed into the aforementioned music-logic system when the material is ready; we still need to add some extra momentary layers and elements for it to be as reactive to the game as Chris Roberts desires. Chris is very into his dynamic music, having pioneered such a system back on ‘Wing Commander’. So, we still have the extra material to come before we take it to a mixing session to give it some polish, after we’ve proven its effectiveness in our new system. Will keep you posted, and try to get some material from this out for you to experience when the time is right. Many thanks to our conductor Allan Wilson, recording engineer Peter Fuchs and our orchestral fixer Paul Talkington for arranging things.
These days we’re thinking heavily about dynamic/procedural mix methods, rather than the usual state-based mixing that’s common to more linear titles. To this end Darren Lambourne has been putting together a dynamic bass management prototype, which is a great place to start when it comes to figuring out mix fundamentals within Wwise. Many games suffer from the summation of too much low-end and we want to keep the experience clean, and configurable, for our users to reflect their different demands and differing set-ups. Will let you know when we have this ready to push out to the game proper but so far it’s quite promising.
And talking of mix – Darren is also working on a parametric mix/effects system to reflect atmospheric depressurisation, whether that’s out in space or when inside depressurised interior locations. We have the concept right now whereby exterior sound is simulated within ships – controversial we know but we feel it makes sense! However, the player suit when exposed to space independent of one’s ship, in our lore at least, it doesn’t have the processing power to perform the same function, at least not to the same level of fidelity. So what you’ll probably hear will be much more akin to structure-borne sound transmission, coupled with a lot of suit/internalised elements. We’re just starting with this one and we want it to be consistent with logic and gameplay, but also dramatically satisfying in its own right. Will share more once we have this at a good place.
Darren’s also pushed out some great EVA audio improvements, particularly re. the manoeuvring jetpack thrusters. We hope you appreciate this one, the articulation is way ahead of where it was previously. In some ways this is now much more subtle, but also far more responsive to player input. We’ll get together some video to show this off properly but it’s far more characterful while still retaining subtlety. We hope you like it.
Stefan Rutherford’s been working on some space-station mixing – there’s some neat bass modulation on one of the stations that varies things as you traverse. He’s done some lovely stuff on the Reliant, too; he’s produced ship ambient mark-up, with parameterisation of sounds so that all of them become far more responsive to external factors. E.g. power-plant level, ship strain. Under his model a single light buzz on a panel can change in tone and timbre, if power output is high to other components – because non-critical ones (such as a light) are receiving less power. A light fitting will also tend to rattle when the ship is undergoing excessive gravitational forces or ‘excitement’. We hope the summation of this level of detail will contribute to the ship experience.
Thanks to hard work by Graham Phillipson and Matteo Cerquone, we now have a solid and working piece of tech for ‘Automatic Character Foley’ in place. Traditionally, this sort of character-based sound would be spotted by hand to animation files, but we wanted to make this far more system-driven, as it’s a very labour intensive approach that doesn’t stand up to variable wearables (that’s a tough thing to say) or animation and clothing simply changing dynamically. So now, we have a system that modulates clothing and equipment sounds in response to limb velocities. We’ll hopefully be able to factor in clothing changes soon too, plus added equipment layers that’ll change depending on what weapon you may have equipped. Matteo’s also been working with the Xi’an Scout which has some great SFX in place.
Following on from the auto Foley though, we now also have a solid prototype for Automated Footsteps. Again, this is traditionally very labour intensive stuff, whereby sound designers would open up an animation file and spot to a timeline. That’s not a robust enough solution for us, so Graham has somehow figured out a way to infer accurate footstep movement and articulation, and play back appropriate sounds – in real time. We know this might not seem like a massive deal but there are many sound designers who’ve contributed man-months to this very task in the past so to solve this problem… well, one of us cried a tear of joy. Almost.
As fuel for the Foley fires (again with the tongue-twisters), we have a ‘wild Foley’ session upcoming to record footsteps, and some physics object style sounds (impacts, slides, rolls etc.). Stefan and Matteo will be overseeing that session, hopefully we’ll gather some eminently usable material there.
We also have a firearms session due at the end of March to capture outdoor gun-fire impulses/tails in an urban environment, for in-atmosphere locations with lots of reflective surfaces, in contrast to our earlier interior sessions which were more ‘roomy’, this is all about distant reflections that help define the outdoors.
Jason Cobb has been working on bug fixes, design documentation, scripting improvements to workflow. He also has sound design coming together for ship debris clouds, subject to a system to drive this properly, but looking forward to that.
Luke Hatton has continued on ship sounds, as is his specialism – we’re always fixing and refining audio for those as you know!
Oh, watch out for an upcoming extended version of the Big Benny Noodles theme. But I’ve already said too much about this, I’m sure…
Thanks for listening everyone, sorry it was such a long update but it’s been a big old month. We blame the leap year thing. Thanks!
Engineering
This month’s new big feature for the live releases is the hostility system. We wanted to start coming up with ways where you could see that your actions would have some sort of consequence, and as a result get some additional emergent gameplay going on. As a first step we’ve introduced safe zones, such as around Port Olisar, where the space will be monitored for any illegal behaviour. If you start shooting up an innocent party in the zone you will automatically get a wanted level, become a hostile, you will be marked up on everybody else’s radar as hostile and as you fire on more and more innocent parties the higher your wanted level goes up. Whilst you’re in the safe zone AI will spawn in and try and take you down. To make it more interesting if you have a wanted level you also become fair game for all the other players, so now anybody can now attack you without fear of reprisal. Of course if you are attacking other players outside of a monitored zone it won’t get noticed and your global reputation stands intact, although the players you attacked will remember and see you as hostile going forwards. You can reduce your wanted level though by using a terminal to hack into the system…
Outside of the releases, we’ve been making progress on lots of the other systems. The code to support turrets has been having a bit of an overhaul as previously it was tied very closely to the vehicles, whereas we want to have standalone turrets on a space station for example. We kicked off work on the scanning feature, where you will be able to use your radar to scan vehicles in more detail and get information as to what weapons they’ve got or even what cargo they’re carrying. This of course depends on how good your scanning hardware is and how good the blocking hardware of what you’re trying to scan has. This scanning is also going to be incorporated in the same way when in FPS mode so you can get information about the players around you.
Talking about FPS again it’s about making steady progress on all its mechanics. The new physicalized EVA is getting more and more solid, we’ve been spending a lot of time trying to fix up a lot of edge case issues, mostly when transitioning from inside a vehicle to outside, so you’re going from gravity to zero-g, or vice-versa (or from non-EVA to EVA). Cover is getting better and work has now started on prone and vaulting.
This month the team has completed some final R&D work into the Gas Cloud tech, and out of that has created a roadmap for the gas cloud system. This outlines when we can start giving this tech to our other internal teams, such as art and design, to work with.
After discovering resolving several bugs with our recent Vis Area/Zone tweaks, the team moved to working on the facial tech. This work has been testing the current framework, to find performance bottle necks, bugs and the look to make general improvements to the tech to get the best out of it without reducing performance.
We have also been working on updates to bloom and lens flares. The current bloom implementation has a harsh falloff around glowing objects and requires their brightness to be cranked up significantly to be visible. The new system will allow for more subtle glows with a softer falloff, and its performance will also scale better with higher resolutions.
With the current flare system, an artist has to create a flare set for each light that generates flares, and simulating different lenses (e.g. for cinematics vs gameplay) which requires a lot of manual work creating multiple sets. There is also a limit on the number of flares that can be rendered per frame before they start breaking. We’re working on a system to procedurally render flares in screen space with a more physically based method, and the new system should significantly reduce the workload for artists and make it easier to change the look of the scene on the fly.
VFX
This month the VFX team have been working on getting the latest flight-ready ships including the Vanguard and Sabre. We’ve also done some thorough R&D for the Xi’An Scout effects, as we want to tie in with the fiction and create a unique style of effects compared to the human and Vanduul technologies. This all based on the VFX style guide which we mentioned in last month’s report; building a consistent visual language through a ship’s effects is very important for player readability, especially against the vast backdrop of space!
Away from ships, things are progressing solidly on Squadron 42’s environmental effects, as the environment and design teams have been fleshing out their levels in greater detail which allows us to jump in and add effects where required. There’s so much here we would love to tell you about but we can’t for obvious reasons – no spoilers!
Art
The team has been full steam ahead, internal concept and external all busting out fab looking work and it’s been a varied lot too!
Here’s a list which I’m sure you can discern what belongs to what: the Idris Gravity Generator room, Idris Cargo Room, Idris story line look dev, Planet look dev, Vanduul weapon look dev, Bengal Hangar, Hangar Breakouts, Bengal Bridge console/chair refinement, Powerplants, Quantum Drives, Coolers, Military props, Shubin Pilot briefing room, Shubin Bridge, [REDACTED] ship cargo room, Research Station look dev for the Gravity room and communal areas, Scourge Rail gun final pass, Rail Attachment system, ammo and just started on a new small ship! Oh – and some 2nd pass concept on storyline bases – that’s it for Feb!
Props
There is a running theme here, another month and a few more ship components! We now have the first couple of coolers and shield generators complete and the power plants have been started.
But more exciting than that is that our team has grown! We have gone from 2 in the UK at the start of January up to 4, with our 5th member joining next week!
Apart from the ship components the team has been focusing on low tech props, we are focusing mainly on assets that can be used in both the PU environments as well as the squadron 42 environments. We have completed a few more tests with the blend layer material mentioned last month and have asked for a few little tweaks from the rendering team before we can go full steam ahead with it.
Finally we’ve have been making an effort to get on top of our documentation backlog. Now the teams growing it’s really important to have our pipeline properly documented and as its evolved over the last couple of months there is a bit to update! I’ve also been creating and updating our template files to make the animators lives a little easier and improve consistency across the board.
Characters
Our two man team has been busy as a pair of motivated bees, I’m not going to spoil any surprises but the character work now is really starting to matchup with the rest of the game in terms of fidelity and quality – exciting times, plus we have hired 2 more people to join the UK team – things are looking up!
Environment Art
This month the environment team have been hard at work fleshing out the environments for Squadron 42, there is a huge range of environments in production currently, so there is a frenzy of activity within the team. There is lots of back and forth between the level artists and designers as they move forwards refining the designs and layouts, something which is quick and entirely real-time using our modular system. That’s it for this months, back to it!
Ships
The Ship Team has been in the process of planning their angle of attack for the rest of the year, laying foundations down to hopefully make the rest of the year’s production run smoothly to push towards fully content complete of the SQ42 within the next few months ( content complete meaning all assets are in-game, playable but requiring polish ). Major highlights of this process have been pulling the RSI Bengal into a metric system that will take full advantage of a modular construction approach, much like we have done on the Idris, meaning we can have twice as much visual awesomeness with less of a knock on to both visual and memory costs in the engine. The Bengal was the first ship to be seen ever for Star Citizen in the original reveal, it’s like the Crown Jewel of SC and will be treated as such!
Both the Aegis Idris and Javelin have continued into final production, the Javelin taking full advantage of the Idris’ interior modules, meaning essentially whatever wins we make on the Idris roll over to the Javelin by default, this also has the added benefit that the Javelins interior production will in fact finish not far behind the Idris even though production on the Idris started several months before, we are gaining variation between the two ships with a clever use of material swaps, lighting and atmospherics, the Javelins will have a far more grittier feel to suit its role / characteristic as a ship.
On top of the above, production is almost complete on the Starfarer Base variant, she is looking beautiful indeed, but more so in our opinion is the Gemini variant, the Gemini being kitted out by Aegis really brings an interesting dynamic to the ship’s aesthetic.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
The weather in Frankfurt this month was definitely colder than last, but it hasn’t slowed us down. This month the team added new people in Weapons Art, Animation, AI, and Game Programming, we’re now up to 37. As the team grows out here we can feel it continuing to pick up momentum, which is always a good thing.
Early in the month we had a handful of internal visitors to the office including Chris and Erin. It gave us a good amount of time to look through schedules, adjust priorities, discuss design systems and tech approaches, etc. We also had a few backers through the office which was fun, the team appreciated the good words and the fattening treats.
Thanks again for all the German team support from the backers and fans, it means a lot to us.
AI
Early in the month we completed the first pass on the refactoring of the Human perception. The new perception is now fully distributed and optimized: we mostly split the perception into visual perception and audio perception. All the other stimuli are either perceived currently as audio or visual objects. In the future we are planning to have several types of senses that can be plugged into the perception if needed.
The vision perception is mostly based on the CryEngine VisionMap, it allowed us to have a very flexible system that on the CPU side uses an average of 0.01ms! The audio map allows us to model the perception of sound stimuli and it also uses an average of 0.01ms! The new perception abstracts what’s perceived by the different sense and what we use as the target: the behavior tree is in control of the selection of the target and we are also supporting future extensions for characters that might be able to track multiple targets at the same time.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
H3. Notes on the Image
The yellow lines represent the audio events that each NPC has received in relation of different sources.
The blue lines point to the last position when the target has transitioned between being visible and not visible.
The green lines point to visible objects in the world for each NPC
The pink lines represent the attention target of the NPC. If the target is visible it points to the entity otherwise to the last known position of the target.
We also made very good progresses on Subsumption. We now have a proper tool developed directly by Tony Zurovec, from Austin, that allows the designers to create Subsumption routines. On our side we process the data created by this tool to actually transform data into behaviors that run in the game. We currently have a first version of NPCs running Subsumption, and the code is very optimised in memory. 50 characters running different Subactivities uses around 12Kb of memory. Subsumption is controlled by our high level behavior tree so that any character can also be able to react quickly to combat scenarios using our systemic combat behaviors.
We then improved several aspects of the Cover usage, we introduce the functionality to blacklist specific cover spots for a specific amount of time, and avoid the effect of NPCs nonsensically selecting covers that have been compromised a few seconds before. We also fixed the selection of the cover based on the actual occupancy size of the character itself so that different NPCs won’t select covers too close to each other.
We completed the ground work to run dynamic behavior trees inside a main high level one, so that scripted requests can be directly accepted and run by the designers only when the behavior tree is ready without conflicting with the main behavior tree. Also we introduced the concept of “Primary” and “Secondary” actions in the AISequences so that we can properly validate the logic setup from the level designers and guarantee that what they want to achieve is correctly communicated to the AI.
Another feature we worked on is the ground work for Assignments, this is the way a designer can suggest specific high level goal to an NPC, something like “Defend a specific area”, “Attack a specific target”, and so on. Along with the above, this should lead to NPCs that can react properly to distractions without completely losing sight of the orders they’ve been given.
In addition to all of that we have continued to improve the stability of the builds in general.
Builds Ops
We recently switched to use BinXml assets for release builds, this is now the default. Continued work on Trybuild development, deploying and stabilization. We have got a solid db backend now (mysql/postgres), instead of a mere sqlite database, running in a docker container. This allows us to persist data through server and/or service reboots.
We’re doing preparation work to soon switch Transformer to Buildbot Nine. Lots of changes/improvements/fixes have been made across the entire pipeline.
Cinematics
A crucial cinematic scene right before Admiral Bishop’s speech in the UEE senate got a major upgrade from our side. The work on that is still ongoing.
It seemed crucial to Chris and Hannes that we wanted a bigger canvas for the tragedy of these planetside scenes to play out on. Frank, our Senior Env Artist for Cinematics was quite busy building rubble pieces and other things we don’t want to spoil right now.
For much of the month, Hannes was busy building up these scenes and doing further previs on some Bengal Carrier scenes as UK art is currently jumping on that one. Mike Nagasaka was busy with Chapter 02 and both of us were looking into different holoshader improvement options and did some visual prototyping for a pivotal moment involving alien holo tech during Chapter “X”.
Animation is busy with prepping pcap we have for Chapter “X” which involves the Starfarer and as that ship has progressed nicely to almost final art we can easily tackle those scenes next month.
Bishop’s head model got some refinement, and we tested that as quite some tech issues were fixed since we had him take the stage in the first scene featuring him at the UEE Senate.
As on ongoing side project we are revamping the cinematic timeline module “Trackview” so that it supports the needs for ships and AI characters, as well as major usability fixes. This will go on for quite some time longer and Sascha Hoba or as we call him “the fixer” is doing a tremendous job on that which will help cinematic sequences shine!
VFX
Over the past few weeks the DE VFX team has been working on getting the Xi’an scout ship ready for release. This includes a full VFX pass, including things such as thruster effects, damage effects, weapon effects and even a new version of the quantum drive based on the Xi’an tech style. You can see the current status in our header image.
Tech Art
The Tech Art team continued developing the internal animation pipeline, supporting cinematics for various tech setups. The team also worked on the FPS weapons rigs and supported the in-game animation team for finalizing the DCC and engine camera for players and weapons.
Engine Programming
Our Senior Engine Programmer is Christopher Bolte, and his focus during the last month was on two aspects of the game: data transfer protocols (critical to loading times) and the ObjectContainer System. Most of the time was spent on the new data transfer protocol mentioned last month and we made good progress there.
So far we already have the capability of storing all the assets of the game in a single, very large, pak file and to update this pak file incrementally. The Engine also has the initial support to be able to start from such a pak file. The next steps for the new data patching process is to hook those tools up into our internal build distribution process so that we can test how well the proposed system will perform. Hopefully we can provide updates on how well this worked next month.
The second focus was on providing our UK Engineers with support for the ObjectContainer System. This system is sort of a replacement of our current level format, with the twist that we can load ObjectsContainer when we already have an objects container loaded. Practically this means we can prepare loading a universe scale level with a very large amount of space stations, planets, or large object groups, even where only the parts that are supposed to be visible to the player are resident in memory. This system should allow us long term to scale to extremely large levels containing many interesting and different objects. So far we have initial support working so that we could load levels with ObjectsContainer instead of as levels. This is absolutely critical to providing a seamless gameplay experience with transparent loading times, made all the more crucial by the fact that the client (your) computer actually only has so much memory to work with.
As the next steps we will extent this basic version to space stations and ships so that we can load complex objects more efficiently.
Code
This month, we made a whole bunch of code related improvements. Including:
WAF build system rollout. All devs are able to compile the project much faster now.
Public crash handler rollout with 2.2. Already getting good intel from our community in PTU. Thanks to everybody participating and agreeing to send crash info our way.
More improvements for code quality tracking (system to track asserts automatically, trybuild on the way to avoid submitting code that doesn’t build against latest code depot).
Additionally:
We’ve made further progress on the much improved patching solution. The plan is to really ever only download files (inside .paks) that changed. In the future we might expose control of data compression on user’s end to allow custom balancing of IO bandwidth vs CPU decompression time. Incorporating a much more modern compression scheme is also planned (much less CPU decompression overhead for similar compression rates). All this will require stabilizing asset file formats so that re-exports of unchanged assets do not invalidate much of the previously shipped content.
Progress started on further improving optimized mesh data storage format. Vertex streams of meshes will get much more aggressive compression of per-vertex normals and tangent frames all the way up to the GPU (decompressed in vertex shader with very little overhead). This will reduce the .pak size, improve load times and streaming, as well as reduce GPU bandwidth which is critically important for the highly (vertex) detailed meshes of our ships, etc.
We’ve also done a good amount of work on the procedural tech, but don’t want to go into the details just yet, we’ll hopefully have a larger update in the near future.
Animation coding was focused primarily on fixing exiting bugs to get the foundation as stable as possible, which will then be easier to build upon.
Design
At the beginning of the month we had a visit from Chris Roberts and a lot of other people from the all the studios. This was a great opportunity to make sure everyone is on the same track and we are all pulling in the same direction. While this might sound like an obvious thing, it’s actually really easy to lose that focus when you’re involved in problem solving for very tricky ground-level technical challenges for weeks on end. Lots of things got clarified on the design side and are reassured that our goals are aligned and the same processes needed to reach those goals.
On the Level Design side Andreas has taken over the Hurston landing zone. He will be focusing initially on the basic layout, positioning of important landmarks, vistas, landing pads and shops in the three layered zone. The Hurston landing zone is buried within the heavily industrial planet Hurston, owned by Hurston Dynamics in the Stanton system, but besides the actual Industrial Sector it also contains a Civilian Commons Sector and an extensive Business Sector.
The power distribution prototype that Clement was working on proved successful, so now he is moving forward to integrating life support systems and depressurization to this prototype. He is also extending the layout needed as more features get added to this test level.
On the System Design side we’ve been specing out some high priority systems needed for PU. We finished work on the Oxygen, Breathing & Stamina system that will handle the mechanics for how the oxygen travels from the suit’s tank to the suit’s internal capacity, through the lungs and into the blood stream and how the levels of oxygen in the player’s blood affect his actions, and also what happens when he runs out of oxygen.
We’ve also finalized designs on how Quantum Drives & Interdiction function and interact, and are also working on a global universe spawning system that will populate the star systems with content based on dynamic data from the Universe Simulator.
Another system that has been heavily looked at is loot generation and the actual looting system. We are trying to keep this as realistic & immersive as possible while trying to also have it still be manageable and entertaining for the player. This together with the work being done with Player Transactions should help us kickstart an early version of the economy in the PU.
On the AI design side, this month, we’ve started to receive tools that help us greatly in the process of building our behaviours and subsumption tasks so we have started working with these and hopefully our AI will greatly improve because of it.
Environment Art
This month environment art completed work on the (can’t say) which will feature in the (can’t say) of the game. They also started working on a wrecked version of the (can’t say) that will be used as set dressing in specific cinematic scenes. Making the wrecked version of the (can’t say) will involve taking the existing (can’t say) and adjusting the geometry and textures to simulate a smashed up and burnt look, while also using decals to really make it look like this thing has suffered some fairly intense damage.
They also continued supporting the Engine team on the procedural tech, further defining the pipeline and approach to get the finest level of detail possible.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
From building the largest environments to growing the smallest space plants, Behaviour’s work ran the gamut this month!
Design
Behaviour’s Design team has been very busy this February. Starting with Hurston landing zone, we designed, blueprinted and whiteboxed all shop locations for the level, 10 in total and every designers chipped in. Good job guys! They are very different from what we did before as Hurston has its own visual signature and gameplay requirements. BHVR artists are going to start working on them soon and we can’t wait to see the result.
We are also helping out design, scope and plan for shopping which is a big priority for us. Regarding that, we made a few changes to the AR mode and AR labels, the more significant improvement will come with the shopping release but we got some very promising prototype on how this will look and feel. Even the March flair items will have AR information attached.
Talking about flair items, we gave a big push for flair hangar decoration this month, try to forge ahead. March will see the new flair collection revealed which will have 2 decorations: a subscriber one and even a stretch goal one. We even have a few more surprises in bank… To be continued.
Engineering
February has seen most of us working on polishing, debugging and optimizing various features for the 2.2.0 branch.
These include many fixes on contact list, hangar swapping loadouts, turret display in multi crew and holotable features.
Aside from that Adamo Maiorano has worked on Augmented Reality prototypes for the shopping experience and general AR changes to fit design changes.
Art
The Behaviour Art team has been finishing the available shops for Levski. Mostly polishing, dressing and creating props to give a distinct look and feel to each shop.
Also, we began work on performance optimisation to ensure a good frame rate for once NPC and players will be populating the level.
Lots of support was given to the 2.2 release, mostly fixing bugs and updating a few assets.
In addition, work continued on generic props for the lowtech style. These will be extremely useful for our many planets and SQ42 needs.
On the Concept art side, we began work on paintovers for the future Hurston shops.
Finally, the next flair objects has been completed for the next release.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings from freezing-rainy Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month:
Ship Stats
With over 70 ships currently listed on the site, the “Ship Stats” page needs a redesign with revamped readability and usability. We have gone back to the drawing board, creating a new user interface with additional search filters, allowing you to quickly find and compare the ships that interest you, as well as give better insight into the ship production pipeline. We are currently in the design phase, so we’ll post a screenshot in an upcoming report.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Last month, we continued our development of multi-factor authentication, i.e. best practices research, prototyping, and data modeling. Our objective is to upgrade our current authentication services and allow anyone to enable this added security feature. On the design front, we finalized the page layouts for the security settings section, which is where the user will setup MFA. In upcoming reports we’ll be able to go into more details about the foreseen short- and long-term options.
Communication Platform
We began brainstorming on a new communication platform for the site which would be able to aggregate and blend forum threads, chatrooms, private messaging into one hub. Our first step was to benchmark and rate other communication tools used by gamers and we are now starting the actual functional design process. Our aim is that this platform could be the next big functional step for Organizations.
Ship Happens
Last month, we updated the game packages on the website, so moving forward, Star Citizen and the upcoming Squadron 42 will be sold separately. It is important to note that his does not affect any packages that you already own; it applies only to packages sold after Feb 14.
Behind the Scenes
The Panic Service is live! Star Citizen devs are now able to access all crash data from this database, making it easier to extract the pertinent information.
Additionally we have been working with CIG to bring about the next big steps in persistence and how it will handle what everyone has on their website accounts. More on this as soon as we’re allowed to disclose anything!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Community… huh… yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely everything, oh hoh, oh…
(YOU try starting one of these things…)
February went by in a blur like the short month that it is. Like always, it was a month of videos, forums, live events, perks, and more, so let’s dive right in.
Videos
The 10 For series reached another pinnacle when we had Sean Tracy and Steve Bender take over the show early this month. We knew it was going to be a spectacular trainwreck when we came up with the idea, and the boys didn’t disappoint. The variety of people it takes to make a game of this scope and quality continuously amazes me, and it delights me in equal measure when we can share those people with you, and show you that having fun in video games isn’t just for the people playing them.
Around the Verse continues to evolve with the inclusion of a more newcomer friendly hosting portion, remote video segments that allow us to showcase our developers around the world, and the return of fun segments like Which Glitch, and the Wonderful World of Star Citizen, where we showcase the community content creators on our flagship broadcast. In the coming weeks and months, you’ll see gamestreamers, youtubers, podcasters, ship builders and more highlighted on Around the Verse, as well as your gameplay videos front and center from now on in the opening of the show.
Reverse the Verse, our weekly informal livestream with the fans, is also evolving! Recent additions to the show include a new graphics and overlay package and a more structured format to the show. Response has been very positive so far, and keep watching as even more additions to the show come over the next few months.
Website
The RSI website continues to be the heart of Star Citizen-related conversation. Last month’s addition of the Shipyard section to the forums has taken off, small revisions to the Issue Council have helped us better track the bugs that affect your gameplay experience, and after a slight database issue that caused havoc with the upvote system in the Community Hub, that appears back on track. We’re hopeful to have continued iterations to both the Issue Council and Community Hub in the near future, and are even exploring options related to a major upgrade to our forums. No details to speak of just yet, but we continue to explore ways to improve all aspects of the Star Citizen experience during development… because that’s what development is for, yeah?
Live Events
No live events for the month of February, but we continue to make plans for our Gamescom and CitizenCon presence later this year. For Gamescom (Aug. 17-21) we’ll be on the show floor in our very own booth all five days, and are looking to host a number of pop-up parties in the evenings throughout the week, so stay tuned for more info on that as we get closer to the event. CitizenCon will be October 9th in Los Angeles at the Avalon Hollywood. The specific start time is still being determined, but we’ll have tickets up on the site for that in the coming weeks once all relevant details have been locked down.
Perks
Subscribers continue to get their monthly flair, and tune into Around the Verse next week to get a glimpse at a new flair series coming to subscribers that has us excited here.
Coda
That’s all we got for this month. We pretty much leave it all out on the field as they say in Sportsball. We’ll continue doing our best to generate and share as much Star Citizen content as we can with you each and every week. As always, a huge thanks to the 6 studios for taking the time to gather all this info for us to share with you.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Star Citizen Alpha 2.2 is now available! All backers can access the latest patch on the Live server via the Star Citizen launcher. In addition to a host of bug fixes and balancing updates, Alpha 2.2 includes a number of ships, new features and gameplay elements! Ship updates include the flyable Sabre, damage states for the Freelancer and the hangar-ready Xi’An scout. The first major changes to the component system launch with this update with the addition of new coolers. The physical space around Crusader has also been updated, and individual instances now support up to 24 players at once. This release also marks the first iteration of a new hostility/reputation system, an initial party system and physicalized EVA. For a complete list of changes and additions, you can find the full patch notes here.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
[/article]
Reputation/Hostility System
“It Wasn’t Me… Honest!”
Your efforts repairing Comm Arrays in Crusader have not gone unnoticed by the corporation in charge of this region of space! Alpha 2.2 introduces the concept of “Monitored” space to the game, which are areas of the system that are actively being observed by Crusader Industries, Inc. These zones are centered around Cry-Astro, Port Olisar and any active Comm Arrays. By disabling COmm Arrays, you can toggle the space around them off in an area, allowing players to conduct nefarious deeds without observation. But watch out! Disabling a Comm Array is illegal, and any player attempting to do so will now be flagged as a criminal in this first iteration of the reputation/hostility system.
Destroying an empty ship, colliding with a landing ship (in Monitored space) or disabling a Comm Array now mark the offending character as a Level 1 Wanted Criminal. More serious crimes, including killing a player or destroying an occupied ship (in Monitored space) will add additional levels. Each level adds an extra 30 seconds of time out before a respawn. Want to reduce your criminal level? Waiting ten minutes without committing an additional offense reduces the level by 1, or you can ‘hack’ a console located at Security Post Kareah for the same result.
The corporate board at Crusader has a vested interest in keeping the Comm-Arrays online, and so they are now offering bounties for those who help protect their space by shooting down Level 5 Wanted Criminals. When a Level 5 Criminal is detected, all active players on the server then have the option to hunt them down, with a special reward for those that score the kill. When a Level 5 Criminal is destroyed, they are ejected from the server and must reconnect. Players aren’t the only one entering the fray, though: pirates and security forces now recognize and assist their friends and foes, and both will spawn to protect their interests (pirates at disabled Comm Arrays, Crusader Security at active stations.)
[/article]
Sabre Flight Ready
“Sabre Rattling.”
Did you miss out on your chance to pick up the now-flight-ready Sabre or the hangar-ready Khartu-al Scout during their concept sales? We’re making both ships available for sale again through Monday, March 7.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
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.
[/article]
Physicalized EVA
“I’m going out for some fresh air… ack… gasp…”
In many games, collision functions as a capsule-shaped mesh around the character model. You bump into a wall, and your character stops because your capsule collides with the wall.
In Star Citizen, the collision mesh is detailed to take a similar shape as the actual character model which allows us to utilize our rag-doll technology to affect individual limbs on collision with another object. If your character has a hand outstretched, the hand will encounter the wall and react realistically. Physical EVA also allows for the character model animations to be more responsive to what is taking place and the environment around you.
A great example of this is when a character EVA’s towards a surface feet-first. You will see the character’s feet hit the surface and tuck knees into its chest, as if it were bracing for impact.
The overall result is a more organic and dynamic experience for the viewer, and greater ability for CIG to use EVA as an active gameplay element.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Those following Star Citizen’s development closely may know that the technical design team has been working on a long-term refactor of all ship components. With Alpha 2.2, we’re pleased to announce the first of these components is now online and functioning as intended: ship coolers! Coolers are used to dissipate the active heat built up from other components, currently primarily weapon system.
All ships include a generic cooler and we’ve also added two specialty units to the Voyager Direct store. The size 1 Wen/Cassel Endo and the J-Span Cryo-Star are both available for purchase and rental. Please note that all backers who signed up before the $56 million stretch goal will already have a J-Span Cryo-Star on their account! These coolers can currently be mounted on the Avenger, Aurora, Mustang, 300 Series, HOrnet, Gladiator, Gladius, M50 and P-52 Merlin.
One important ‘under the hood’ aspect of 2.2.0 is the start of our rollout towards the updated component system we’ve been working towards. As mentioned above, we have added a new set of Power Plants and Coolers to all existing ships, along with 2 aftermarket Coolers to Voyager Direct to start offering more loadout tuning options for each ship. Our next big step is going to be a rework to all of our Shield Generator components.
To prepare for that next step, we’re needing to make a few short-term changes to how Shield Generators interact with ships. For 2.2, we’ll be locking down the Shield Generators installed to each ship. Avenger shields are locked to Avengers, Mustang shields to Mustangs. Additionally, the current Seal Corp shields offered for sale on Voyager Direct will be temporarily disabled from use.
Now, since we’re temporarily taking something away from the current owners of these Seal Corp shields, we also wanted to take this chance to let everyone know the plans for how these existing purchases will convert into the new component system when the updated Shield Generators roll out.
Voyager Direct Shield Replacement Matrix
Old INK-Mark Shield
Old INK-Splash Shield
NEW Seal Corp WEB Shield
INK-MARK 104-ID
INK-SPLASH 104-IS
1x Seal Corp WEB Shield
INK-MARK 204-ID
INK-SPLASH 204-IS
2x Seal Corp WEB Shield
INK-MARK 304-ID
INK-SPLASH 304-IS
3x Seal Corp WEB Shield
INK-MARK 404-ID
INK-SPLASH 404-IS
4x Seal Corp WEB Shield
Overall, it’s a fairly clean exchange. We’ll be providing owners with 1 Small-sized Seal Corp WEB shield for each size of an existing shield you own. If it’s a Size 3 INK-Mark, you’ll get 3x WEB’s, a Size 2 INK-Splash will get you 2x WEB’s. These updated parts will be distributed out once the full Shield Generator update goes live in a future patch, and the existing items will still remain available (and eligible for this conversion) on Voyager Direct until then.
Bug Reporting
“I have problems.”
Remember, while there’s a lot to explore in Alpha 2.2 the game still just a portion of the Star Citizen experience! You can help the team improve future releases by reporting bugs and other issues using the Star Citizen Issue Council. The amazing feedback from Star Citizen backers is what has allowed us to interate on the PTU so quickly, and we’re eager for feedback about the Live release as well. You can access the Issue Council here.
Finally, we would be remiss if we not thank our incredible community of PTU testers for helping make this patch the best it can be! Your dedication is exemplary of the UEE’s finest defenders!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
The attached article was originally printed in the January, 2016 issue of Jump Point. It offers a comprehensive overview of how Cloud Imperium Games’ artists and designers have updated two of our signature multicrew ships for Alpha 2.0!
2016 is here, and we’re ready to rock! We kicked off the month with a series of summits in the UK and Los Angeles to prepare for the new year. There’s still one more to go, an AI summit in Frankfurt happening next week, but we’re ready to take on 2016! Now that our i’s are dotted and our t’s crossed, we’re ready to continue getting some great content out to the community. Specifically: going forward, you can expect to see regular updates to the Star Citizen Alpha. We are shooting for one significant patch each month. Expect to see this cycle repeated: numerous PTU test patches followed by a live release and then a lull as content for the next patch is prepared and integrated. As I write this, the team is working on content for Alpha 2.2. Expect to hear more about this release very soon! Meanwhile, here are the specifics of what each Star Citizen studio was working on in January…
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Now that we have taken our first step into 2016, we have already started the year off with a big splash. January marked the release of Star Citizen 2.1.0, a continued evolution of the ground-breaking 2.0.0 release from last year. Additional world missions were added to the universe; however, the biggest stand-out feature was the additional two flyable ships: the Aegis Vanguard Warden and the long awaited MISC Freelancer. If you watched any of our streams last year, you would have witnessed the unveiling of the AEGIS Sabre. With the 2.1.0 release, for those who purchased the Sabre during its debut last year will find this sleek and beautiful space superiority fighter sitting in their hangar!
Along with the regular gamut of balances, fixes, and updates, below is our monthly report for CIG LA.
Engineering
January has been a busy month for the CIG LA Engineering team. The biggest milestone for all of the LA teams was the successful release of Star Citizen 2.1.0. Lead Engineer Paul Reindell has made solid progress on the item refactor collectively called Item System 2.0. Other regions are contributing to this new system and many preliminary features have been already released in order to provide a solid foundation for the Item System 2.0 and set the stage for its continued evolution. As mentioned in last month’s report, this feature provides greater control over itemization on the back end of the game. For January, Paul has implemented a physics controlling component that handles the physicalization of objects. This lives as a layer between the items and its physical proxy, interfacing how the physics mode of an object is changed (enabled, static, rigid, ragdoll, etc.).
Engineer Mark Abent has been industriously creating parameters for ammunition. With many of our systems moving away from strict XML and moving towards our own internal data management system, there’s a need to convert projectiles to this new management system. While outwardly, this will have no visible impact on the game itself, it changes how the parameters are loaded and allows us to move away from the XML project path.
Associate Engineer Chad Zamzow has been working on changes on how shields function. By making higher levels of shield health better at preventing damage, well-managed shields should provide a positive benefit over poorly/improperly managed shields – with the end goal of making lasers increasingly effective at depleting shields the more damage a shield takes and providing interesting decisions for players balancing regeneration speed, sheer strength, and signature in their shield generator options.
The new Interaction system has been worked on by our Engine Programmer Allen Chen, changing how interactions function. The current “Use” function in-game prevents us from adding more than one action to a single interactable object. Allen has completely decoupled the interaction logic to allow multiple actors to interact with a single object simultaneously.
Tech Design
“Ships galore!” should be the slogan for the CIG LA Tech Design team this month. With so many ships in the pipeline, it is difficult to decide where to start from.
One of the most anticipated ships so far, the 890 Jump, has just had its technical design documentation completed by Matt Sherman. Creating technical design documentation for the ship provides the artists with a template of specifications. Requisite information such as dimensions, hard points, internal volume, and various functionalities will ensure the artists are incorporating all of the necessary design elements.
Further development on the Xi’an Scout has reached the ‘grey box’ tech design phase. While the technical design documentation is akin to a “letter of intent” in that it is providing an idea of how the ship will function, the grey box stage is where the nitty gritty details of the ship begin to take shape. Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome has given the Scout its overview such as its variants, characteristics – a comparison of various aspects of performance based on other ships of similar mass and design – and an idea of how the ergonomics of the cockpit will be laid out.
While Kirk continues with his design work on the Scout, he has also taken on the hefty task of refactoring the mass of every ship in-game. Definitely not a job for the faint at heart, Kirk has researched how to properly calculate the mass of our ships, and is now looking to apply these findings. With functional realism an end-goal of Star Citizen, we want to make sure all ships are using calculations ideal for the kind of materials our universe will contain. Whether they are far-future composite materials yet to be discovered or are composed of tried and true iron and steel, every one of these items will affect how ships move through the void.
Balance master Calix Reneau has also taken on a juggling task worthy of a traveling circus show. With our shield system being further iterated upon, Calix has created a metrics system to quantify shield performance. By allowing the Tech Design team to analyze these performance numbers, we can further fine tune how shields function not just as a whole, but also how they respond against various weapon types whether they are kinetic projectiles, energy-based attacks, or other exotic weapon types.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
With the team beginning to fill out the shader libraries for MISC, it is no wonder the Reliant is shaping up to be one of our most stunning ships yet while also being one of our most collaborative multi studio efforts. Its unorthodox vertical shape has given our ship team a fresh canvas to exercise creative ideas for a creative design.
The MISC Reliant has been an all-hands-on-deck effort by the CIG LA Art team. Elwin Bachiller and Daniel Kamentsky have completed the exterior POMs and decals as well as generated almost all the geometry require to destroy it.
Concept artist Gurmukh Bhasin has been creating large renders to wallpaper our new building as we are still getting settled in to the new location. Each conference room will be given a different theme based on a ship manufacturer, and Gurmukh has been designing renders for how each room should look when the installations are completed. If you ever come by to take a tour of the place, make sure you check out our giant mural featuring the Vanguard. Given how much time we spend here, the investment in morale is well worth the effort!
Omar “Armani” Aweidah and Jeremiah “Versace” Lee, our in-game fashionistas, are creating uniform and clothing design for characters in-game. Creating an era-appropriate aesthetic for clothing while keeping certain elements familiar allows our players to identify and relate with the universe we have created. Not only do we want our ships to be the most epic spacecraft ever, we want to make sure our pilots, pirates, explorers, and ilk are geared appropriately for their chosen lot in the life of a Star Citizen. Jeremiah completed the medium armor concept, while Omar completed the high-poly geometry for the male navy BDU (Battle Dress Uniform).
Tech Content
Sean Tracy has migrated to the Los Angeles office, transplanting himself from Austin, Texas and has been making his mark with his Tech Content team.
Those who piloted or stood in proximity to a Constellation during the 2.1.0 PTU may have noticed drops in in-game performance. Matt Intrieri and Mark McCall have been fastidiously delving into the root cause of this performance issue. With 2.1.1, pilots of (and anyone standing in proximity to) a Constellation should notice a marked increase in game performance.
Further content refinements performed by Mr. McCall include adding LODs to normalize the mesh count for the Constellation as well as converting thrusters for all ships to .CDF format and add LODs to the thrusters.
Riggers Gaige Hallman and John Riggs (yes, we have a rigger named Riggs…how awesome is that?) have been working on putting processes in place. John has finalized the skinning vertices on characters while Gaige has been spending a little time each day performing some early Spring cleaning, organizing our character outsource submission management in Shotgun.
Finally, Patrick Salerno has also been proactively beautifying the Gladius by adding LODs to the Gladius to normalize the mesh count.
Production
Senior Producer Eric Kieron Davis is truly a man of many talents. One week he is in Austin, TX assisting the production team with Persistent Universe processes then another week he is spearheading the beautification of the new Los Angeles CIG office, all while keeping his eyes on the target of 2.1.0 and 2.1.1.
Mark Hong has fully settled in, another transplant from our Austin, TX office, has taken control of the Art and Technical Content teams as their producer while Randy Vazquez has filled in the much-needed role of Engineering and Tech Design producer. Randy’s familiarity with the design processes gives him a unique perspective on how best to manage the tasks of the Tech Design team, especially since Randy has both production and design experience under his belt. Production Assistant Darian Vorlick now fills a support role for the CIG LA team by providing data analytics, logistical reporting, as well as relieving any extraneous loads that may fall on the shoulders of the other producers.
Narrative
Our Head of Linear Content John Schimmel, Senior Writer Will Weisbaum and Lead Writer David Haddock were visiting the UK office for a few weeks to sync back up with the designers as well as discuss the production of Squadron 42. They were able to address all of the narrative items of the story and adjust based on new insights as the in-game tech advances. On the Persistent Universe front, as more landing zones are in the process of being built, they have been delving deeper into the look and feel of the locations, characters and even how in-game fictitious products are advertised and branded.
In addition to writing Jump Point articles and News Updates, Associate Writer Adam Wieser tackled a pretty massive S42 task: conforming the scripts to accurately reflect the dialogue recorded during last year’s performance shoot. A laborious process for sure, but now that it’s complete, the designers will no longer need to hunt down footage to see how scenes played out.
Archivist Cherie Heiberg continued to work with our science consultants who have been generating data based on the various planets and systems in the Star Citizen universe while waging her colossal battle against the monstrous hydra known as disorganization and confusion. Our internal wiki is their battlefield. It’s like Thunderdome. Two will enter. One will leave.
Conclusion
With the first 30 days of 2016 behind us, we still have another 335 left to go. That leaves us plenty of time for new ships, new features, new missions, and new art to make its way into the universe. February is looking to be just as exciting and we can’t wait until we can bring you a month in review next time. We are making video game history, and all of you are at the center of it!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The New Year is behind us and teams are in full swing planning, developing, testing, and launching new content for the game. We have had several team members in the LA studio this month for substantial in-person collaboration and planning efforts, and we’ve received a ton of new content for testing and publishing. After substantial testing we launched the 2.1.0 version to the Live server, and have made subsequent updates to tweak and tune the experience. We’re looking ahead to the 2.2.0 update which is soon to come! Here are some detailed updates from each group in Austin.
Persistent Universe Team
The keyword for this month has been ROADMAP. Lots of scheduling and planning has been going on this month for 2016, and we’ve made good progress in laying down a roadmap for features and content. Mark Skelton and Tony Zurovec have been in LA the last couple of weeks meeting with Chris Roberts, Erin Roberts, and others to ensure that all of our goals are lined up and clear to everyone.
That being said, roadmaps and schedules weren’t the only thing we worked on this month. We’ve identified the hero landing zones, smaller landing zones, and space content we want to bring online this year, but the ones that are currently in progress are tracking along nicely. The Levski landing zone in Nyx is in Final Art Stage, and we are now putting the finishing touches on the Shops we’ll have there, including Cordry’s (armor), Conscientious Objects (personal weapons), Café Musain (bar), and the Medical Unit. Initial VFX and Lighting passes are under way for those environments and they are looking absolutely beautimous in their own grimy, decrepit kinda way.
Looking forward, we’ve been putting some hard design focus on creating blueprint documentation for the next hero landing zone on the horizon, the Stanton>Hurston>Lorville landing zone (that’s the Lorville landing zone on planet Hurston in the Stanton system, for those of you who’ve been enjoying the Starmap). Rob Reininger has been working with BHVR to layout the blueprints for the various shops for Hurston, as well as the layout for the city of Lorville itself. We’re excited about the design opportunities that have presented themselves for this environment and are taking full advantage. We’ve also been doing some pre-visualization for Hurston. Mark Skelton has been going back and forth with BHVR over the art direction of this environment, and Corentin Chevanne, Art Director at BHVR, and his crew have been doing an excellent job nailing that aesthetic. We’re excited to jump on to this landing zone after we wrap up work on Levski.
In Ship Land, Chris Smith and Josh Coons have been chugging away on the Xi’an Scout (or Khartu-Al). Emre has been working with them to finish up his initial lighting pass on it and it is looking pretty slick. We’re aiming to finish up this ship in the very near future, at which point we will move on to our next focus, revamping the original 3 ships in Arena Commander (the Aurora, 300i, and Hornet) to match our current quality standards.
On the Ship Animation side, in conjunction with Art we’ve been working on enter and exit cockpit animations for the Scout in preparation for its hangar-ready release. These animations are completely unique, since this type of ship is the first of its kind that we’ve done. In addition we are implementing a new cockpit type control scheme for this ship: The Dual Orb. On the PU side, we’ve wrapped up work on the Medical Unit animations and have been making some nice progress on the Nightclub scene animations. We’ve got NPC’s leaning against walls, sitting at booths, drinking at bars, using vending machines, and even using the toilet!
As mentioned previously, Tony Zurovec has been in LA for the past couple of weeks meeting with the other Directors to discuss high-level Design goals for 2016. There are several exciting features that are being discussed that we will aim to bring online this year. I won’t mention them here just yet but look forward to updates on these features soon. Another part of the planning that Tony has been going over with Chris is the Backend Networking/Server roadmap for the year. Jason Ely and Jeff Zhu are fully focused on Persistence right now, and will be for a while longer, but there are several core backend systems that need to be developed this year in order to make significant leaps forward in the PU. For example, Tom Sawyer just finished wrapping up work on improvements to the Party System, and will now be writing a TDD for the work to be done on his next focus, the “True Friends System.” More on that next month!
Live Operations
QA
After a well-deserved break, QA began January with focusing testing efforts on the deployment of 2.1.0 to the live environment. After five deployments to the PTU, we were very happy to finally deploy 2.1.0 to live.
This month we have gained 2 new recruits. Please welcome Jeff Daily and Katarzyna Mierostawska. Jeff comes to us from NCSoft where he worked on many titles as QA Lead. Katarzyna worked with many titles as well including Trion World’s Archeage where she obtained Cryengine testing experience.
Training new additions to the team is a significant undertaking but Tyler Witkin and Melissa Estrada are up to the task and doing a great job.
After deploying 2.1.0 to the live environment QA began testing the game-dev development branch which will eventually become 2.2.0. Todd Raffray headed up a comprehensive test of Party System updates and improvements.
Meanwhile, Vincent Sinatra and Andrew Hesse have completed additional investigations for designer Calix Reneau involving ship speeds, time to kill, and flight mechanics. Vincent and Andrew have also been supporting daily developer playtests in the LA studio which have resulted in very valuable feedback.
This month we had two visitors from our QA team from the Foundry 42 studio in Manchester Glenn Kneale and Andrew Mawdsley. Glenn and Andrew sat down with Jeffrey Pease and learned how to effectively monitor and report issues with our back end services.
Just prior to the month’s conclusion, we tested and deployed a small hotfix (2.1.2) to the PTU and then to the live environment. We are now squarely focused on testing new additions and updates in the game-dev branch which will become 2.2.0. The entire QA team is doing some really great work and we are all looking forward to getting 2.2.0 out to everyone as soon as possible.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Game Support
January saw the rollout of 2.1.0 (and subsequently, 2.1.1 and 2.1.2) to our players. Chris Danks and Will Leverett in Game Support worked alongside Production, QA, and Live Ops to feverishly put out daily builds to get tested, assessed, fixed, and finally pushed to Live. We’re excited to see the reception it’s received, and we’ll continue to make additional fixes on the road to 2.2.0 next month.
Game Support also has been focused on the general work of catching up from the holidays. Most of this work is complete, and we’re happy to provide faster turnarounds for players who send in technical-related tickets.
On a related note, we’ve also been pushing hard to get caught up on our hacked accounts. We feel this is a good time to remind players that we do not condone buying and selling of pledges using the gifting system, in fact we actively discourage it. This is one area where we cannot promise and you should not expect that we can or must address a given ticket. The gifting mechanism is not intended for this use, and not only can CIG not monitor a third party transaction, you are exposing yourself to a risk where you may not be able to recover your funds if the other party has malicious intent.
Lastly, we’ve been working with company leadership to discuss our plans for growth in 2016. We’re excited about growing our team both in Manchester, UK and in Austin, Texas, and we’ll be looking for some top talent to help us run the BDSSE in the next few months. Stay tuned!
IT/Operations
January has been fun for us all here on the IT team. First and most importantly, nothing broke down! We all feel quite a sense of relief over the stability of our networks now with all the work that has been done at each studio to accommodate the large bursts of data for the builds and publishes. Normally, a network of this size and complexity requires constant tuning and maintaining, particularly with all the requirements and overhead involved with secure communications between studios. This year over our holiday however, the IT team didn’t even receive a single alert which is how it should be of course, but this is the first year for us that we’ve experienced such a smooth holiday vacation.
This month went by very quickly but toward the end, we got to meet up with some really great groups of backers. It was fun to spend time chatting with them about some of the details about how the build system works and the cool systems we made which allow us to replicate petabytes of data between the studios. To those of you who were here, thanks for coming and we’re looking forward to your next visit.
Live Ops
Kicking off the first month of 2016 has been very productive in the LiveOps team. We published version 2.1 to the live service 3 times in January with 9 publishes to the PTU. We’ve also reconfigured our desks to make room for more growth on the team and just because it feels good to clean everything at the beginning of the year.
Major progress has been made on tools that support the build process. This month has seen the most impressive updates in the form of interface and usability. These important changes will allow us to push more control out to the dev teams so they don’t have to request every single change from us directly. Additionally, we’ve nearly completed our work on the public crash handler which should be incorporated in to the game in February if all goes well. We expect this will produce a wealth of information for the dev team with regards to any client crashes – this information will help them hunt down and fix those client crash bugs once and for all. Finally, we’re also finishing our work on a new type of build which we hope will have an impact on client load times. If we do well in testing, we’re hoping to get these new builds in to the pipeline in February as well.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
Let’s get right to it! Here’s what we’ve been doing at Foundry 42 in the new year:
Art
Concepts
A relatively slow month of production due to Christmas holidays eating into a good portion of the month, however true to form and CIG style we hit the ground running with 2 weeks of planning meetings for the hurdles we face this year.
One aspect of the planning was trying to give the concept team a smoother ride; in the past we’ve had to adopt a fairly reactive flow, whereas this year I’d like to know 3-6 months in advance – we have the work that’s for sure!
This month the team has covered finishing off the Javelin exterior, Idris/Javelin turrets, Shubin corridor and main bridge, low tech props, asteroid outpost garage interior and Apocalypse Arms rail gun (first pass).
Character Team
The pressure is on! Forrest has been visiting and giving the guys a good understanding of the new pipeline and has done a stellar job on working with associate producer Andy to get a comprehensive schedule together. In terms of art work, “Randall Graves” is now close to in-game final and the Bridge Officers uniform high poly is looking top notch too.
Environments
Most of January has been picking up the whiteboxing phase for the environments in Sq42, we’re making all the big changes to the layout, composition, vistas and flow in this period as everything is very malleable. It’s really promising seeing how all our big set piece events will play out, and how the player will traverse through the various locations in the game. Our PU team has also started whiteboxing out a new location for Crusader which will feature a familiar character. This is going to be a cool one and we’re going to take it into full production next month. Work is also progressing on our testbed for asteroid bases, the look development for the terrain is now complete and now we’re applying this to the rest of the landscape.
Ship Art
There’s plenty of spaceship action going on at Foundry 42! We’re getting in to the final art stages of production with the Sabre and StarFarer. The StarFarer is rather large with lots of interior work so she’s going to take a little longer but we hope to have the Sabre flying around Crusader very soon.
It’s exciting times in the land of Capital Ships. We’ve got resources back on to the Idris to get her ship shape with the Javelin and Bengal getting their whitebox work well underway. We can’t wait to get these babies flying!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
We certainly hit the ground running after the Christmas break! Adam has been focusing on some “thruster standardisation” tasks. There are a number of inconsistencies that we want to smooth out across all thrusters in the game; one example would be some thruster effects having no idle effect , where others do (when the ship is “on” but not thrusting) – we are going to make sure all idle thrusters have a glow to show the thing is powered up. Another part of this task is the creation of boost effects, so there is clear visual feedback to show the difference between boost and standard thrust. This wasn’t previously possible, so Adam has been working closely with John Pritchett to give us improved functionality to really enhance our thruster effects.
Away from thrusters, Mike has been working on a cleaned-up, simplified VFX style guide. This is a concise document that clearly lays out the expected visual style for our VFX artists to adhere to, ensuring visual consistency across the whole range of effects we make (and let’s face it, we make a LOT of effects here!) – it also gives us a very clear visual language for different manufacturers and races. Mike has also been working on cleaning up the effects “templates” and building up our libraries so designers and artists have a greater range of effects to choose from when fleshing out their levels, weapons etc.
Collectively, the VFX team have begun looking in earnest at the effects requirements for Squadron 42 – no spoilers here but suffice to say we have some spectacular scenarios throughout the campaign. I can tell you there will be explosions. Lots of explosions. Did I mention there are going to be explosions?
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Prop Art
The Props team has been continuing to focus on the ship components, we are just putting the finishing touches on the third. We have however had a slight change of heart with how we approach the materials. After consulting the Character and Weapon teams we are now looking to use the same layer material they use, this allows us to achieve a much higher quality surface on the components and it has the added benefit of being much cheaper rendering wise. We will need to revisit our original components but the work is fairly quick and the benefits are well worth it.
We also hope to make use of this layer material in other areas of prop production which will ultimately mean we can throw more on screen than before, a bit of investigation work is in order next month.
With the prop audit coming to a close we have started to do a polish pass on some of the older and commonly used assets, with the aim of improving the quality and performance in one hit.
Work had begun on supporting the Squadron levels and we are working closely with the environment team building some of the key props they require.
Finally work has commenced on the next set of flair assets for our subscribers hangars, we are planning something a bit different in the next couple of months so we are trying to get a head start now.
Design
Wow! January went past at 100 miles-an-hour and the UK design team have been busy in all areas of the game. Systems design is still refactoring the UI for the HUD to give new players a less steep learning curve into the game. It’s not just the HUD that needs an easy option as we are also looking at all of the usability aspects of the game in relation to new players, such as USE prompts, inner-thought, controls unification, better on-foot navigation aids and augmented reality.
As part of this process we are giving mobiGlas some much needed design love, doing a full sanity pass through all of the apps we will need, the priorities being the ones required for the military version for Squadron 42 and the shopping experience.
With the StarFarer coming out soon, we are looking to get the fuel collection gameplay tiered up so Players will have some interesting things to do with this beast of a ship in the coming Live releases.
The Tech designers are still bashing away on all of the new ships and having some extra bodies in that department is starting to pay off in terms of getting the ships flight ready sooner.
From this month we are going to have a dedicated Ship Balance Designer who can act upon feedback in terms of where ships fit in the overall game. This is going to be a very important role going forward and will require a lot of trial and error before the ships feel how they are supposed to, but it’s great that someone is now going to be responsible for this on a daily basis.
I can’t say too much about S42 as you know, but we had Chris Roberts and the writing team over here for the first two weeks of January and we are very happy with how the campaign is paced for design now.
Engineering
Some good progress has been made on some of the core systems this month which will all go and help make the game easier to maintain as well as fix some of those annoying little bugs that crop up from time to time.
The hardest part of the job sometimes is just knowing what to call something. For example, in the current version of a game when vehicles get created, either when you or somebody else requests a ship, or when AI spawn in, it’s actually quite an inefficient process on the networking side. The client first comes up with a list of what the required loadout is and sends it to the server, the server then creates the ship with all the individual items (which can be over 100 depending on the ship), the server then serializes all these items to all the clients (a fancy way of saying it makes sure they both are synchronised with the same information) one at a time. This has led to a lot of pain in past to get all of this working, as the CryEngine wasn’t designed to dynamically create vehicles like this, and it ended up with a lot of hard to track down bugs. A number of these were caused because the ship on the client could be built in a different order than on the server depending on what order the packets came through. We’re now doing away with all of that and coming up with a solution where we just have one packet of information which describes the whole vehicle and how it is set up. This packet is sent to the clients in one go and used by both the server and the client to build the ship. Now we have the advantage that there’s a lot less network traffic required, and because the server and all clients build the vehicle in exactly the same way it is completely deterministic which means it’s a lot more robust and easier to track down any problems. We were going to call this new packet a Spawn Bundle, but that that got confused with the AISpawnBundle we already have, we then started calling it Dependent Entity Spawn Helper, which doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, so now we’re using the Loadout Helper, which we’re not really happy with either. So it’ll probably change again. (If you don’t think this is a big deal, consider that the name of a module or subroutine may be employed across multiple files across millions of lines of code across different code development branches being used by different teams that need merging before a release. And yet, a reliable and ordered naming convention is extremely important for internal consistency because if the names don’t make intuitive or engineering sense, it’s harder and slower for newcomers to get up to snuff on a system that’s become too idiosyncratic.)
The Object Container work (which similarly had gone through numerous renames) is making some good progress. We’ve now got proof of principle where we can export a level as an object container and get it to load into the game correctly. Now we begin the fun part of trying to split the level up into multiple containers and getting them to stream in and out of memory, which is where we start to break everything. We’ll also be working on converting the prefabs over and getting the containers working with the Zone System. Once all of that is in it will allow us to greatly expand the scope of a level.
Otherwise it’s pretty much carrying on as usual. The audio guys are currently trying to track down a really nasty audio corruption bug which you might have heard. It’s proving really tricky as it’s very hard to reproduce, our QA only hear it after playing the game for around 4 hours in a session with a full server so we might only get it once or twice a day. It ends up that the turnaround time between creating a new build with some additional debugging, or potential fixes, and seeing what happens becomes very drawn out. We have started to narrow down what is going on though and we’re confident we can get it fixed shortly.
Graphics
Last month a lot of our focus was on improving performance and we’ve managed to make significant improvements on existing scenes/ships but also on our newer and more complex assets that are still in production. Some of our recent big wins have come from fixing various issues on the Constellations and Retaliators room setup to ensure they’re properly occluded from outside the ship, and to heavily optimise the UI of both ships (we now render less than ¼ of the number of meshes for the holo-UI for the exact same visual result).
This month the leads have been planning the long term schedule for the year, and the graphics team have had to determine the graphics requirements of all the other teams (art, vfx, design, gameplay) and ensure we’ve planned out all the required features. While doing this the rest of the graphics team have been focussing on newer features, starting with our revival of the gas cloud tech that will be vital for both Squadron 42 and the PU. The gas cloud tech will continue to be one of our main priorities for the next couple of months, and at the moment we’re focussing on researching efficient volumetric lighting techniques and trying to get the look and feel right before getting into the optimisations and polish stages further down the line. Other new features we’re starting on are improvements to some of the shaders such as glass and skin, a new version of our LOD merging tool to optimise space stations and FPS environments, improved fire/glow on particle effects, and a completely new physically based glare & lens-flare system.
Animation
Here in the UK we have been working on core FPS player mechanics. We’ve been setting up some of the aim pose requirements for technical implementation of cover low and cover high systems. We’ve also been reworking the no weapon locomotion turns to add in some weight to the animation in 3rd person while keeping the camera steady in first person. An interesting challenge in itself when gameplay requires turning on the spot!
Further adjustments to core gameplay requirements have been lowering the crouch locomotion set to better fit the height metric set by design. This will allow idle and locomotion to keep below cover height, instead of your head popping up when you start to move. We’ve also started to look in to implementation of the vault and mantling mechanics, reviewing the motion capture data and working with design and code on the best way to break it up to allow for a smooth gameplay experience.
Animation
Here in the UK we have been working on core FPS player mechanics. We’ve been setting up some of the aim pose requirements for technical implementation of cover low and cover high systems. We’ve also been reworking the no weapon locomotion turns to add in some weight to the animation in 3rd person while keeping the camera steady in first person. An interesting challenge in itself when gameplay requires turning on the spot!
Further adjustments to core gameplay requirements have been lowering the crouch locomotion set to better fit the height metric set by design. This will allow idle and locomotion to keep below cover height, instead of your head popping up when you start to move. We’ve also started to look in to implementation of the vault and mantling mechanics, reviewing the motion capture data and working with design and code on the best way to break it up to allow for a smooth gameplay experience.
Other than that we’ve been planning for the year ahead, and providing some body data for cinematics over in Frankfurt to unblock them.
Audio
Here in CIG Audio, we’ve spent a lot of time tracking down an issue that’s affected the sound experience in the live release; wholesale and rather nasty distortion, that typically happens only after a reasonably lengthy play session.
It’s been difficult to discern the cause up until this week, but we think we have a solution and we’re rolling that out as soon as we can. We’ve had help from the community in tracking this one down, and have to thank all involved who went above and beyond the call of duty in sending us their data files and reporting the issue in such detail – it’s awesome to work hand in hand with you all. We’ve also had some great assistance from Audiokinetic’s support department who’ve pitched in wherever they can. It’s been a trying time for Graham, Sam and Mikhail in doing the necessary detective work and our QA team have also been of great assistance here. We’ll write up a more detailed report of it for those interested later once we have a fuller picture.
As you can imagine, this has curtailed some of our progress on the system side and has highlighted just how much we need audio programming engineers; as well as this issue bringing this to the fore, we’ve put together our entire audio engineering roadmap to feed into the wider code schedule and it includes much of what is discussed on the Ask A Dev forum and far more besides – there are a lot of foundations still to put down to cater for a universe as huge as ours, lots of variables to cater for and you can never quite know what they might be until the game hits the live servers.
So on the topic, we have a role available here at Foundry 42 for a Senior Audio Programmer, and one can apply via the CIG website!
Otherwise, work has continued where possible on Squadron 42, with Ross putting down as much as he can there, setting some markers for how that workflow should be, and continuing on the music logic system with Sam. Ship work is continually ongoing via Darren and Luke. Stefan’s been refining the impacts of ship-based weapons – he’s looking at making them more dangerous when you’re in EVA or generally unshielded by a ship. Matteo’s continued with Foley work for characters, Phil has been putting together one of the most awesome rigs ever for p-cap dialogue capture purposes, Bob’s been hard at it speccing up our dialogue system/database. Jason’s been assisting with that and looking to proximity based VOIP tech. I’ve been arranging as much as I can for a forthcoming orchestral performance session, and also working with everyone on a bit of everything.
Hopefully with this nasty bug out the way we can get back to more gainful work in building up the systems and content. Thanks for listening!
QA
UK QA have been split between the testing of Star Citizen Future and Present this month – with us covering the current release streams of 2.1.0 (via 2.1.1 and 2.1.2) as well as the more developmental stream where the new upcoming features work is being done. At the time of writing this, 2.1.2 is about to go LIVE – so we’re all feeling happy in the knowledge that it’s been a good months’ work well done!
In terms of our biggest, most difficult to catch bug this month; we’ve been devoting a lot of time to the reproduction of the audio corruption and subsequent crash that’s been happening in 2.1.0 and 2.1.1. This has been some quite involved work for the UK test team – which has required frequent communication with the audio programmers as well as needing us to be sat in the PTU and LIVE servers, trying to force the issue to occur – with the help of many a backer. So thanks again!
This is also Andy Nicholson’s last month working as the QA Manager in the UK – Phil Webster will be taking his place in the coming week. Andy’s SC journey will continue, albeit in a new form with the Design team – but as QA Manager he leaves a legacy of creating a really great QA team.
And now it’s time to sign off. SPACESHIPLAUNCHSFXNOISES!
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings Citizens,
Hello from Frankfurt! Our main focus for January has been to re-iterate on the goals set throughout December and ensure we are still on track with them. For that we had a few meetings to discuss priorities so everyone was on the same page what to work on next. We slowly ramped-up on the focus so everyone could get back into their zone and work without interruption as much as possible. FPS, PU design, Cinematics, AI and core engine development progress so far within the first few weeks of 2016 has been quite impressive and you can find more details in the respective reports from our team.
Production
The production team started the month with a lot of planning sessions. Having ended the year with our massive 2.0.0 update, introducing some key features of our game, we want to ensure that 2016 will be aequally as exciting for everyone. We met with the Directors and the team to talk about what high level goals we want to achieve, and when they’ll be completed, throughout 2016. We then prioritized and matched the tasks against our available resources. Talks with the team are still going on to break the goals down into achievable steps. Going through this process is taking a lot of time and since we also have to continue working on the updates/bug fixes for the live game it’s something that needs to be scheduled carefully to allow the team to prepare properly while keeping interruption on their current work as low as possible. On the AI side we are almost completed and will have a first draft roadmap ready within the next few days. This will cover all requirements for S42 but also PU and we have a lot of really interesting features and systems ready to be worked on. Follow-up discussions will happen with other departments of the team where dependencies need to be clarified. FPS, PU design and core engine development are on a good way, but all need prioritization and breaking the work down further before we can pull together a final plan.
Code
Hi everyone, a new year starts with new technological challenges. We released 2.0 in December and 2.1 in January, each accompanied by a PTU phase before they went live. Star Citizen nowadays has a size of ~30GB, which means that with the current patch model, the backers have to download a load of data (Especially on the PTU where we want as many people as possible to make the game stable prior to going live). The size is the same internally for us, as even a 1GBit LAN connection cannot transfer 30 GB instantly. Hence we in Frankfurt collaborated with our Austin engineers on how to tackle this problem. We came up with a good solution in which we all believe in and have started to implement. The idea is to design a system which knows your local data, knows what data should be in the build, and then selectively downloads and updates your local data set to match the one of the build. For example, if between two PTU release, zero textures are changed, then no texture will be downloaded, reducing the required download by several GB. We hope to start testing this system soon internally and then extend it to our public releases as well. Unfortunately, as this is part an integration process which often tend to have many small issues which add up to a lot of time, I can only give you Soon™ as an estimate.
EVA was also a major focus! For extra vehicular activities (EVA) the player model is basically a ragdoll which is 100% controlled by physical impulses. This type of “ragdoll” can be driven by animation and is able to perform all actions needed for a player character. All physics-based control models can be unpredictable in certain situations: for example, whenever legs collide with an obstacle the character is doing somersaults and sliding along walls always makes the view spin around. This behavior is physically correct and pretty much identical to what happens when parts of a ship collide with an obstacles in space. But if this happens in first person view, then it’s not exactly what a player expects. In the last weeks we investigated (with the help of UK and LA) different control methods for the EVA suit that preserves the physicality of the ragdoll simulation and while still giving the player more precise controls for navigation and EVA combat. This includes:
Improved “view-based control mode” without drifting. This control mode is very similar to John Pritchett’s thruster controls for ships.
Improved Yaw-Pitch controls that reduced the “camera roll”.
Better capabilities to slide along walls by reducing the friction on the suit and using counter forces to stabilize spinning automatically.
Weapon aiming in vertical and horizontal poses for driven ragdolls
New IK-system for driven ragdolls. Whenever the legs collide with the environment, the character can pull them up immediately.
Experimental auto-navigation methods that makes it easier to move around in tighter spaces without getting stuck in level geometry.
Finally, we continued working on the procedural planet environment and trying different combinations to improve the planets overall appearances. We’re making great progress and look forward to showing things off in the future.
AI
Since AI didn’t provide a large update for December due to the holiday, we’ll focus on the general progress we made since last month.
On the character side we completed the first pass on the implementation of the functionalities required to allow enemies to use covers during their combat behaviors. Animators have provided us animations for staying in cover, shooting from cover, peeking from cover, and firing blindly at their target. The behaviors can now correctly request functionalities such as peeking or shooting from cover. The system will take care of analysing the current position in relation of the target position selecting the proper posture to use.
We also started to refactor the character perception. We’re basically creating a perception system that can be modularized directly in the game code. Components will register the different entities into the system that will allow them to perceive through different senses. Vision has been the first to be tackled, we started using the CryEngine VisionMap and we created a game component that registers an entity as an Observer or Observable. This allow us to specify what we’re interested in seeing, and how other characters can perceive us so the vision map can take care of making physical checks and caching information for queries. We will share more details about this in the upcoming weeks!
On the behavior side we have exposed a lot of functionalities through new behavior nodes and extended the current behavior we’re using. We also started using the TokenSystem we previously talked about to create the foundation for the first coordination. With the TokenSystem we’re experimenting with coordinating agents during the investigation of dangerous sounds, having one person going to investigate while the other covers him and wait for his information, etc.
Regarding the spaceships AI, we have moved all the spawning logic from LUA to C++. This will allow us to maintain the system better and it already helped us by properly supporting the asynchronous entity spawning.
In addition to all of that we have been working on a lot of stability improvements and we have worked on the creation of a development plan for 2016 and beyond!
Build Engineering
Our Senior Build Engineer has been busy in general working on the build system, trybuild and automation. This month a good amount of time was spent on general build issues that generally come up throughout development. He also worked on a few changes that will allow us to switch over to updated software once it’s released.
QA
This month Chris Speak has been progressing on Automated testing setups for CryEngine, primarily focused on AI and the way it handles obstacles within a level as well as the Usables such as vaulting over walls and climbing ladders using a relatively simple Flowgraph module. He setup a test-map that contains several feature tests that can be triggered via the console within both the Editor as well as in Client mode that tells an AI character to move towards a specific target location, and upon entering that location the FeatureTest node in Flowgraph marks the test as complete. The AI has to determine how to navigate to that target area using the obstacles in front of it, so in the case of the screenshot below it needs to climb two 4 meter ladders to reach the target.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
He’s also been recording timed demos for the purposes of automating end-user-experience testing to give us daily feedback relating to everything from ship boarding and flight, to FPS combat etc. This should give us a good foundation for future changes, and make changes to the game-code a bit less risky and painful.
Cinematics
Cinematics is currently at work on several scenes that happen during S42’s story’s beginning. We’ve done a first pass on our Navy hospital scenes and are currently doing previs on a few others that we can’t discuss just yet. Our Sr. Environment artists are busy building up terrain, as well as environment and key props for a dramatic planetside scene. The scene is fairly prominent and we need to make room for an Idris to land. We also started with a major facelift, as well as under-the-hood work, on the Trackview editor, one of the main tools use by the cinematic designers. Sascha Hoba is currently busy bringing the toolset up to speed for what we need it to do, both in usability and feature set. The additional functionality will make certain areas more efficient for the team, and allow us to assemble scenes quicker.
Design
For Level Design work continues on the prototypes for the Modular Environments and the Power Management Systems, we are pretty close to having the latter ready for an internal play test to verify the concept. It should turn out to be a pretty interesting, a dynamic and fun way for the players to interact with the environments in everything from Space Stations to planetary outposts, just make sure you don’t turn off the lights while someone is still in the SpaceLoo™, bad things might happen.
As with development life in general we sometimes encounter bugs and blockers that might temporarily halt our work in one area, but there is always work to be done fill those small gaps, so in the last month we have also been doing some work on a small multiplayer map, defining game rules for multiplayer (line of sights, density of obstacles, height variations, scale) as well as scheduling and planning for 2016.
This last month System Design has been focused on getting a thorough breakdown of all the systems that we need for Star Citizen, past, present and future. This would allow us to verify and better see what systems are used the most and in which specific situations so we can better prioritise them.
Besides that we’ve been working on various cargo prototypes to decide what is the perfect balance between doing things as realistically as possible while making sure cargo movement and management is still fun and exciting to do. Other systems that we are pushing for right now are looting and resource spawn management as these will allow us to improve the PU experience greatly. We’ve also had a new addition to our team, Grégoire, a great designer from France, he’s been trying to catch up with the massive amount of documentation so that next month he is 100% up to date, while at the same time trying to get familiar with all the internal tools we use on a daily basis.
On top of all this we are continuing to interview great applicants and talent to fill the ranks of the expanding Frankfurt Design team.
Weapons
We have been working with the concept art team on a new FPS weapon, it’s going well and looks good, but It is still in a very early concept stage.
Also the updated metrics for ship mounted and personal weapons have been completed after being evaluated by various departments and are ready to be used.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Audio
This month Mikhail spent most of the time on bug fixes and refactoring AudioSystem so that it uses the ZoneSystem for all relevant positional information. It turned out to be a fair bit of work, because, like most currently existing audio systems, CrySoundSystem was designed under an implicit assumption that audio sources are mostly static, and the ones that aren’t inform the audio system explicitly when their positions change. This works well for the majority of 3D-engine-based games in existence. Naturally, like with many other things, Star Citizen is a different case. Since a lot of action in the game happens inside the spaceships, there is no reason to expect the audio sources in any particular frame to be static, in fact, more often than not they are all moving, and, sometimes, for example when landing on a capital ship, there might be several clusters of audio sources all moving at different speeds relative to the listener. This not only applies to the permanent audio sources like thrusters, ship weapons, doors etc., but also the transient ones, like footsteps, object collisions, electrical sparks. As you can imagine, when the standard approach is used, the number of position updates required quickly adds up and starts to affect the overall performance. On the other hand, the Zone System provides the engine modules with a centralized and efficient way to keep track of the positional information for the objects they need, so querying it once per frame for the positions of all audible sources based on the current listener’s position is definitely a much more scalable solution.
Art
This month Robert Stephens has been concentrating on the escape pod used in the Javelin Destroyer. Even though it’s only a small / minor craft in comparison to some of the larger ships, we’re spending the time we need to give it the level of detail fans and backers have come to expect. A good amount of time was spent on how the pod doors will open / close, we want to have both a complex and accurately stylize locking mechanism that the player can easily use and recognize. Some of the challenges with something like this is making it look as though it would work if it existed in real life, and also balancing that with the requirements of other departments such as animation so that the character can actually get in and out of the pod easily.
Pascal Muller has been working on art for the procedural planet tech. This involves a lot of iterating and figuring out what works on a technical level as well as getting it to look as good as possible. The main difficulty is to make it read visually no matter how far or how close you are to the planet. To make this work there are multiple levels of detail which blend in and out depending on your distance to the surface in a very particular way. Can’t say much more about it at this point except that we can’t wait to share it with everyone.
Tech Art
As part of our character pipeline, this month we divided or character data files into three separate units, _SRC, _PUB, and _BND files. The SRC file stores the render mesh and skeleton data, PUB stores the puppet rig, and _BND file helps us to map our FBX animation data to our puppet file. Currently we’re smoothing out the pipeline and developing tools to communicate with different files and systems with metadata nodes. We also provided some Tech support for EVA animation as well as some rigging for a weapon prototype.
VFX
For the past few weeks VFX in Frankfurt has been prototyping the visual looks and styles of some of the Xi’an tech. This tech differs visually from the other races and In order to get this visual look it required us to integrate some new tools into our texture creation workflow.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
2016 is off to a great start! We began this month with great excitement for what’s coming next. Here’s what BHVR worked on in January:
Design
January was very successful for the Behaviour Design team. Francois Boucher and Jesse Kalb went full steam ahead on the blueprints and the whiteboxes of Hurston shops. Working with our friends at ATX, we quickly iterated on Hurston locations and are about ready to hand most of the whiteboxes to the Art team.
We also updated our shopping prototype and put it in situation in both Casaba Outlet and in Nyx/Levski bazaar market, proving the concept even more, highlighting our future needs but also its current flaws.
Lead Designer Guillaume Bourque is working with a bunch of team members, both in Montreal and in other studios, setting the next collection of flair items on the right track. All I can say is it’s going to be real nice. We are also looking forward the next location we are going to work on, possibly a space station.
Lastly, we are helping setting up the Bar Citizen Montreal event which is going to take place early February here in Montreal.
Art
This month, well rested from our holydays, we began R&D for a brand new planet. The work consisted mostly on creating a distinct feel and ambience to make sure that all our planets don’t look alike. Furthermore, working on a new planet is a great opportunity to apply the latest techniques that we’ve learned from the previous planets. Hopefully with this in mind, we can improve even more the visual quality of our new assets.
On the building sets, we moved to the polishing phase of the industrial/mining set. Also, we continued work on the different shops that we will be able to explore in Levski.
There was also a lot of work done on industrial props and on the next month flair objects.
Engineering
This new year, there was a lot of work done on different game features. Simon Jambu worked on the Party System, to help you pick up the right instance to play with all your friends.
John Corbett, has been continuously at work on the datastore system, to allow temporary modifications on ships. This will be handled through a holotable on Port Olisar
Martin Poirier is working with other studios on in ships’ display screen optimization: reducing the memory and CPU footprints of ship UI (especially multicrew ships) as well as making the system ship component driven.
Adamo Maiorano and Fabien Poupineau are going full speed ahead on shopping experience. Going through different prototypes to make sure you have the best experience.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
Greetings from Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month:
Organization Invitations
Last month, we launched the new Organization invitation template. We refreshed the look-and-feel so that it gives more prominence to the Organization’s own branding, and also added color schemes to match the type of Organization. You can find this feature under My Account > Organizations, in the left menu.
Subscription campaign
We wrapped up the QA phase for the upcoming Subscription campaign and will be launching in the beginning of February. Subscribers are a key part of the Star Citizen community, as they support the production of “10 for the Chairman,” “Around the ‘Verse,” “Bugsmashers,” “Meet the Devs,” and more. In addition to re-designing the Subscription section of the website, we produced some logos and animations that can be used in videos. We’ve also added new exclusive rewards (for Centurions and Imperators) in an easy-to-read matrix. If you haven’t already done so, now’s the best time to become a Subscriber!
Ship Happens
This was an exciting month for ship production, as three ships were brought into the game. With the release of 2.1, the Sabre became hangar-ready, giving players their first in-game look at this agile fighter. As for flight-ready ships released in 2.1, we had the Freelancer base as well as the Vanguard Warden. During the release of 2.1, a sale was launched alongside it featuring the Sabre, Warden and an Aegis Fighter Pack featuring both the Sabre and its big brother, the Vanguard Warden. The following week also saw the sale of the alien ship, Xi’An Khartu Al, to coincide with Gillian Anderson’s interview on Squadron 42. To close out the month, there was a Free-fly to coincide with the weekend of PAX South.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
We have begun development on the core mechanism for multi-factor authentication, which will greatly reduce the number of hacked accounts. In addition, we’re updating our design layouts to match the current look-and-feel of the website. Once MFA is in place, you will need a second authentication factor besides your username and password in order to access the game. You will decide how you receive this second factor (by email, SMS or a third-party app such as Google Authenticator). We are still in the early stages, so keep checking back for more updates!
ARK Starmap
We began discussions with the Star Citizen dev team to decide on the best way to integrate the Starmap into the game. A lot of factors have to be considered, such as visual integrity, performance, code maintenance, star system updates (synching), and what technologies should be used for the in-game version. Each month, we will provide more details on the process. In the meantime, you can check out our web version at: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/starmap
Behind the Scenes
What happens when the game crashes? Well, we have been working with the Star Citizen dev team to build something we call the Panic Service. The Panic Service is responsible for receiving game client crash data and cataloging them in a centralized database where they can be accessed by the devs. Game crash data is sent to us via the “Receiver”, which is then processed by the “Worker” and stored in a database. From now on, Star Citizen devs will be able to access all crash data from this database, making it easier to extract the pertinent information. This will save time in troubleshooting.
Bar Citizen
For those of you who live in or near Montreal, we hope to meet you at Bar Citizen Montreal! All the details can be found on their Facebook page.
Inhalte von externen Seiten werden ohne Ihre Zustimmung nicht automatisch geladen und angezeigt.
The start of 2016 has been a fantastic one. Right out of the gate, the response from you guys to Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 and 2.1 has been tremendous, and it always makes our jobs just a little more enjoyable when we see all of you enjoying your Star Citizen experience.
Videos
The 10 For series that airs every Monday made another evolution when we started incorporating hosts from different disciplines. With the addition of 10 for the Developers, we can answer questions provided by our development subscribers with more than one perspective. This has been providing us with what we feel are answers that are both more informative, and hopefully more interesting as well.
Around the Verse continues expanding to include coverage of other studios like Austin and Manchester, while addressing the production challenges inherent in trying to coordinate, produce, and direct segments through Skype and email. We’re hopeful to have a chance to visit our European studios in person this year and delve even deeper into the amazing work being done on the other side of the world.
To facilitate the production of these segments, we constructed three free-standing sets to improve overall production value. While only one of them is currently decorated, we have plans to bring the other two online in the coming weeks to months. This in conjunction with upgrades to the audio and lighting equipment, we’re slowly working to make our weekly productions all that we want them to be.
January also saw the release of two videos detailing Gillian Anderson’s work on the upcoming Squadron 42. Gillian is an exciting addition to the cast and we look forward to sharing more behind the scenes looks with other members of the cast in the future.
Forums
We recently added the Shipyard sub-section of the forums: an area dedicated specifically to the discussion of your favorite ships in Star Citizen. This change, like any change, often takes time to get used to, but the developers have taken to the dedicated nature of the feedback they’re looking for, and information is flowing from Citizens to Designers more easily than ever, so we definitely feel this is a huge win for everyone involved.
Live Events
While we didn’t have an official presence at any conventions this month, we were able to send a single infiltrator to PAX South to meet with fans and shake his head at the litany of “when” questions that assaulted him. Our intrepid Community Manager even managed to unexpectedly find himself on a panel with the Community Manager for Elite: Dangerous, much to the delight of fans in attendance.
Perks
We launched our new Subscriptions landing page this month that you can find here. It’s a brief look at all the things becoming a development subscriber gets you. This month’s Subscriber flair was the AV8 Battle Armor Replica from the Puglisi Collection, and looking at the numbers appears to be a big hit with you guys. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve our Subscriber flair, so if you have a fantastic idea, please share it with us in the Subscriber forums.
Coda
We’ll keep it short and sweet this month, as by the time you’ve gotten to this section your eyeballs may be ready to burst. As always, we want to thank the other studios and departments for taking the time to gather all this info for us, as we appreciate it just as much as I’m certain you all do.
Because all simulated, mocapped or keyframed animations are shared in first- and third-person view, we were able to use the same system in both view modes. This is the first time we worked with a player model where a large part of its motions are coming from physics and we feel that we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with this kind of physical simulations. This is an ongoing task and we hope to show more improvements in the next months.
IMPORTANT NOTE: corn is not and will not be supported.
