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Jason Hutchins here for the weekly Star Marine update.
It has been all hands on deck in all studios working towards all of systems and features of Star Citizen and the on foot first person experience is a no exception. Here’s the good news: I GOT TO SHOOT A SPACEMAN IN THE FACE! Earlier this week the build was stable enough to do some internal playtests. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you too much about what we were testing this week without ruining what we have in store for you at CitizenCon… so tune in tomorrow to see what we’ve been working on!
I did, however, work with the dedicated QA testers in Austin, and our very talented new video editor, Justin Chambers, from the Santa Monica studio to make you this teaser video. Those shots were literally taken this morning and we put them together this afternoon. Thanks to Pedro for another superb music track to work with. Next week, I’ll share some of the behind the scenes footage that went into making the final trailer you see today.
Of course we also did work to push the FPS development forward, building up to what will be a public release as soon as we can. Thanks for tuning in, see you at CitizenCon 2015!
Added alternate fire modes (semi, burst, auto fire) to ATT-4
Continued investigating issues with grenades and gadgets
Updated P4AR shells helper to align better
Stripped down keyframed recoil animations from the P4-AR and made new animation files.
Reload animation event timing tweaks for the P4-AR
Working on procedural weapon sway/recoil animations for the P4-AR
Fixed a bug with the weapon not following when moving the camera up/down
Then connected these settings to the weapon data.
Crouch and crouch+ADS Procedural animation setup
Fixed an issue where guns would float in the air with the owner died. They fall to the floor now. They were leaving their attachments behind, fixed that bug, too.
Fixed some bad diagonal sprint strafe blends.
Finished first pass on cover lean system. Will need proper animation assets for the next pass.
Stated support for weapon changing, need animation assets to be created/implemented.
Next up, low cover ADS cover support.
UI
Worked on Quantum Travel HUD (spoilers!)
Working on a the Mission manager display for an upcoming release.
Helped the audio team with hooks for the FPS visor HUD
Technical Art
This week we did a huge cleanup of environmental textures that were much larger than they needed to be. This saved almost 1.7 GB in allocated texture memory. As you can imagine, that was a big performance improvement.
Animation
The team in the UK is making excellent progress on base locomotion as well as procedural weapon animations. You’ll see what I mean in the video.
Smoothing start transitions for the first person view
Submitted fixed Stocked motion set prone transitions
Cleaning up the Stocked walk start transitions
Revived the Weapon Pose for Procedural animation clips
Looked into an animation conversion issue
Removed all ADS and iron transitions – they looked bad
Added WeaponSway and WeaponPose to Stocked transitions
Adjusting look poses to correct aim point in ADS
Found an issue with another bone that wasn’t being exported by one of our internal tools.
Sniper rifle crosshair adjustments.
Started working on to/from prone animation transitions
Continued polishing first person movement on stocked weapon set.
Shotgun fire animation tweaks.
Audio
Working on breathing manager
Made another pass on the bullet cracks
Done a pass on EVA thruster audio
Debugging and fixing environment and props in Gold Horizon
Making another pass at ADS audio
Debugging audio for grenade cooking, burst fire, and destroyable props
Blocking Issues
I’m going to start providing a list of the issues that we feel we must fix before we open the tests to backers.
Pistol animations need to be implemented and cleaned up, once we finish the stocked weapon set.
All Armor Types – Taking damage while swapping weapons causes character to lose weapons.
Stocked Weapons clip into the characters face while prone.
Damaging breakable objects causes random objects to move.
Using the Hologram causes a crash.
When pistol is selected user is unable to throw grenades or use gadgets.
All Armor Classes – Characters are missing line art/interior helmet geo/Hud elements.
P4-AR Ballistic Rifle – Rear sight and part of gun vanish when user goes into ADS
ATT-4 Energy Rifle – Rear sight and part of gun vanish when user goes into ADS. (JH edit: I think this one was fixed today – was broken yesterday, though.)
Devastator-12 Energy Shotgun – Rear sight and part of gun vanish when user goes into ADS.
Throwing a grenade can cause a crash.
All loadouts – Sometimes you are unable to shoot your weapon until you cycle through all of the fire modes (press V).
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This month’s Subscriber Flair is the 350r ship model! This realistic ship model from Takuetsu Starships, the most trusted name in ship models, is the ninth in a collection of Star Citizen’s ships. Display your 350r with pride, and then collect other models to complete the display. This month subscribers will also receive a special piece of event flair!
In honor of Citizen Con 2015, all active subscribers will also receive a special subscriber variant of the Citizen Con 2945 trophy. Additionally, all Citizen Con attendees will receive a Citizen Con 2945 trophy and digital poster on their accounts which will be attributed later today. We’ll also have the poster and trophy available for sale tomorrow in the store for those unable to attend the event!
Please note that the model, trophies and poster will not appear in your hangar just yet, they will be included in the next patch release. If you’re an active subscriber, the model and event flair will be attributed to your account today. If you subscribe over the weekend, the 350r model will be attributed to your account on Tuesday October 18th! More information about subscriptions can be found here.
UPDATE: The attached demand letter is our formal response to specific, slanderous allegations made in the recent The Escapist article on Star Citizen. Normally, we would keep this behind closed doors, but we felt it was imperative to put our statement on record and indicate how disgusted we are with The Escapist’s irresponsible actions. Corporate at Defy Media asked us to delay publication of this letter while investigating, but we feel strongly that the record needs to be set straight without further delay.
We know that most Citizens are not interested in this drama, and as such we are updating the original notice rather than publishing additional Comm-Link articles. Future updates will occur here rather than in additional sections of the RSI site.
Response to The Escapist
Greetings Citizens,
I have, to date, attempted to stay above the internet drama currently surrounding Derek Smart and his claims about Star Citizen. My feeling has been that it is most important to speak with actions instead of words, and to date I feel that we have done that with the multi crew demo, the launch of the social module and everything else you see here in this space on a daily basis. However, with the publication of today’s article (I can only call it a hit piece) on The Escapist, I believe it is necessary to address the issue directly. In the interests of openness, I am making available right now my correspondence with The Escapist’s managing editor. What follows is his original e-mail to our Director of Communications, David Swofford, and my response, sent to them three hours before their deadline and not included in the piece.
I have to say that I’m incredibly disappointed in all of this. This sort of drama is not what I, or you, signed up for with Star Citizen. Thanks to your support, the project has become bigger than I ever thought possible and there’s no question that opens us up to criticism from anyone looking to make a name for themselves. I know that every company goes through such things, especially with regards to unhappy former employees. It is unfortunate that our open nature makes us a bigger target, and going forward we will do the best we can to refute such baseless accusations. But most importantly, stay tuned to see the actual work we’re doing, which should put any questions to rest.
I will update this piece with a direct response to the article later in the day, but I wanted to go ahead and show you what they left out; hopefully it will calm some nerves now.
Chris Roberts
- Chris Roberts
My Response
From: Chris Roberts Sent: 01 October 2015 14:10 To: John Keefer Cc: David Swofford Subject: Upcoming Star Citizen article
John,
I was quite shocked to see the email that David Swofford forwarded to me filled with a bunch of conjecture, falsehoods and opinions of disgruntled ex-employees enflamed by Derek Smart’s personal quest to destroy Star Citizen.
I know you say that “none of these come from Derek” but we both know that’s not true. You are quoting the exact same things in your email he has spewed in his blogs and twitter for months. If you want me to give you links to the exact same claims (which are patently UNTRUE) I can but we both know it’s coming from him and the few people he’s rounded up. We are a company of 261 employees spread across two continents and four development studios. With a company our size there will definitely be a few unhappy ex-employees – the same would be true of any large organization – we have built up quickly and not everyone is a superstar or fits in with the culture. We have parted ways with a few people over the past couple of years, not all of them amicable, and it is alarming to feel like there is a one sided piece that will be filled with complaints of people who aren’t part of the project for a reason. As long as I’ve made games, especially on large projects this has always been the case and it shouldn’t be news.
So why is it for you guys? Do you really want to give a platform to Derek Smart? This is the same person who wrote a letter to Origin and me after Wing Commander was out claiming that we were infringing on his game and we had to cease publishing it or he would sue us. We told him we never heard of him and good luck with that. He never sued. His game was, of course, the now infamous Battlecruiser 3000AD that would take many more years to come out (I think I shipped four Wing Commanders before his game came out).
Derek has a long history of finding some “big” thing to joust at just to keep himself in people’s consciousness rather than let his games do the talking. We’re not the first project where he has made it his mission to attack. Personally I think it would be much better to use that energy on his own game rather than take this path. He’s managed to rouse up enough attention that sites like yours are reporting his bile like it’s fact. You can’t pretend that the article that you published the other day was anything but a mouth piece for him. It completely repeated his narrative hook, line and sinker and mentioned plenty of out of context material in an attempt to harm the project and my reputation. I just don’t get it. The only person who is famous for being a blowhard, bully, an awful game developer and human being is Derek Smart. Just look up his history over the years. Or see how he treats people who dare to write a bug up on his current “game.” Why aren’t you doing a piece on the state of Line of Defense? Everything he accuses us of doing, he actually does himself! He’s the king of self-projection!
I’m pretty disturbed by your approach to this piece as well as the last piece Escapist published online. Why the rush to publish with or without our comments by noon today? What’s so urgent that you can’t take a little time to actually approach this like responsible journalists and do proper fact checking, get both sides of the story and only publish verifiable claims that have proof? Otherwise you’re just engaging in the same kind of campaign of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that Derek Smart has been actively pursuing every day since he realized that he could get attention by attacking Star Citizen (as he certainly wasn’t getting any for his own game).
I’m also pretty concerned that your reporter on this is compromised and pursuing her own agenda. For someone who is a self-acclaimed Gamer Gate supporter, which last I checked was about ethics in video game journalism, she’s not been behaving or going about her business like an ethical reporter. Lizzy Finnegan appears in this tweet from Bandit@istheguy:
This is directed at a self-avowed feminist. Meantime, Bandit@istheguy is the very same person who started attacking Star Citizen on the day before your reporter wrote her article, tweeting about two people we parted ways with, then following up by retweeting the Escapist article and people who mentioned it…and then finally ending up by doxing myself, my wife and one of my daughters with this sequence of tweets.
“Bandit” is an anonymous account that was created on August 11th of this year and is almost exclusively used to aggressively attack and harass folks seen as enemies to Gamer Gate – the usual targets are all there, as are the usual proponents being retweeted. It’s notable that this account was interacting with and supporting Derek Smart when he was complaining about being blocked and reported as a harasser by two huge GG targets; Randi Harper and Briana Wu, which was another Derek Smart self-announced drama (he loves to play the victim, which he did when we refunded him publically sharing his refund email, claiming we were trying to silence him. We weren’t – we strongly believe in free speech and allow many dissenting opinions on our forums as long as they stay within standards of decency. You don’t keep someone as part of your community who is demanding you run the development differently or else he’ll sue you, especially someone who is plainly using the opportunity to attack Star Citizen for self-promotion).
Derek tweeted @1:15pm on September 24th about us letting go of staff in LA, less than an hour after we had completed the exit interviews of the two employees we were terminating (considering he’s in Florida and we’re in LA it’s not hard to connect the dots on where he got his information from). At 4:01pm “Bandit” starts mentioning people being let go.
If you look at the Twitter history of Liz and “Bandit” they frequently retweet each other’s tweets and generally reinforce each other’s views / opinions. I don’t know Liz’s personal life (nor do I care to) but based on the picture of her in “Bandit’s” tweet it is not a stretch to assume there is either a close relationship between Liz and “Bandit” or they are potentially one and the same. Which kind of calls into question these statements she made on Twitter:
Also retweeted by “Bandit” (as evidenced above).
This would explain her approach to the article, which was to pretty much take everything that Derek Smart claimed and report it without allowing us any opportunity to properly respond. Liz’s first email to David Swofford was at 744pm on the 24th, after which “Bandit,” riding into battle for his/her new friend, and Liz directly referenced Derek Smart’s claims. I didn’t see this until Friday afternoon (David works out of our Austin office, I was in our LA office) after David had a brief and rather irritated exchange with Liz (attached). I replied to him with some comments and concerns expecting David to have the opportunity to go back to Liz to further discuss some points she was bringing up that were clearly just singing out of the Derek Smart hymn book and much to my dismay and disappointment the article had already been published.
Which brings me back to my original point on all this. Why the rush to publish an article without allowing a proper round of fact and source checking? It completely feels like an agenda is being pursued. This is not the journalism that I remember from the Escapist of old. It’s click bait journalism of the lowest standard. It’s pretty ironic that it’s exactly the kind of journalism that Game Gate stands against. I’m also pretty bemused how suddenly Star Citizen and I have become the subject of attacks by a few people who associate themselves with Gamer Gate. I’m a gamer. I am making a game that gamers have overwhelmingly said they want made, to the tune of almost $90M and rising! I believe in ethics in journalism. I also believe in being inclusive to all and not being abusive to people in person or online. I don’t support either side because I believe it’s too polarizing but I believe we can do better, as gamers, as journalists and as human beings.
So why? It can’t be because we don’t buy banner ads and thusly are an easy click bait target for sensationalist pieces. I have to believe that your reporter is telling you she is onto something and you are taking her at face value and not questioning her motives or ethics.
Derek Smart is very adept at doing what he has been doing; spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. He always grabs one nugget of a fact and uses that to sell a whole lot of lies and disinformation. He tweets about Star Citizen EVERY DAY. Not once but multiple times. If you read his Twitter stream it comes across as the crusade of a crazy man. He continually blogs about us. He constantly agitates…encouraging people to ask for refunds, report us to the FTC, the FBI and/or their local attorney general. He calls me a liar, a fraud, incompetent and many other names. He has slandered my family members and business partners. He has publically doxed me, sharing the address of my home in LA, pictures of my wife and five year old daughter. He constantly attacks Sandi Gardiner, accusing her of having no qualifications, or experience, that she had other people do her work for her and only has the Marketing position because she is my wife. That is incredibly ironic considering we are the most crowd funded project in history, that she wrote the marketing plan, and single handedly executed it when we were a tiny team – even today she’s the only dedicated marketing person at the company, for a game that has raised almost $90M for its development solely through viral marketing, word of mouth and PR. If you were going to criticize Star Citizen you certainly can fault us for taking longer than everyone wants, which would fall on the development side of the company but not marketing! The icing on the cake is that she has five degrees and speaks five languages, which I am willing to bet makes her a lot more qualified than Derek Smart is!
You have to ask yourself why? What does he have to gain? He didn’t like how I was running Star Citizen? Fine, he has his money back. He has no active claim in the game, nor would I ever want someone like him to be part of our community. I have never met Derek Smart, nor do I ever care to. I have never done anything personally to him. Yet he has continued to wage a FUD campaign on Star Citizen, the company making it and its community since July. He actively tries to destroy the hard work that I and everyone else making the game have put in to this project. He wants to tear down something that close to one million people have put their hopes and dreams into. Is it ego? A sense of self-importance? The fact that he’s getting attention again after being in the wilderness? It’s probably not a coincidence that he’s actively courted the Gamer Gate crowd, while professing to remain neutral since he started attacking Star Citizen. It’s also probably not a coincidence that he’s been using the buzz words “accountability” and “ethics” when attacking us as he knows in today’s internet world, where almost no one actually does the research to find the real facts that hyperbole sticks and people love to tweet an instant response to an attention grabbling statement on Twitter.
Derek Smart publishes blogs where he talks about lawsuits and how’s he going to take us down. He’s going so far as to publically share a letter with some pretty silly requests from his supposed lawyer (he seems unable to sign these letters), regardless of the fact we haven’t received the letter. In his latest blog he linked to a letter from his “lawyer” that was dated September 14th. We only received it yesterday, on September 30th! And it was post marked September 22nd! If you know anything about real legal discourse you would know that it stays behind closed doors. You don’t publish this kind of communication as it will prejudice any possible case. What he is doing is just a publicity ploy to get headlines from journalists who don’t know any better and to worry Star Citizen backers into thinking he’s going to legally give us troubles. And this is exactly his FUD plan – scare enough people, tell enough lies, round up the occasional angry ex-employee to help pour fuel on the fire to give him some semblance of credibility. We are not afraid of Derek Smart. We have nothing to hide and are very confident in our ability to defend ourselves against anything he may try to bring. But my bet is he won’t – he’s full of hyperbole. He claims he’s made over $200M in royalties from his games as recently as a week ago (I don’t think I have to go into why this is a complete lie). He also says frequently that he’s worth over $100M, or that he has two PhDs, or that back in July he was taking out a full page ad in The New York Times to expose us. He says a lot of things to get attention and for some reason people don’t call him on it. You may say, “Well don’t shoot the messenger,” but when the messenger is delivering his own message, then I think it’s perfectly fair to question that persons motives and credibility.
And you know what? If he was a decent person he would state his opinion and then sit back and see if it actually plays out, which at that point perhaps he would be vindicated. Instead he is actively trying to make his prophesy come true, using whatever dirty tricks he can muster. Why?
So he’s trying to put 261 people out of a job and destroy the dreams of almost a million people? For a personal vendetta? To gain some notoriety? Because he’s jealous that people love my games and ridicule his?
I’m just a passionate game developer making the game of my dreams. I am lucky enough to be supported by a huge community of gamers that has contributed a large amount of money to make a game that no publisher would dream of making. We have a very large team, most of which share my passion and dream. Yes, there will always be people who don’t fit in with the work and dedication that the dream demands and some of them will be resentful when they part ways, but I am in this to make something that will stand the test of time, much like Wing Commander has. When reaching for the stars there are bound to be a few bumps and delays on the road. You’ve covered games for a long time. You know that games, especially big complicated ones always have hiccups and are frequently subject to unforeseen delays. We aren’t even at the three year mark of full development (we didn’t open up the first development office in Austin with 15 people until February 2013). Projects of half our scope frequently take four to five years.
We are a very public project and rely on the goodwill of gamers to exist. Having a negative article that includes the views or comments of a small number of disgruntled ex-employees with their own opinions on whether things were run well or not, especially when they will be shielded behind anonymity, could give people an impression of the project and company that is 100% false, especially if we are not part of the story. This would be far more damaging to us than a normal developer or publisher. I know that this kind of material is great for clicks but you also have to remember that we are talking about the jobs of 261 people and numerous contractors. Every time a game studio shuts down every outlet and commenter is quick to lament the state of the game industry. Every time a big public company pushes out a game quickly to make the holiday season everyone laments about lack of ambition and taking the audience for granted. Here you have a 100% gamer funded project on the PC, a platform that almost every publisher ignored or pushed crappy console ports to and you have a game in a genre that everyone said was dead to a level that no publisher would dare to – and you want to harm it? Shouldn’t the press be cheering on these kinds of games? The gamers spoke. They wanted something as big and ambitious as Star Citizen. I will deliver it – I have never in my life worked this hard – including when I was 20 and making Wing Commander. There is a huge group of very talented game developers who all share this vision, who are all working as hard as possible to deliver a game that will make all the backers happy. So I implore you to think twice about going for something that while it may be fun to see Rome burn…isn’t in the best interests of the game, the employees of CIG or the 987,217 members of our community. You may say that if it isn’t true what is the harm but we both know in today’s world that’s not how it works, the truth will be lost behind the click bait headlines and the damage will be done.
In an effort to be complete and also answer the talking points you sent David here are my responses;
-Employees have indicated that Star Citizen and all of the promised stretch goals, “even with competent management,” could not be made for $90 million.
CR: How do you or they know this? Which employees said this and what makes them qualified to make that judgement? I know it’s what Derek Smart loves to say but he couldn’t make a good game with $200m so I don’t think his opinion matters. Outside of that, no employee beyond me and a few other key people who are leading Star Citizen would have the appropriate information and overview to make any judgement about the cost of the total project. Secondly, the company uses additional sources of funding such as tax incentives, marketing and product partnerships, but we do not discuss these issues in public for obvious reasons. We always keep a healthy cash reserve and operate our business prudently based on the incoming revenue. It should tell you something that we are actually increasing our global headcount not decreasing it despite the inaccurate rumours perpetuated by Derek Smart.
-Concerns expressed over the planning of the project prior to launching the Kickstarter, namely related to Roberts’ extended absence from the video game industry.
CR: What concerns expressed prior to launching the Kickstarter? The small, tight team that put together the KS campaign and worked on the technical demo are all very much still at CIG and none of these people had any doubt. And judging from the record breaking campaign which is the biggest crowd funded project (not just game) in history I would say that there’s a large amount of people that also didn’t have these concerns. So may I ask where did these concerns come from?
-In 2012, a Kickstarter FAQ indicated that the high cost of stretch goals was in order to ensure a 2014 delivery date.
CR: Is this the FAQ line you’re talking about?
The purpose of the higher stretch goals is to ensure that the game-as-described is finished in the two year time period. We intend to build the game that Chris Roberts described at GDC Online regardless, but without additional funding we are going to have to do it one piece at a time, starting with Squadron 42, rather than as a single larger production. With more funding we can include more ships, systems, unique locations, animations and cinematic sequences.
You will notice that this is saying that we would only be able to deliver Squadron 42, not the bigger game without additional funding. If you refer to the stretch goals you will notice that the base goal was enhanced community content (delivered), alpha dogfighting module (delivered) and Squadron 42 (in progress). That was the base game as described. The full persistent universe and all the extra features like FPS boarding, multiple star systems to visit, extra ships and so on are all stretch goals. As is true with most projects when the scope changes so do the timelines, you can’t build a castle in the same time you would a wood shed no matter how much money or how many people you have. To try to make some kind of narrative about how we promised the game in two years no matter how big the scope grew is false. Could we have shipped a small scale 30 mission game in the old Wing Commander format in two years? Yes, but that’s not the game the community wants or the game we’re building. What we are delivering now, just on the Squadron 42 side is more akin to a huge AAA game that would retail for $60 by itself. The value for money that people are getting for a $40 pledge is pretty crazy.
-Allegations of a “toxic” work environment, including ignored Human Resources complaints against Sandi Gardiner (including accusations of discriminatory hiring processes, vulgarity and personal insults during both public disagreements and email exchanges).
CR: All personnel and HR matters are obviously completely private and we can’t comment on this as a matter of principle. As always, there are two sides to each story.
-Accusations of the mismanagement of money, including: using crowdfunding money to pay for couple’s Pacific Palisades mansion, using crowdfunding money to pay for personal vehicles, using crowdfunding money to pay for personal vacations, using company resources and employees to create videos for films and auditions (Sandi Gardiner).
CR: No crowdfunding monies are used for any private purposes – these allegations are completely false and defamatory. This is pure innuendo for nefarious purposes and I guarantee that anyone making this claim will be unable to show any proof of it as it simply hasn’t happened. Ever since Wing Commander came out I’ve been lucky enough to be financially independent, driven nice cars and lived in nice houses. That’s due to money earned through royalties, the sale of Origin to Electronic Arts, Digital Anvil to Microsoft and prudent investing. So why are people making a deal about me having these things now? I also find the continued attack on Sandi fairly alarming. Why is she being singled out? Because she’s my wife? A woman? Yes, she’s also an actress and there’s nothing wrong with her also engaging in one of her passions after hours or outside of work. We let employees play games of D&D in our conference room in the evenings or weekends. I don’t see attacks from Derek Smart about how this is a waste of company resources (and it is not his to comment on or judge anyhow).
-Accusations of entering into a joint venture partnership with Turbulent, and using crowdfunding money in order to assist with the continued creation of the crowdfunding platform that was used on the RSI website to market to other companies.
CR: The opposite is true. CIG benefited from pre-existing software that Turbulent had developed. Our JV with them allowed us access to cheaper rates and bound an important part of Star Citizen closer to CIG, which are both beneficial to CIG and the backers. Per our agreement Turbulent is of course free to offer their technology to other customers.
-Accusations of “irresponsible spending” of money, including the use of “big name” Hollywood actors for voice-overs for the commercials, the hiring of inexperienced “movie people” to work on certain aspects for large fees with minimal to no experience.
CR: Where does this come from? Has anyone given you examples of “big name” actors or numbers? It’s completely incorrect – we paid appropriate rates for normal VO work for the commercials. Now for Squadron 42 we do have a really great cast, which we will announce in a week from Saturday, but that was one of our stretch goals so it would be a bit rich to accuse us of mismanagement there!
“Squadron 42 will feature celebrity voice-acting including at least one favorite from Wing Commander”
-Accusations that the majority of the crowdfunding money has been used, with minimal progress made. Sources state they “feel like they were making commercials, not a game.”
CR: Anybody even with minimal knowledge about game development can assess the significant progress by looking at the released modules and the detailed monthly reports from each development studio. We have a massive team, working flat out to build something special for everybody. We feel like we’ve made huge strides and have completed a good portion of the underlying technology that will enable us to make Star Citizen the game that your sources say can’t be made. I don’t know how someone could say with a straight face that they felt “they were making commercials, not a game.” In fact we haven’t had a ship commercial since last year! As an aside the commercials were used as a fun milestone to make sure everyone got the ship to final game quality, and it focused the artists on finishing the work for public consumption, which in turn helps with getting more final assets in the game sooner. It was also a great way to build the lore of the universe of Star Citizen up, which is a universe we intend to continue to expand for many years to come.
-People feel the company is understaffed for what is being asked of them
CR: In every project I’ve done and others I’ve witnessed it’s a very common tendency for people to want more staff to help finish the job. It’s always that way until the game is finally done. Under Erin’s leadership at head of Global Production we’ve re-organized to make things more efficient (which is really what started this flap in the first place) and we are in a hiring mode (which you can see by our open positions) which shows that we are working to address these concerns. We have ten confirmed new hires that will start this month alone and offers out to several more candidates.
-Employees are concerned that Roberts is not listening to the advice of people who have worked in the industry during his absence, and that they will have to waste time and resources attempting something impossible just to prove it would not work.
CR: I have a very strong vision for Star Citizen, which is why I believe we have been backed to the level we have. I have no doubt what we can achieve. Now that most of the base technology is in place we will be able to get with the Large World and MultiCrew milestone a game experience that will allow you to seamlessly go from foot, to boarding a fully realized spaceship with your friends, take off, fly thousands or millions of km in space, exit your ship in EVA and explore derelict space stations or wrecks, engage in FPS combat, return to your ship, engage in space combat and return to your home base to share the tales of your adventures with your other friends. All with no leading screens, all at AAA first person fidelity that you can’t even get on a next gen console. This is the core of the Squadron 42 and Star Citizen experience that we will continue to iterate on and add content to, but even the first release will be more “game” than most commercially released space games. In terms of not listening to the advice of people that have worked in the industry that is not true. I have a very strong executive management and design team with huge experience in AAA titles that all contribute to the decision making of the company. I listen to everyone – from our top level all the way through to our QA testers and community giving feedback on gameplay and features. I care and want to build the best game possible. Now that doesn’t mean I agree with everyone’s opinions and feedback as a project director I owe it to the community to stay true to my vision and pick the things that I think will make the game better which can occasionally lead to people feeling disgruntled, which I suspect is the root of this “concern”.
-Allegations indicating that there are not currently any complete character builds for the game.
CR: Where are you getting this from? Have you guys really looked at what you can do right now in the game? You’ve been able to walk around your hangar since August of 2013. I’m pretty sure that was a complete character walking around rather than a mass hallucination. We have multiple characters in the game and are working on a lot more (of which some will be seen at Citizen Con).
-Statements made that the Austin office will be closing, as is understood by employees.
CR: This is completely false. We’ve actually made public statements to this fact. All Austin employees have been advised of a fairly minimal restructuring where some roles have been moved to LA or Europe for overall team efficiency. The majority of our Texas employees will remain in the Austin studio (indefinitely, by the way). As I’ve mentioned previously we are actually increasing our worldwide headcount in order to complete the game as effectively as possible. I would hope that the backers want us to be constantly trying to increase efficiency and making the hard choices that will benefit the game.
-Accusations that Star Citizen became more about crowdfunding than about making a game
CR: It’s about making a great game. Crowd funding is just a tool that allows us to do it with freedom that you would not normally have with a traditional publisher. So no it’s always about the game.
-Employees feel as though they are “part of a con”
CR: This is the statement that really makes my blood boil. If any current employee feels this way they should not be working on Star Citizen or at CIG! I suspect these are the words of a few bitter ex-employees trying to stir trouble but I consider it a privilege and an honor to have so many people support myself and the team in making the game of all our dreams. I have nothing but gratitude to our backers for their support and patience and nothing but respect for the CIG team giving their all to make this game. Anyone who doesn’t feel this is welcome to the door, and as you must now realize there have been a few people who haven’t shared the same passion or love and now resent being called out for it.
Ok, there you go.
I would like to point out that ever since I got your email from David I have been working on this response. I worked on this until 5am last night, and a couple more hours this morning in the UK, where I am currently am in preparation for CitizenCon in a week from Saturday. Conservatively it’s taken me about eight hours to write. This is time I could have spent working on the game instead of dealing with a Derek Smart instigated drama. And this is really what annoys me – that his silly rantings occasionally gain traction and pull me away from the very thing I prefer to do and the very thing everyone wants me to do and the very thing Derek Smart accuses me of not doing – FINISHING THE GAME! By constantly tweeting, writing blogs and soliciting journalists in the background to report his “findings” he’s waging guerrilla warfare on my time, the time of other key executives, and the peace of mind of our employees and backers.
I would ask you to think hard about this in the context of what you guys have been considering running with. What do you hope to achieve by running with an article like this? What good do you hope will come out of it? Are you looking to cast assertions on our chance of success? What’s the point of unfounded conjecture and innuendo from biased parties? People say we will not deliver the game we’ve promised. So? Shouldn’t you just let us get on with it? If it falls apart they will be vindicated, if not we will be. I don’t know any other project that gets the level of scrutiny that we get in the development phase. Every day I have to deal with thousands of arm chair CEOs and developers mostly because we are the most open game development project in history. I have no problem with our community having its opinion on various facets of our development but when our openness is used against us by a small number of outside agitators harbouring ill will against us, it becomes incredibly frustrating and detrimental to my ability to deliver the game as promised.
If you guys are willing to do a proper piece then I’m happy to engage. You’re invited to visit all of our four studios, meet the developers making the game and see how we’re building one of the most ambitious PC games first hand. I’ll put my 261, their passion and energy against the complaints of a few disgruntled ex-employees any day. We have backers visit the offices all the time, they all come away with the same impression – that the entire team is dedicated to making the best game possible – if you took the time to research this you will find that it is a common comment and that the “noise” that has been generated is really from a very small number of people and some quite bitter ex-employees.
-Chris
Original Letter
From: John Keefer Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2015 12:44 PM To: David Swofford Cc: Josh Vanderwall; Lizzy F Subject: Upcoming Star Citizen article
Hey David,
After our chat and the initial story ran, we had a bunch of former employees and current employees step up to talk to us about Star Citizen and what is happening with the game. The allegations and concerns are numerous (see below), which gives us a sense of urgency to get this story out there ASAP, ideally first thing tomorrow morning. Note that NONE of these come from Derek but are all internal or formerly internal folks who came to us or agreed to speak with us. We are giving you and Chris a chance to respond before the story goes live. We are willing to wait a very short while to ensure these get answered if possible, but this story will run tomorrow at noon at the absolute latest.
Bullet points from the story:
-Employees have indicated that Star Citizen and all of the promised stretch goals, “even with competent management,” could not be made for $90 million.
-Concerns expressed over the planning of the project prior to launching the Kickstarter, namely related to Roberts’ extended absence from the video game industry.
-In 2012, a Kickstarter FAQ indicated that the high cost of stretch goals was in order to ensure a 2014 delivery date.
-Allegations of a “toxic” work environment, including ignored Human Resources complaints against Sandi Gardiner (including accusations of discriminatory hiring processes, vulgarity and personal insults during both public disagreements and email exchanges).
-Accusations of the mismanagement of money, including: using crowdfunding money to pay for couple’s Pacific Palisades mansion, using crowdfunding money to pay for personal vehicles, using crowdfunding money to pay for personal vacations, using company resources and employees to create videos for films and auditions (Sandi Gardiner).
-Accusations of entering into a joint venture partnership with Turbulent, and using crowdfunding money in order to assist with the continued creation of the crowdfunding platform that was used on the RSI website to market to other companies.
-Accusations of “irresponsible spending” of money, including the use of “big name” Hollywood actors for voice-overs for the commercials, the hiring of inexperienced “movie people” to work on certain aspects for large fees with minimal to no experience.
-Accusations that the majority of the crowdfunding money has been used, with minimal progress made. Sources state they “feel like they were making commercials, not a game.”
-People feel the company is understaffed for what is being asked of them
-Employees are concerned that Roberts is not listening to the advice of people who have worked in the industry during his absence, and that they will have to waste time and resources attempting something impossible just to prove it would not work.
-Allegations indicating that there are not currently any complete character builds for the game.
-Statements made that the Austin office will be closing, as is understood by employees.
-Accusations that Star Citizen became more about crowdfunding than about making a game
-Employees feel as though they are “part of a con”
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Greetings Citizens,
I wish I had a more exciting update for you! The past two weeks have been about fixing crashes, blockers and addressing issues with server stability. The biggest news this week is that Austin QA was able to play a Free Play practice match on a release build while connecting to internal servers! That’s a good indicator of progress, but there’s still work to be done.
What kind of issues are we talking about? Let me talk about one example of a complicated issue that we feel we need to resolve before the initial release. That is: something is causing weapon aim not to return to the center of the screen where it needs to go. There’s some type of lag that is keeping the aim offset from the center. We have been working on solutions involving modelling, animation, programming and scripting in order to address this and the team feels confident we’re close… it’s looking better than it had, and we hope to show you a ‘before and after’ video next week.
Issues like this are the reason we aren’t ready to release a playable build just yet. We are so eager to get Star Marine in your hands, but it doesn’t help us with development if we ship with issues we know we can solve… especially issues that prevent you from having fun. We want your feedback, but we want it to be valuable balance feedback rather than have you run into the same issues we’re seeing.
I’ve read the reactions to the “Thumb Wars” on the forums and I’m glad you liked my little joke. While we may not do Thumb Wars via thumb-stick any time soon, we will be using the system to add other actions into the game: motions to settle bets or make decisions. That’s coin flips, dice rolls and other RNGs… even an animated Ro-Sham-Bo emote setup (rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock, if you prefer.) After all, in the full game you’ll need to resolve your conflicts in ways beyond just shooting virtual people in the face!
Below you will find the weekly list of changes, updates, fixes and issues. We’re getting very close to release; those that remember the early days of Arena Commander will remember how frustrating it was that last minute blockers continued to pop up… and the same is true here. It’s part of the process, for sure, but a part we’ll be happy to be done with very soon.
Gameplay & Engineering
Continued investigating / working on weapon issues.
Continued tweaks to the Arrowhead sniper rifle.
Fixed weapon animations not playing
Committed a first pass of the decibel based visor Radar system
Fixed crash with decibel based visor Radar system
Working on sniper overcharge vFX display system as per feedback from game director.
Currently tracking down animation issues with weapons/IK
Looking into crashes caused by API changes the network spawning of gadgets
Updated left hand IK bone rotations on all stocked weapons to fix broken wrists
Updated medium character item attachpoints to be better aligned
Looking at various cover/ladder/MedPen bugs
Fixed ladder footstep SFX triggering incorrectly now
Fixed crash relating to Area Denial asset
Fixed missing crosshairs on some weapons
Trialed xml position/rotation offsets on weapons now code is in, but ran into some issues.
Unified recharge rate for energy weapons
same speed of recharge for all of them but some take longer due to larger mags
Looking at bugs moving slightly out of cover
Investigating additional audio hook ups to the breathing manager, to hook into stamina and player injury states
Tech artists removed old shoulder flashlight that mysteriously reappeared after the 1.2.0 merge, and hooked up new illumination devices that are helmet mounted. This will be a good thing when you are investigating that asteroid you landed on, walking the ArcCorp dark alleys, or clearing that dark corner on the abandoned Gold Horizon station. The lights on GH are flaky and easily broken!
UI
Fixing bugs related to HUD visor widgets and internal helmet Geo
Changed the size and color of the FPS indicators
Reviewed the new line work on the light helmets for both Marine and Outlaw
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Almost ready to roll out weapon manufacturer style guides. Artists will use this to unify our concept art so we can start cranking out additional concepts and then get more weapons and gadgets into full production.
Did a large weapons texture clean-up last week. This will help reduce used texture memory in the Star Marine and Persistent Universe or Arena Commander maps that have any personal weapons in them.
Fixed P4-AR iron sight alignment issues in the art asset.
Investigated issues with personal shield gadget collision issues.
Continued work on new Area of Denial gadget.
Included is a shot of the WIP on the high poly model that we received last night, which is much smaller than the old briefcase sized gadget.
Attached is also a picture of my feedback, which needs to be approved by Todd and Tobi early next week. Todd is on a much needed holiday today, and by the time I sent my feedback for Tobias to review he’d already gone for the night. Ah, the challenges of distributed development…
Animation
Working on weapon fire animations, to address feedback and changes regarding procedural code and the new rig. This work will continue into next week.
Re-targeting of some animations as needed when bugs are found by tech design and engineering.
Created missing stocked crouch forward and backward turn animations
Fixed prone roll popping bugs.
Working on 1st person movement for stocked weapon locomotion set.
Helped fix the Fixed P4-AR iron sight alignment issues in the art asset.
To give a little more detail on this, we are using the P4AR Ballistic rifle as our gold standard once we have animations, IK issues, camera positions, and designer set up all working we will use that as our basis for the way other stocked weapons are set up, as well as the basis for pistol type weapons, and in a future Star Citizen or Star Marine module release, heavy weapons.
Investigate issues with throwing grenades. This work will continue into next week.
Audio
Player hit feedback is now submitted
Looking into the UI/Radar feedback
Hooking up sounds to the energy recharge stations
Tested grenade cooking audio
Fixed up some material SFX
Downed sound is tested and checked in, need to review in game.
In closing, it’s been another week of solid progress. We get closer and closer to putting this into your hands. I hope to have a video for you next week detailing one of the major blockers that’s kept Star Marine out of your hands thus far, including the solution we’re in the process of implementing even as I write this.
What a month! It’s hard to believe that August saw both our live Gamescom multicrew demo AND the release of the social module… and a heck of a lot of work in-between! From building new starships to designing new landing zones to teaching the Vanduul to fly, we’ve been doing a little bit of everything, and it’s finally adding up to things you can see live! You can read on to find out what our teams around the world worked on in August below.
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Hi everyone! In August, the team had their heads down creating functionality and content for the upcoming MultiCrew release of which we showed an early iteration of at Gamescom. We’ve had a great time working on implementing several major elements of Star Citizen and are looking forward to finishing more. Like always, we love sharing with everyone what we’ve been working on so check it out and let us know if you have any questions.
Engineering
What a month! We started off delivering some major systems you saw debut at GamesCom and are ending with full game implementation, high priority bug fixing, and major code clean up and more. We can’t believe another month has gone by in the blink of an eye so here’s what we knocked out during that blink.
We’ve been hard at work on the Pilot AI module and to support that module, we’ve needed to do some work on the item system. Our resident UI pro, Zane Bien, has been working to finish up the massive amount of UI for some of our bigger ships while working hand in hand with all the UI stakeholders to close down the base UI systems used all over Star Citizen.
Now that we’re merging everything back up in to our main stream we’ve had a lot of integration and stability issues to address. We’re really happy to get everything back in to one stream (we’ve been working in multiple streams for several months). We did find a memory leak issue that we knocked out quickly (memory leak issues are a leading cause of many slowdowns and crashes in software of any kind, so catching these things is really important). We also worked to clean up a lot of the large world core types to get ready for the future elements in the game. We are digging further in to the physicalized damage for our ships to get that done as soon as possible.
We worked with our global team on some Quantum Travel tasks and are really proud of what we we’re going to be able to accomplish for the multi-crew release. Since we’re finishing elements of the game and supporting the live content we always have normal bug fixing to complete. Some examples are head rotation for EVA as well as camera snapping and bounding box bugs which we had to address. We had a strange Constellation firing bug that we had to iron out as well as a control transfer bug. Also, a visor position bug, HUD bugs, EVA gas giant bug, flare bugs, character helmet bugs and many more that we tracked down and squashed!
Toward the end of the month we started tying down shadow and area light fixes with forward tiled shading, cleaned up leaking decal render nodes on level unload, finished up initial implementation of multilayer material work and integrated them into the correct stream. We added thread-safe loading interfaces for textures, materials and character models as well as set up the testbed for async (asynchronous) batch loading. We also figured out the workflow of bullet pierceability, prototyped upcoming flight control modes, and chased down IFCS (Inertial Flight Control System, one of the major features that makes our game a leading-edge ‘sim’) bugs and issues for release versions. Having said all that, we’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us so stay tuned for next month.
Design
We’ve has such a successful month! Not only did we complete some major milestones for multi-crew but are making leaps and bounds toward improved Arena Commander all while working alongside our global partners on their respective aspects of the game. The highest priority is finishing up the last minute items for the multi-crew release for you to enjoy!
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To dig in deeper, we’re working tirelessly to get the Drake Herald flyable to iron out everything we need to do to make sure it’s balanced and fits well within the game. We also worked hard on general balance for our 1.2.0 patch and future patches as well by listening to your feedback and evaluating what’s needed for improvement. Now, we’re clearly laying out the ranks and hierarchy for multi-crew stations to provide what’s needed for proper controls to encourage healthy teamwork within our multi-crew ships. We’ve also been designing more physically based damage alongside engineering to get that system online as soon as possible.
GOST rear door and state groups were worked on extensively to improve this system. We also fixed a lot of bugs such as the missile rack bug, flying into space, and Gladius weapon bugs as well as a Constellation character bugs. We also fixed the Glaive hangar bug and we did Glaive blade Mannequin clean up. The Retaliator power plant transition was really fun to work on and we’re glad we finished it. We also setup the Cutlass Blue interior doors chrparams and the Constellation destruction was fun to work on because it had a lot of technical challenges. Another system we’re working hard on improving and preparing for the long term is our component implementation through prototyping and retro-fitting ships. We also did worked hard on Glaive flight balance through-out the month for the release of the ship and beyond.
It’s going to be a great upcoming month and can’t wait to show you everything we’re doing.
Art
Another month down, and what a busy month it was. We worked hard on all the art needed for the Multi-crew release, Squadron 42 and FPS characters, as well as concepts for the next great ships.
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To dig into the nitty gritty, some of the tasks we worked on in concept included the Male UEE Marine concepts, the Vanguard variants, Marine armor concepts, and the Shubin exterior Miner. For characters, we modeled several helmets such as those used by UEEN Deck Crews. We completed art for Star Marine such as helmet interior line work, the Marine Helmet, and the Light Marine Helmet. We also fixed some of the female textures, the human skin shader, and an issue with multi-light visibility, the eye shader, and finished some loadout screen renders to get ready for Star Marine. On the rigging side, we fixed the base male character model weight simulation issues, and player skin exposure issues for not only Star Marine, but the Social Module as well.
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On the ship side, we modeled the white box and the grey box of the Drake Herald to get them to a flyable state as soon as possible. We also completed the Constellation LODs (Level of Detail), the Cutlass Blue LODs, added Scythe burn marks, Retaliator damage, and addressed Merlin bugs, Freelancer z-fighting bug, Cutlass Blue texture bug, Merlin thruster bug, Retaliator shield hookup, mesh and proxy, Constellation shield fitting bug, and general art bugs as they arose. We worked on the Vanduul Glaive materials vertex colors, Aurora clipping bug, ship shield meshes, Constellation grey box lighting pass and began working on the white box for the Reliant by our own Elwin Bachiller.
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Also, we’ve working hand in hand with design to finish standardizing our components for all ships within the game, through proper pipeline documentation, component orthographic images, component placement, and cleaning up the overall component files. We’ve been working hard and excited about what next month holds.
Writing
Coming off the rush of production, it’s been a much calmer month than the last few. Our collective sights have shifted more to the PU while the data from Squadron 42 gets crunched to be implemented into the game. That isn’t saying that there hasn’t been S42 work, we have been helping the Editorial department by compiling first passes of the NPC Character wildlines (essentially going through the raw footage and editing out pauses and any line flubs) to present them to Chris for review.
Otherwise, we’ve been pushing forward on Star Systems, organizing the current star systems and preparing them to be vetted by scientific consultants while delving into the remaining un-lored systems to sketch out their character and how they fit in the universe. This information is important, not just for the Galactapedia, but also for reference by the developers who will be building the actual large-scale game environments for the persistent universe. This kind of data is also one of the many things we do to add deeper simulation elements to the game, instead of just doing things by fiat. While science fiction can of course contain unexplained or strange artifacts and circumstances that add elements of mystery and wonder to your exploration of the universe, we want the rest of it to make enough conventional sense for you to fully immerse yourself in a setting conducive to suspension of disbelief.
Next, we’ve been talking with Matthew Sherman, Elwin and Mark Skelton to further consolidate the list of corporations that manufacture the individual ship components. Part of these discussions involve art and design determining the standardized size/shape of each component (what elements do all power plants have, for example). The ultimate goal is to establish a brand identity (indicating the quality or type of product the company makes), so that not only can the artists can develop a consistent form language for the parts (what is the company’s visual trademark/stamp of the standardized component), but also so that the designers can begin to assign how the company’s design philosophy affects the individual part. In short you will not only be able to look at an individual part and potentially be able to identify who manufactures it, but you can also intuitively gauge how a particular company makes their products, and what the strengths, weaknesses and quirks of their construction does to that particular component’s performance characteristics to help inform your purchasing decision.
Probably the coolest thing we’ve been working on is REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED.
It’s really exciting.
That about does it for Santa Monica. We had another fun and busy month here at the studio as we work every day to close down the tasks necessary to bring Arena Commander 2.0 to your computers. As always, we appreciate you taking the time to read through our list of work and if you want to know more please don’t hesitate to ask! Thank you again for everything and remember, we always value your feedback.
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What a month! The team in Austin has been working non-stop to support a variety of efforts for around the company, most dear to our hearts being the release of Social Module to the PTU and then to Public release in the same month! The team is so excited to be able to share this module with you, and so exhausted from all the work that has taken place in the leadup to this release. We’ve got big plans to release new features on a regular schedule and to continue to expand this module over time. Here are some detailed updates from the team leaders in Austin.
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The Art Team this month spent much of its time helping to ship Social Module v0 out with the release of Alpha 1.2.0. The PU Environment Team spent most of the month supporting BHVR in creating the awesome ArcCorp landing zone environment. Patrick Thomas, Lead Environment Artist, helped Mark Skelton review and provide feedback on a daily basis to get ArcCorp looking as polished as it could be. Lee Amarakoon did multiple VFX passes on ArcCorp to get it looking nice and grimy with steam effects, atmospherics, animating graphics on screens and monitors, and he even had a hand in getting our ships ready for use in the traffic patterns in the skies above Area18. Lee also created the fire effect in the incinerator you can see in one of the back alleys of Area18. Emre Switzer completely revamped the lighting in the environment, so that the courtyard was more impressive, the alleyways were properly dingy, and all the shops each had their own flavor. Cort Soest, Global Environment Tech Lead, spent much of his time this month monitoring the optimization of the assets used in creating the environment, so you can thank him for helping to get the environment to run smoothly on your computer! We also had a new addition to the PU Environment Team this month. Ali Seffouri, Environment Tech Artist, joins us from EA Tiburon in Orlando and has been helping out with creating some much needed tools to support the art team in making more amazing environments.
The PU Concept Team has been working hard to flesh out some of the look and feel of more upcoming planetside locations. Ted Beargeon has been doing work on making style guides for Crusader and MicroTech so that each landing zone has its own unique aesthetic. (For those of you who might not remember offhand, ArcCorp, Crusader, and MicroTech are all located in the Stanton system, so being able to travel between these planets and see all of these locations in the same solar system even if you don’t have a jump drive on your ship is something we’re all really looking forward to.) Ken Fairclough has then been taking these style guides and drilling down into the nitty gritty of what makes each location stand out. Megan Cheever continues to expand the wardrobe of our game. We now have one of our clothing line’s aesthetic pretty well-defined, the Terra-influenced Fashion Casual line. We’ve also been in discussions with BHVR and supporting them on streamlining and improving the chat interface.
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Our Animation Team this month has been helping in several areas. For Social Module, Vanessa Landeros has been implementing all of the emotes you see in game. We’ve got more coming down the pipe so look forward to those soon! On the ship side of things, we’ve been doing a lot of bug fixing to get rid of some of our animation debt, so to speak, so that ship interactions don’t appear to be distractingly broken in our next release. We’ve also wrapped up establishing templates for ship enter/exit animations so that our modelers have something to follow for future work. This will reduce our animation footprint for future ships. We’ve also been updating our ship cockpit animations to match the brand new templates. Lastly, our Animation Lead Bryan Brewer has been working alongside our Rigger to test and implement new custom skeletons to match some of the proportions of our actors we had on set at the mocap shoot at Imaginarium. We’ve come up with an efficient way to create new skeletons quickly and efficiently, and it has been working pretty well so far.
Last but not least, our character artist Billy Lord has been doing some R&D on creating some new hairstyles for our characters. Pretty soon we’ll be able to see these in game, which in turn will allow our characters to have a little more variety in the cranial region. I know everyone is looking forward to finally seeing some flowing locks in game!
Design
All this month has been spent supporting the effort to get Social Module out the door and into your hands! Time and effort were spent on several aspects of Social Module, including setting up NPC’s in ArcCorp (activity around the landing pad outside Customs and Jobwell), hooking up emotes to play in game (all through DataForge), and setting up ship traffic in the sky above Area18 (I dare you to find a pattern!). In the coming weeks we will be spending more time fleshing out ArcCorp even more, including setting up the buying/selling functionality of our shops and NPC daily routines.
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Looking toward the future, designer Pete Mackay has been spending some time on setting up the “Periodic Table of Elements” for Star Citizen. This will be the first step in defining our commodities and recipes. This will also help to establish what elements can be found while mining asteroids, how rare and valuable certain commodities are, and laying the groundwork for how trading will work in the PU.
Lastly, Tony Zurovec has been spending time this month thinking over the top-down layouts of upcoming Planetside locations. Specifically, the Orison landing on Crusader and the New Babbage landing zone on MicroTech. Area18 went through a number of revisions over the past few months to get the first release just right, and we learned a lot that will help make the initial layouts of these landing zones much easier to accomplish. We’ve also recruited a few designers in the UK to help out with an additional landing zone design, the Lorville landing zone on Hurston, so we will be overseeing that as well in the coming months. Before you know it our designers will have their hands full breathing life into not only the locations above, but also Levski landing zone in the Nyx system.
Engineering
The Engineering Team was excited to play a big role in shipping our first iteration of the Social Module in August! They helped ship and support a couple of pushes to the PTU and have been providing continuing support behind the scenes on improvements for the live release since it went out in late August. The Server Team in particular is continuing to work on backend code that will be pushed out to continue to improve the experience of this first Social Module release.
Working on the Social Module was a great team effort…a lot of eager blood, sweat and tears went into putting this module together. Engineering worked very closely with our DevOps and QA teams daily here in Austin for many weeks, which led to improvements in our communications and workflow as well as in increase in team bonding. Together, and with support for various other disciplines, they were able to run a few very successful large cross-studio playtests in prep for the release. We’ve had our top guys analyzing both network and client profiles of playtests and identifying areas where we need to make improvements. This process included adding new analytical tools to further diagnose everything going on under the hood.
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A lot of other work, not specific only to this Social Module release, progressed throughout the month of August as well. Improvements have been being made to the network optimizations for our characters, as we will be working towards adding more and more players and NPCs to game modes and maps as we go forward. As always, work continues on our various backend services and memory issues, including the juggling of new feature work with various bugs that get raised on our live game or by QA. In Austin we’re also continuing to share our engineering expertise for other features being developed outside of Austin, including support for the Frankfurt and UK studios.
A group of engineers continues to work closely with out design team to build out Subsumption Tools, which will allow our designers to create AI behavior for our NPCs. Yes…NPCs in ArcCorp will be coming, and the team is excited to be making progress on reaching that goal! The team has been chugging away at creating new Subsumption Tool functionality as well as implementing new types of behaviors and tasks that can be assigned toNPCs. Nevertheless, other tools have not been suffering from lack of attention and we continue to make improvements and fix bugs for such tools as the Sandbox Editor, Dataforge and the Asset Validation Tool.
Other engineers…our unsung heroes…have been focused on crucial super-behind-the-scenes laborious work in getting our various development streams integrated with each other. With feature work for various releases such as our recent Gamescom demo, Social Module and upcoming FPS release, as well as the integration of an updated version of CryEngine, our experts have been working to keep the correct content in the correct stream at the correct times to coincide with our release schedule, all the while working to ensure that the streams diverge only as much as is absolutely needed to support our stream workflow. While it takes attention and effort to split off different projects into different development streams and merge back together later, this process enables parallelization of work assignments and frees us to deliver content at a pace that is more satisfying to backers who are interested in sampling our work in progress. Without the effort being put into separate streams, there would be far fewer releases and a much longer wait between patches of any kind, because all of the features – as well as all of their bugs – would be tied together.
Live Operations
QA
QA met the month of August in a full swing crunch for the content we were debuting at Gamescom. Our focus was squarely set on the multi crew functionality. Each day QA would play through the demo in which we were prepping to show off our new features multiple times verifying fixes and reporting new issues. The day would conclude with a play through with the developers in LA. We found this very valuable as the developers’ in depth understanding of their systems helped to identify additional issues. We were incredibly happy with how well received the team’s efforts were at the Gamescom presentation. It was a hard crunch but in the end it was all worth it to see the overwhelming positive feedback from everyone. This has energized us to work even harder to get Social Module, Multi-Crew and Star Marine out to everyone as soon as possible.
After Gamescom, our focus shifted to testing the ArcCorp/Area18 Social module in preparation for its release to the Public Test Universe and eventually the live environment. Our Social Module Specialist Todd Raffray has been very effective in ensuring each feature is properly tested. Because of this, we were able to identify a hand full of critical issues that were promptly fixed. In addition to these we have found and fixed multiple issues related to our back-end Generic Instance Manager but will be standing by to identify and address any new issues that arise from a large influx of curious citizens eager to explore Area18.
Tyler Witkin and Andrew Rexroth have been comprehensively testing Star Marine, a process which included an analysis of the cover system, how projectiles interact with the environment, as well as weapon zeroing improvements. Tyler has also helped to provide videos and screenshots of Star Marine and Social Module which have been used on the website, the latest issue of Jump Point and shared through social media.
The focus on Multicrew testing was a boon for our overall development but did result in some things being pushed aside temporarily. One of which is our automated testing development. However we are now in a position to significantly move forward on this particular front. Melissa Estrada is our resident engine specialist and has been working to train others in her in depth knowledge of proper testing of the Cryengine Sandbox Editor. She has done an amazing job training our other QA team in Manchester. She is now free to work full time on our automation framework to get it running as soon as possible.
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This month we welcome our newest addition to the QA team, Marissa Meissner! Marissa is filling the role of QA Information Specialist. The QA Information Specialist is tasked with ensuring all of our documentation is recorded and maintained as well as compiling our release patch notes. She is also the liaison to Customer Service, ensuring they are kept up to date on the latest issues affecting the game. She immediately hit the ground running and is already doing a great job in this very important position.
Thanks to Marissa’s efforts, Jeffrey Pease is now free to focus on the DevOps side of QA. He has become very knowledgeable in how our back-end services function and how to effectively monitor them. As soon as an issue is encountered, Jeffrey will log the issue and notify our engineers with all the needed information. He is also documenting these efforts which is laying the foundation for an eventual Network Operations Center.
For the month of September QA will be heavily focusing on Arena Commander 2.0 testing including, among many other things, multi-crew functionality and significantly larger areas.
Game Support
Game Support was all in for a big month in the history of Star Citizen. We first ran a public playtest to profile some of the larger Arena Commander issues of the day, worked on 1.1.6 and a brand new launcher, then pulled some double duty by creating the Gamescom multicrew demo videos, then moved straight into testing and preparing for the launch of Star Citizen 1.2, aka Social Module.
Our playtest was important because it again demonstrated the helpfulness of our backers, particularly those with a more technical or design-based aptitude. With that in mind, we’re still very keen to create our special “test group” which will assist in the nitty gritty details of playtesting changes to the Star Citizen service. This isn’t very glamorous duty; quite the opposite. But we need to test things such as network improvements, client optimizations, launcher updates, game balance changes, etc… anything that needs to hit a scaled test group or needs feedback before we roll it out.
We’re going to be announcing this in conjunction with the Issue Council this month, our brand new bug reporting system. We’ll be moving away from ticket and forum based bug reports into this official bug reporting system so that you can see and weigh in on the popularity of development issues with Star Citizen (we’re still in Alpha, after all!). This helps us as a development studio in understanding what’s important to the community.
We pulled a little side duty in helping create the Gamescom Multicrew demo videos as well (with a little help from Alex in DevOps). We hope that you enjoyed them as much as we did creating them!
We also worked with DevOps in releasing Launcher 2.0. As with any new product release, it’s not without faults, and the release unfortunately coincided with an unusually high adoption rate of Windows 10 (where most of our issues lie). But we’re seeing drastically improved download speeds and success rates, and we’ll continue working with DevOps to make this a completely seamless experience.
But our crown jewel for everyone at Cloud Imperium Games this month was rolling out the Social Module. What a great moment for backers, for the CIG team, for everyone involved! Game Support was heavily involved by organizing the testing groups for each phase of the rollout, as well as communicating with players along the way. We had to admit that seeing players run through the elevator for the first time was one of the coolest moments ever.
For September, we’ve got some cleanup to do. So much of our time was taken on other tasks that we’ve got a bit of a ticket backlog to work through, though we will be making the transition of bug reports into Issue Council. Once caught up, we’ll refocus our efforts towards getting Arena Commander 2.0 tested and out the door.
IT/Operations
GamesCom was incredible! Thanks to all the community members who volunteered to help us and it was especially great seeing everyone at the E-werk event and on the show floor. This month the IT department put a primary focus on preparing for the amazing content we wanted to show at GamesCom and the new build systems.
GamesCom work began early in the month with Paul joining Hassan & Kyle in our UK office to help with setup, testing, and tuning of 24 demo machines which would be used in Cologne. On site, Paul and Hassan met with some of our super supportive backers and many others during the week-long event. While this was going on, the development team keeps on working. IT continued to work closely with DevOps on the new build system and optimizing performance of other key systems supporting the delivery of assets throughout the company. At some points working around the clock we managed to keep up with everything even though a good portion of our team was deployed to Germany.
It seems like we’re always reporting on performance improvements or the need for more speed. And it seems as if the more performance we find the more this incredible project requires of us. This month we were especially hard on our network infrastructure. We moved more builds and aggregate data across the wires than we’ve moved in the last three months combined. There’s just more of everything; more publishes to PTU and live service, more patches, more builds in general and more builds to replicate to each studio, more testing, more automation, just more and it’s exciting to see all this progress. By the time GamesCom got started we had pushed well beyond the capabilities of our core network infrastructure and it became noticeable to the company. Considering everything else going on, we couldn’t risk taking anything down and waiting for parts was out of the question as well. Mike “Sniper” Pickett quickly identified the hardest hit areas in our network and designed an overhaul of both our virtual and physical environments in the Texas office which increased our capacity and redundancy (in delivery terms, that’s a good thing – it means that some glitches that would otherwise crash your session have backup behind them and so you wouldn’t experience an interruption in service) by a factor of 2x without the need for additional hardware. This substantial upgrade was also done without downtime which is just how we like it.
August was a super exciting month and we can’t wait for what comes next. We’re preparing for Citizencon already and looking forward to meeting more of the community there.
Dev Ops
This month the DevOps team has been focusing on getting the new build system online and used by QA and developers. In addition we started work on the enormous amount of Automation testing that the company needs as a force multiplier, continuing to improve the Launcher, and rolled out a patch and several hotfixes to the live environment. We also lent a hand in supporting the roll out of all the GamesCom demo builds and helping create a Multicrew teaser video.
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As part of the new build server roll out we have built a webpage visualizer to give developers an easy way to view and kick off builds. In addition work has been continuing on automatic integration/merge code to help us manage the changes between our many development branches. This ensures that builds have all the most up to date, compatible, changes in the builds we roll out to the public.
Work has continued on improving the game launcher; handling more error cases, improving the logging, adding analytic stats reporting, and of course attempting to eke out more speed for downloads. Expect another launcher patch iteration soon with more improvements.
For GamesCom the team split up into shifts to work with the IT team 24hrs a day for the week of the convention making sure builds and digital media being created were handed off to our support staff on the ground at GameCom. Though we ended the week quite exhausted, I think everyone was happy to see the fruits of the company’s labor in front of the backers. Plus we drank a bunch on that Friday to relax and enjoy the show.
The team has also been working quite closely with the server team looking at the performance of our Game Servers, General Instance Manager, and other Universe Services. This has led to creating and rolling out 12 hotfixes to improve crashes, memory leaks, deadlocks and performance over the last few weeks. In addition, work on setting up the game database has begun in earnest, and a couple of engineers from the DevOps team have already begun writing code for the interface layer to the eventual Persistence Server.
Finally, we began our four month automation project. This project will encompass work from the DevOps team in Germany as well as in Austin, and will cover the four major areas of automation; Perforce Tools, Game Client, Game Server, and Build Server. While we are still at the very beginning of this effort, the road map we have outlined promises to help QA reduce monotonous repetitive testing, ensure that checkins into the branches will not crash the build before they go in, enable engineers to see server load and performance without the need to organize massive playtests, and will fire off an array of build checks at the end of the build creation process. Obviously, the gritty part is getting all the coding done and then bug free!
Looking Ahead
As with every month here at CIG we’re working each and every day to bring you the next iterations of the Social Module and push onward towards the Persistent Universe proper. Select developers across the project are working on bug fixing for a subsequent patch to 1.2.0, but the majority of us have shifted focus to working towards the release of Social Module v1. Social Module v0 saw the release of features like Multiplayer functionality on our first planetside landing zone (ArcCorp’s Area18), the Chat System, and Emotes. Now that we’ve got some core backend technology as a foundation, we can start to build upon it to make the BDSSE!
Some features that are in active development at this present moment include improving the chat interface and functionality (hooray for private channels!), adding at LEAST 25 more emotes to choose from (now with audio!), updating the shop facades to make them absolutely unmistakable from across the Area18 courtyard, and something to do with…buggies??
We know you guys are looking forward to seeing the next landing zone, Levski in the Nyx system, and we are too! Levski is in Final Art stages and now we are looking at scheduling in time for optimization using some new tech called the Compound Render Node. This will significantly increase performance across all environments and will allow them to run smooth as butter while traipsing around these amazing locales.
It’s always scary to put something that you’ve worked so hard on out in the hands of people to render their judgment. We were hoping that you guys would like what we delivered, and the positive feedback has been overwhelming. Thank you for all of your support, we can’t wait to knock off your socks once again in the near future!
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Greetings Citizens,
As always, plenty of work happened in Manchester this month! Members of the team here were thrilled to meet thousands of Citizens live at Gamescom, and we’re excited about introducing you to the entire team at Citizencon in October! Meanwhile, here’s the department-by-department review of what we did in August…
Engineering
Another busy month has passed in the F42 coding department, with the start of the month seeing both the release of 1.1.6 and the Gamescom live demo we’ve been hammering away at our keyboards to help fix up some of the core large-world and multi-crew ship features that went on show, as well as the usual bug smashing! The features included work on the Quantum-drive mechanic which has been amazing to see in action as it not only looks cool but allows us to actually traverse the new large 64bit worlds we’ve created in a reasonable time. A highlight Q-Drive bug that got fixed along the way was your ship losing control at distances a long way from the origin, it turns out this was due to Cry Engine’s default ocean water level of z = -1000000 being now easily within reach, which would subsequently flood your engine!
Work has also been done towards various game modules. The FPS visor now includes new hit and grenade proximity warning markers and has had polish on its health display and ammo counter. There’s been fixes on med-packs, doors and ladders; nice touches for example include the ability to change speed on a ladder and new animations for holstering your weapon as you mount them to smooth and speed up transitions on to them. While a lot of FPS work happens at other studios, Foundry 42 does take some of that development onto its own plate, particularly for things that are integral to the Squadron 42 experience that we hope to deliver. Squadron 42 has seen work started on the Sidling (wall shuffling) mechanic as well as further work on looting, save game and security networks, plus the conversation system has started hooking in audio data that was previously recorded on the live shoot. Ships-wise we’ve started looking at a new ship-scanning feature that allows you to scan a targeted ship and over number of seconds it will gather information about each of the ship’s components (weapons, shields, cargo, engines, etc) and then allow you to cycle through that info.
More time is now being allocated towards cleaning up pre-existing in-game systems, we now have a “Clean-up Friday” that sees us look at tasks such as moving our in-game item .xmls into our new DataForge tool .xml format, which makes them easier to edit and validate going forwards. It also covers refactoring of systems such as the input backend, which thanks to this can now support an unlimited number of connected joysticks, all with separate keybindings. It also sees the cleaning up of stale code that we no longer use and the fixing of non-game breaking errors and warnings in our logs, this improves the overall state of the game as well as our overall visibility on what is wrong under the hood, thus speeding up our workflow for future releases.
Animation
The team has continued working on some of the AI systemic cover animations now that we’re fully moved over to the v7 rig. As well as that we have synced up with our Frankfurt team on the first batch of performance capture animations and started making progress getting them synced up with the audio tracks and engine ready. Our resident tech animator has been making good progress in getting facial animation in to game and we’re really looking forward to completing some vignettes and seeing it all come together for the first time. The new few weeks we’ll be busy supporting the teams’ needs for Citizencon.
Graphics
“This month the graphics team have mainly been focussed on character shaders, the first of which is a new shader we’ve developed for clothing, armour, items and weapons. Rather than uniquely baking individual textures for every asset, this shader uses a pool of generic textures for base materials such as steel/leather/denim, and combines these in the shader to determine the properties of the surface. This allows us to support quickly change the properties of an object without having to modify the underlying textures, which is a huge benefit for customising and items in the PU. It also allows us to support dynamic changes such as dirt or damage building up over time, or allowing the art director to tweak the look of say a specific metals from one manufacturer without having to find all the items created by that manufacturer. This shader has taken some time to develop but we’re expecting it to open many possibilities in the PU in the coming months.
The other character shaders we’ve been working on relate to human skin. We’ve extended CryEngine’s skin-wrinkle technology which is used to show wrinkles and creases in the skin on certain facial poses, and we now support four times as many wrinkle-poses as before. We’ve also added support for blood-flow maps, which capture unique colour variations on the skin on certain facial poses caused by changing blood-flow and the stretching and compression of the skin. These extensions resulting in a significant improvement in the quality and believability of our characters facial animations.
The rest of the graphics team have been investigating improvements to shadow system and continuing work on the damage system for multi-crew ships.”
Art
It’s been another whirl wind this month, starting with the glorious Gamescom demo, the team worked super hard to bring everything for the unveiling and are now pushing on with advancing the play space and areas of interest.
We have been tasked with concepting a new ship, all very exciting and Gavin Rothery is doing a Sterling job of bringing it to life (can’t say more!) Overall concept work has been focusing on picking up a lot of pieces, working out areas that have slipped through the net, redefining areas as the Design dept makes updates and lending support to cinematics in Frankfurt.
Environments
The environment team has been busy with the map for the Arena Commander 2.0 release for CitizenCon. We have three main stations with interiors whiteboxed out now, along with one planet, three moons, three smaller satellites and a set of small asteroids. We have also been taking a new Low Tech Alpha set up to greybox that will allow us to build our station interiors more sensibly and to a grander scale than originally planned. The last POI to go in will be Asteroid Gainey and its sister set of large asteroids which are currently being prototyped.
All these points of interest have gone into the new map.
Next we’ll be continuing refinement on the large world map, getting lighting, mood and atmosphere locked down for each of the three stations, along with extensive testing on the physical limits we can push for Asteroid Gainey and the large asteroids.
VFX
This month was dominated by CG tasks covering GOST, Quantum drive implementation and ship destruction. With the integration of 3.7 into game-dev we got lots of new features and lots of new bugs which have all been documented and prioritized. Adam joined the VFX team and has been tackling the Blade thrusters and weapon effects, as well as learning our tools.
A big push has gone into cleaning up all the old assets and bugs that affect the whole game with some very good progress made. Work has also begun on implementing the ship damage effects into multicrew ships using the full systemic damage system as well as getting the destruction pipeline nicely streamlined.
Props
The new pipeline has been locked down and is now being rolled out to all new props created, improving the legacy props is still in the planning phase.
After the Gamescom work was complete focus was shifted onto the upcoming CitizenCon event. The CitizenCon work covers a wide variety of props, high tech, low tech and also a lot of universal props both for environments and ships.
This work will help to prove out the new pipeline works across the board but will also help test our new production workflow that should improve communication between the different teams and ultimately mean we see more props with audio, animation and VFX seeing their way into game.
Ships
A large amount of work went into getting the Retaliator ready for the Gamescom demo, getting GOST states ready and fixing all the new issues that came to light as the systems were implemented. We have had a slight reprioritisation and the vehicle team has temporarily grown (some artists have moved from Environments) and now we are tackling a hefty bunch of work (more in next months report). The Starfarer is happily motoring along, the guys are now working on the key areas (the archetypes) that make up the ship, once we have the textures and materials for this MISC ship defined we’ll be able to roll out a lot more assets faster and also use them for the updates on the Freelancer. Some extra work has gone into the Mining Bot, it’s looking in good shape but it will be on hold for the foreseeable future until we have engineering resources to work out a four legged walker – as you can imagine, we have a lot of other areas that are higher priority but this is one ‘ship’ I’m really looking forward to see in the universe.
Idris – c’mon –what about the Idris, I hear you say – well, for those that have bought one, you can’t be disappointed with what your money is buying, this ship will be epic – it is complex, believe me, even with all the art and tech experience we have it’s still a highly challenging asset (level) but it will help define medium size craft and how they are ultimately put together.
UI
The AEGIS themed UI work took a big chunk of time, working out all the new systems needed for Multicrew and the demo, this work is ongoing, now we have a style we’ll be able to start making more and more elements to be used around the ship.
FPS UI has been worked up, slight nip and tuck – tweaking placement and the look of Health, ammo and prompt systems along with additional work to the Conversation system, Use and looting systems – it’s all coming together!
Audio
Our big push early this month was to ensure that the Gamescom demo and related material was done to the required standard. Sadly some technical issues with the live stream meant that certain peaks (literally!) didn’t quite come across as intended, but thankfully these didn’t carry over to the offline rendering of the same material so it won’t have affected most people. As well as the sound design team’s work, we also had some excellent music from Pedro Macedo Camacho in there which never fails to please.
Quickly following on from Gamescom we had a hugely productive session recording weapons sound effects, with an emphasis on interior/environmental reflections, which will benefit Squadron 42 (as well as the general FPS aspect of Star Citizen) greatly. We hope to release a dev-diary/work-in-progress video focusing on the process behind this, Stefan’s put a great video together showing what went down. Special mention to our very own Sian Crewe who also was a huge help on this session.
Talking of Squadron 42, we had a shoot to support in terms of dialogue, Phil and Bob both went down to cover that on the same day as the gun recording by sheer coincidence.
The release of 1.1.5 and subsequent releases have crystallised our requirements for coping with the sheer scale of our game, our audio coders have been ironing out some bugs before moving onto what we’re terming ‘Large World Audio’. We want to ensure we have a high detail level at a local level for players, which we don’t sacrifice for the scale and scope of the grander universe. All very modular systems-led stuff, and we’re hoping that’ll continue to improve performance within Wwise and CryEngine so that we can keep on emphasising audio detail and quality.
Otherwise we’ve been working hard on the audio for the Social Module, other FPS work, and preparing for CitizenCon. We’ve also refining how we handle audio for ships as we sincerely want to take that up a notch compared to what we’ve done already.
As always, thanks for listening and please feel free to ask any audio related questions on the Ask A Developer section of the forums!
QA
So August for UK QA was all about the whirlwind of activity that was Gamescom and the recovery process that followed its culmination.
Liam Guest, Glenn Kneale, Ben Parr and myself were lucky enough to be involved in the event and the livestream for the multicrew demo. A stressful and of course deeply satisfying experience! A big thanks to all in the community that helped us make it through the 4 days in one piece, although Red1 could have done with a towel on stage…
Meanwhile, back at base camp, Geoff Coffin, Steven Brennon and the rest of the team were holding things together superbly – Geoff earning himself MVP and the most esoterically German medal (with cows and milkmen) that I could find in Cologne. The UK QA team spent a lot of time meticulously practicing the demo – giving those of us in Germany all the pointers required to pull of the presentation – if only we’d read them!
After the event, we were able to ease up on some of the long shifts we had been doing in the build-up and get back to a semi-normal routine. That included getting stuck into supporting the ATX studio on the development of the ArcCorp social module, something which, as you can imagine, turned into something of an all-hands-on-deck sort of affair.
Roll on September – in which we’ll have two new starters in the department – much needed for testing the upcoming release of sc_alpha_2.0!”
Design
Gamescom came and went, but there is still plenty left to do that we are working frantically on to get the “Large World” demo into your hands. The designers are populating and optimizing the system (can’t really say level anymore as it is so big). We are tidying up the gameplay and working flat out to get as much functionality into the multi-crew systems as possible. We have new FPS environments that are being worked on with a view to getting them into the next major release if possible.
As I mentioned in last month’s report all the various systems that had designs that were light or out of date are still being revamped and we are making good progress on things like radar, scanning, ship signatures, the conversation system and repair.
There is also a huge push on getting as many ships as possible hangar ready by Christmas and that has meant we have had a lot of meeting and sanity checks on some of the older ships that are very much due some love. I hope when you get your hands on them that you will agree they have been worth the wait. Thanks again for the awesome support, we couldn’t do this without you!
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It’s been a busy month for the office as usual. Most of the team helped out with the Gamescom presentation to some extent. It’s really cool to see different components start coming together within the same game space, and the reactions and excitement of the fans and community helps drive us.
We’ve had a steady stream of candidates come through for our open positions, and the Frankfurt team is slowly growing to help out with various areas of Squadron 42.
We did our first segment for Around the Verse last week, we look forward shooting something each week to give everyone more insight into what we’re doing here. Below is a breakdown from the leads or directors of each department on the main things they tackled over the last month.
Engineering
During August, Frankfurt engineering has mostly been dealing with several Gamescom and post-Gamescom engine related items. As most of subsystems are moving over to the Zone system, there have been several medium and long term items being discussed, tackled and reviewed such as streaming, loading times, memory usage etc. The learnings from Gamescom with regards to large world map and multicrew are being applied to the new Large World maps that, as expected, are going to be larger and larger… other items are being worked on for Citizen Con and for the upcoming releases.
We continued with removal of legacy engine code (mostly renderer) in preparation for major engine and render refactor (long term task) to better utilize modern APIs and multi core systems. We fixed several client side (rendering) issues for arena commander. While we previously looked into memory efficiency on content side, this month we looked into client and server side memory performance of the SC code base. As a result several leaks were fixed that caused stability issues and crashes. This process is ongoing and we hope to further improve stability and optimize memory performance. There’s work items already scheduled / in progress which tie into this goal.
On the animation and physics side we developed a new method to drive ragdolls with animation data. The goal was to get accurate and fast pose matching between animation and permanently driven ragdolls. Along the way, we improved the blending in and out of ragdolls, created a new ragdoll setup with correct mass distribution of human body parts and improved the tools to setup springs and joint-limits for natural body poses. To speed up the turnaround time when building ragdolls, the whole setup of the physical parameters was moved from Maya into an XML-file.
AI
August has been a month busy with some of the low level work needed for Subsumption and the simulation of the persistent universe.
Francesco has traveled to Austin to work directly next to the Social Module team. Main focus has been the optimization of the NPC movement and the synchronization of the playing of the animations across the multiplayer infrastructure.
On the first point we have worked with Wyrmbyte to analyse the current network usage during the movement of a character, and we laid out a plan to test a first optimization for NPCs characters: compared to normal players, we can assume that the AI controlled entities are much more predictable and will require a smaller amount of data sent to correctly move into the world.
Regarding the animation synchronization, all our characters use Mannequin to organize the animation database and select the proper animation to play. This month we made a first version of an animation component that gets informed when animations are queued on the server so that the clients can also correctly queue the same Mannequin fragment, wait for the selection of the random option to happen on the server and then start the same animation with the same starting time of the server. Our implementation also takes care of state replication, so that clients that will join the game mid-way through the animation playing will also have the correct visual representation of what’s happening on the server. This implementation allows us to make full usage of Mannequin without making big changes on the current game code and that’s a big win!
And not to forget to mention, all the animation functionalities are shared between AI and player characters!
We have also started collecting requirements for the re-design of the spawning mechanics, we want to have a centralized system that can be customizable and that can take care of the all the needs of Squadron 42, which then can also be used for Arena Commander and Social Module.
We have progressed further into using the Usables system as navigation links, that will allow us to place links in the world (manually or procedurally) with specific properties to mark-up specific locations of the world where the NPCs can move using specified animations and causing specific gameplay interactions (for example an NPC needs to press the elevator button before entering it).
Last but not least we have just started to fully integrate the navigation mesh and the characters’ paths into the Zone System and we are continuing refactoring the code into more portable/combinable components (for example we isolated the functionalities for controlling the NPC aiming and looking into two separated components that can be controlled independently).
In addition to all of that, the Frankfurt office has continued coordinating the work made by Moon Collider on the improvements of the DataForge/Behavior tree connection, the new functionalities like the personal log, the task system refactoring, the improvements of the ships behavior and the ships movement.
Build System
Working on code validation, automation and tools to make dev’s life easier. Also this month we’ve been visited by Jeremy and Joseph from ATX, both part of the Dev-Ops team. Needless to say we have plenty of meeting where many things were discussed and are going to be worked on. Without going into details, build reliability, the ongoing switching towards a new build framework, paks and patch creation were discussed. Lot of work ahead.
Design Department
One of the big things at the beginning of this month for us was finishing up the setup of the interior of the Retaliator for the GamesCom demo. It was a bit of a mad rush but the final result was well worth it and the feedback and appreciation we received from you guys at the live show, Twitch and YouTube channels was amazing and humbling at the same time.
Once we finished with the Retaliator demo we sat down and tried to figure out what needs to be documented and replicated in order for all the other ship setups to go smoothly in the future. And believe me, there’s a lot of things we did not initially know as this is the first ship to unite so many of the systems we want to have in Star Citizen.
Our level design department, while still continuing to build two of the Squadron 42 levels, they are also working hard on bringing a new multiplayer game mode to life for the FPS module. The guys are working together with the programmers from Illfonic to get this ready in time for the FPS release.
On another, a bit more less exciting note, both the level and system design departments have been working on improving our recruiting pipeline and candidate testing to ensure we get the best of the available talent pool.
The work on AI and AI-building tools continues and it looks like as soon as the new character rig goes in with the new cover animation set we’ll be able to quickly adjust our behaviours to start making use of all these goodies. Right now we’re running our new AI behaviours in more of an experimental/debug mode in which we can test and prototype their thinking and their logic without being able to see much of the fruits of our labour in actual game but once the rig and the assets are in, everything should just fall into place.
Hacking and electronic warfare are also systems that were given a lot of attention this month but more details will come on that once we feel they are solid enough to show to you guys.
At the same time we are supporting our tech department with their work on prototyping planetary procedural generation. Sadly, we were informed by them that if we give away any details about this before it’s properly ready to show, we will be skinned alive. We take our programmers’ threats very seriously around here!
Cinematics
In August we were busy on multiple different fronts regarding the cinematic side of things.
Additional p-cap shoot
Our main shoot for performance capture for S42 ended beginning of July, but we went back to Imaginarium Studios in London for 2 days to wrap up capture on some crucial story elements we hadn’t shot during the main shoot due to actor availability. Can’t wait to reveal our cast to the fans out there! It was nice to be back in the volume, reunited with the crew that worked with during the months earlier in the year.
Environment Art
We were also continuing work on several cinematic environments, namely a construction dock for a capital ship that will be featured in S42’s story, a UEE Navy hospital facility and a UEE administrative building.
Our initial prototype environment for the Vanduul Kingship bridge interior was cleaned and lifted up a few notches. Still not final by any means but progress!
A smaller part of S42’s opening will actually be shown at CitizenCon in October so we are also working hard on the environment for this scene which will also be perfect to show the progress we have made in facial animation quality.
Facial Animation
We recently got the first full performance of body+face of one of our main actors working in sync in engine. Saying we are quite happy with the level of facial fidelity we can now achieve would be a tremendous understatement. Can’t wait to show it to the community at CitizenCon. Coming from earlier tests like the Constellation Commercial last year there has been a dramatic push in quality for what we will be able to show on our characters faces. Exciting!
Cinematics
High end character performance is just one part of SC’s cinematic equation though, the other big chunk will be space dogfight/cap ship battle scenes. For those we are currently planning some more tools like a spline corridor so we can film our ships fully articulated but also in a 100% repeatable and reliable way. For that our IFCS needs to be taking a backseat as we will have to be able to override ship functions to make sure that a cinematic will not break if e.g. a ship’s in-engine thruster power gets adjusted later on during development.
We also found some smaller issues related to certain cinematic tools/cameras coming from the recent move to the LargeWorldSystem but overall the move has been quite smooth. Quite a thing to see world coordinates in the millions of kilometres range in-engine, compared to just 4-8 kilometres before.
Audio
This month there was a lot of tool and pipeline work. Updated the audio asset build tools, which should improve the sound designers’ iteration times and lower the load we put on the P4 (that’s Perforce, our codebase version control system) servers, made lots of small fixes and tweaks post-3.7 integration in game-dev to get the new tools and systems to work properly with the CIG audio setup, tweaked the standard Sandbox audio tools to improve their performance when handling the large number of audio assets already accumulated by our project. Also finally started the work on moving the audio system to using listener-relative audio rendering required for the proper Large World support.
FX
This past month we have been working on the quantum drive effect for the ships. This required a fair amount of R&D before we achieved the look that was desired. We also had to work closely with the graphics programmers to create the custom shaders and backend systems required to bring it all together.
The final effect combines elements from VFX, code and audio in order to bring the quantum drive to life!
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As you will be able to read below, all my team put in double effort this month to bring you the first iteration of the Social Module. We were hyped by how the demo was received at Gamescom and this gave us the energy to push our limits so that the Social Module would hit your computers before the end of August. Working with Austin to deliver it on time was a phenomenal effort. We are really glad you can enjoy it now and we are looking forward to give you major improvement over the next couple of weeks.
UI
This month the UI team has been working hard on various features for the first release of the Social Module: The chat UI has undergone a lot of changes, for both design and art. The contact list got a couple of art upgrades, AR mode got some love, and we have been doing a lot of bug fixing.
We also flew out to meet up with our friends at Foundry 42 as well as some folks from L.A. for a UI summit. Together we have started to get a clearer overall view of all the different types of interfaces in the game, and are working to unify and improve upon the interaction design as well as the graphic design across all modules.
Design
A big month on the design side, with the coming release of Social Module V0 before the end of the month. Lots of bugs to fix and small improvements here and there to make sure your visit to ArcCorp goes without a hitch. We can’t wait for you to explore every shops and back alleys with your friends.
We are also hard at work on the Million Mile High Club, more details about it are coming soon.
Finally, we have delivered the August Subscriber Flair in your hangar: the Takuetsu Starfarer ship model.
Art
On the Environment side, we have been working on putting Area 18 together for the PU release. Mainly optimization and bug fixing.
We’ve also started polishing one of the building sets to include the new specs that will make the maps run faster and look better.
On the flair side, we’ve completed all the trophies for Gamescom and CitizenCon and as usual preparing next month flair.
Programming
August has been a very productive month here at Behaviour. We focused a lot of our efforts in the Social Module Demo that was shown at Gamescom on August 7th 2015 and then continued to polish the experience for the Live Release of the Social Module. We’ve done a lot of polish to the new In-Game Chat UI, and made it so the transition between talking on the chat and playing the game is very smooth and intuitive. We’ve also made sure that other players viewing you doing emote animation from a chat command will see the same animation as you do on your side. We’ve added a functionality that allows a player to easily switch between a few predefined Player Loadouts in his Private Hangar before going outside to meet the world.
Speaking of Area 18, we’ve worked on making sure that all interactable objects (i.e. Elevator Console, Doors) present in ArcCorp’s Area 18 work as intended in a multiplayer Environment. You’ll also be able to appreciate the work we did regarding the Augmented Reality (AR) functionality of the mobiGlas. We’ve optimized the way we detect AR-enabled objects and also the way the system will choose to display AR information on screen. This is also valid for when looking at other players; you’ll now be able to see the name of the players you are playing/chatting with.
We’ve added more UI feedback in the Transport Elevator Console to inform players of the status of the transition between two different areas. We’ve also added a search functionality to the In-Game Contact List and fixed some existing Issues with adding and removing contacts. We’ve also reworked the way we integrate Loading Screens into our game so that we can quickly add new Loading Screen Art per Level in the future.
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What’s up mah Citizens?! Coming straight outta Denver, it’s the monthly IllFonic studio report! I’m sure you all have probably heard the news, that the team here has been scaled back as Star Marine transitions to be internally developed at CIG. This is true, and was always the plan. However, we do still have a smaller, lighter team working on the FPS module to help wrap things up. Read below for the nitty gritty details.
Art
On the art side, we have been making a polish pass on each of the FPS weapon based on feedback from Chris and the Art Directors at CIG. We have also been creating clean and dirty version materials of each weapon. This will be used to show wear and tear on a weapon as it ages and sees some heavy usage.
Animation
The animators spent most of the month cranking away on retargeting all of the FPS animations over to the new rig. They have also been re-rigging the weapons to accommodate the system change of the weapon being parented to the hand instead of the spine. New animations have also been created for juking/stepping while in a crouched state. Magazine check animations were also created to support a new reloading mechanic that will intelligently check the magazine currently in the gun against the other ones the player is carrying and either replace the mag with a fresh one or pop it back in. Lastly, they have been going over the remaining mocap data, cleaning it up, and prepping it for implementation. This includes things like vaulting, mantling, sidling, injured locomotion sets, etc…
Engineering
The engineering team has mostly been focused on fixing bugs. They also spent time on implementing the new mag check system mentioned above and creating the rules for a new game mode similar to Headquarters or King of the Hill. Over the last week or so, the majority of their time has been spent helping out CIG with the large merging process that has been going on. Taking the work from each of the different release branches, and consolidating them all back in to one.
That’s about it for this month Citizens, until next time!
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Hello and bonjour from Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in this last month:
Jump Point – The Producers
Our very own Grand Poobah, Benoit Beausejour, was featured in the August issue of Jump Point Magazine, in the “Producers” section. He and other Producers (from CIG and partner studios) were interviewed about their roles and responsibilities, challenges, and mission. Several Producers took part in this in-depth (15-page) article, so if you’re interested in learning about the inner workings of a gaming company, you should definitely check it out. Thanks to David Ladyman for putting it all together!
Starmap
This month, our main focus has been the element that we have code-named “Control Disc”, which allows you to retrieve information about a particular celestial object. Not only did we revise the design to fit smaller screen resolutions, but we also explored different animation effects on the disc itself. As complex as the Starmap project has been, the Control Disc is perhaps the most complicated element since it requires integration of WebGL, static HTML elements and the Starmap database.
Although we will continue tweaking until the very end, the current WebGL viewer looks amazing. We refined the Galaxy and System views, and developed a “console” so that we can easily adjust color and animated effects for each celestial body. Next month, we will improve the transition effects, i.e. from Galaxy to System view, and from System to System.
Work continues on the 3D animated versions of the celestial objects – for example, planets, stars and space station.
Also this month, we began discussions about the audio component of the Starmap. We would like to add some sound effects to enhance the experience, without being distracting. For those who like to browse the web in complete silence, we will also offer a toggle option.
Issue Council
We are now in the final stretch. We’ve cleared the majority of critical bugs and are now working on the FAQ and Help pages. We’re working with CIG to set a launch date. We plan to start rolling out the Issue Council in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for it in the “Community” submenu!
Community Hub
The hub is ready! Soon, it will be accessible to a select few Star Citizen members so that they can contribute some starting content to the Hub (artwork, videos, external links, podcast feeds, and livestream feeds). Once we have received some submissions, we will be ready to open it up to all Community backers. The presence of the hub on our staging servers has already spun many other ideas on how we can use this to power other parts of the community (10 FtC questions, game feedback and others).
Ship Happens
This month’s Star Citizen presentation at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, was accompanied by the sale of several limited ships, such as the Merchantman, the Reclaimer, the Carrack and many more. There was also a surprise flash sale on the website for those who could not attend the event in person. During the presentation a competition in Vanduul Swarm was announced, allowing the first 1,000 people who completed wave 18 to buy the Esperia Glaive, a reproduction of the feared Vanduul fighter. Toward the end of the month, the highly popular Vanguard Warden went back on sale, flanked by its new siblings the Sentinel (an E-War focused variant) and the Harbinger (a bomber focused variant). This sale also saw the introduction of the new Battlefield Upgrade Kits for the three variants, allowing you to hot-swap your Vanguard’s equipment between that of a Warden, Sentinel or Harbinger, to suit your next mission.
What you didn’t see
We completed the migration to Google’s GCE this month, resulting in a 20 to 25% increase in performance across our infrastructure, and also significantly reducing the monthly cost for CIG. This move is also significant in that we finally moved away from the original hosting provider that we’ve had since the original crowdfunding campaign. We’re leaving the family nest because we’re all grown up now, sniff! On the technical front, our GCE environment is fully based around “containers” (docker). This major advancement makes operating the site servers and processes more integrated and really helps in streamlining how we get code updates to production.
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Some months we find ourselves focused on two or three big features, but August was one of those months where we found ourselves doing lots of small tasks: bug fixes, feature improvements, responding to feedback from designers. They were all important and useful, but they don’t always make for exciting reading for you, the backers. So we’ll spare you the talk of merge conflicts and build configuration bugs, and stick to the cool stuff!
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An interesting piece of design work we’ve been doing is a refactoring of the Kythera perception system for characters. Now that designers have spent a reasonable amount of time building behavior trees in Kythera and using our perception system, they’ve found that they want some aspects of the perception system and the way it interacts with behaviors to work a bit differently. In particular, they want behavior trees to have more control over how AIs respond to certain events in the world such as hearing weapon fire or some unexpected noise, and to also control when AIs look for better targets and when they stick to their current one.
Right now the Kythera perception system will take in stimuli from different sources (vision, sound, and tactile events for characters; radar signatures for ships), perform calculations on whether enough stimuli have been received for an AI to have noticed something, and then pass this information through to the target selection system, which will look for the best target at any point in time. There are various parameters that each AI can set to affect how both their perception and target selection work, but from the behavior’s point of view, it is just told what the current best target is.
This setup allows for simpler behavior trees, and has worked really nicely for ships, but for characters we’ve found that the behavior trees tend to be set up quite differently from ships. In human behaviors, where the acting element is so complex and vital, more control is needed, so it’s desirable to move some of the logic of the perception system into the behaviors, even though this can make them more complicated. So we’ve been working on a design for an improved perception system that will allow behavior trees to be authored with the control that designers want to have. We’re also looking at whether we can improve ship behaviors as well by making similar changes to their behaviors, and that’s something that will be ongoing in the next few months.
Engineering
We made quite a few good improvements to ships this month, particularly with regard to improving their behaviors for Pirate Swarm. Some of the highlights are improvements to approach and retreat behaviors that better take into account max weapon range and current shield levels; changes to make AI missile usage less predictable; and some improvements to avoidance so AI are less likely to crash into other ships.
We also fixed an interesting bug where AI would sometimes behave strangely when going to fly on a spline in scripted situations such as the tutorial. We use the reported thrust values from IFCS (Intelligent Flight Control System) in order to plan out ship movement, but sometimes IFCS wasn’t fully online when we were planning, and so we weren’t working with correct values. So we added a way for a ship behavior to make sure IFCS is fully online before doing something that depends on it.
One nice change we made to character visual perception is to allow them to see things at greater than 180 degrees if desired. Our visual perception system had both a primary and a secondary vision cone, where the primary cone mimics regular vision abilities, while the secondary cone is intended to mimic peripheral vision. That means targets in the primary cone will generally be detected fast by the AI, while the secondary cone takes longer.
The problem is, AI often seem stupid when their peripheral vision is less than 180 degrees, so the obvious solution is to increase the field of view of the peripheral vision. The issue there, though, is that the primary and secondary vision cones are precisely that: cones. The mathematics of the view cones completely breaks if you try to go above 180 degrees. So to fix this, we needed to change the geometric shape that defines the vision space of an AI from a cone to a more appropriate shape when the field of view is 180 degrees or more (which is basically a sphere with a cone cut out of the back of it).
We also continued to make some improvements to the behavior tree editor in DataForge. We added the ability to now specify inputs to BT nodes as a dropdown list of predefined values when this makes sense, such as when telling a character to change to a new stance. Behavior trees can now also embed other trees within them, which allows designers to put a common piece of behavior in its own tree and then add that to their trees in multiple places as needed. As the trees get bigger and more complex, this will be invaluable for keeping them readable and avoiding duplication.
Finally, we made some great performance improvements to the Kythera Recording Server, which is the system that allows designers and programmers to record AI behavior and then play it back with detailed debug information to help figure out bugs or look for ways to improve behaviors. There is potentially a lot of debugging information that needs to be saved for this system to be useful, so we improved the system to be better at detecting what data has changed since the last update and what hasn’t, which means it can better compress the recordings. This is both good for disk space and for making it easier to export recordings to give to other developers.
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Red One, Jared. Red One, Jared. Red One, Jared…
Hey guys, Community Manager Jared “Disco Lando” Huckaby here. August was a big month for the Community Team, starting with the realization of Gamescom 2015. Just about everyone on the Community Team played a part in making this event perhaps our best yet, and it was a terrific opportunity for the staff in Santa Monica to meet the CS staff in Manchester in person for the very first time, as well as many of our European backers.
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We’d also challenged ourselves to really spruce up our live events. To this end, we undertook many initiatives such as sending the bulk of the Community Team, adding the on-site “Concierge Store” (not to be confused with Concierge backing services generally – this is special in-person functionality for live events), and improving the overall quality of the items presented to our attendees.
Our first order of business was to create a new, protracted series of collectable ship pins. Something that could be collected from each event a person goes to. Since we knew Gamescom was going to feature multi-crew predominantly, the Constellation became the logical choice for our first pin. I discovered existing artwork used for a patch series and was able to repurpose that for our needs.
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A free fly promotion had become a staple, but we wanted something more than just a card with a code. Working with Ryan Archer in Austin, we developed a foam version of the Gladius that was just as much collectable as it was a way for potential fans to discover the game. While we can’t say it “flies,” we can certainly refer to it as, “throwable.”
In years past, posters had become a Gamescom tradition, but in our efforts to increase the quality of overall presentation, we commissioned BHVR to imagine Köln, Germany in the year 2945. Working with art from Nicholas Ferrand, we designed the limited edition poster that we gave out to attendees, complete with the signatures of our studio heads and members of the Community Team.
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Coming from the community, I have an affinity for the truly great works that our fans create, and one of the finest creations is the Hunter web comic by Adi Nitisor. Working with Adi, I was able to point him in the right direction and get the necessary clearances to print up physical copies of his first issue for our attendees. Our fans truly make Star Citizen, and it seemed right to include a little piece of their work along with our own this Gamescom.
Finally, when decorating the E-Werk event space, I wanted something that would truly evoke the sense of what multi-crew gaming could look like. To that end, I worked with fan content creator FiendishFeather for nearly a month to create the giant banner that hung over the heads of our fans in the venue. Rendered entirely in the game engine, and using 100% Star Citizen Assets. Rendered as a single scene with zero compositing, it measured out at a whopping 27325×7200 at 100dpi. I have to thank Feather for trusting in me that he could do this, and that the crazy things I was asking him to do would work out. It’s just another example of how working with our fans allows us to create something greater than either of us could alone. (You can see the image in the Foundry 42 update above.)
With Gamescom we wanted to return to livestreaming. Gamescom has always been special to the history of Star Citizen thus far. To that end, Thomas Hennessy, Alyssa Delhotal and I worked to ensure that we’d have a plan in place that would address many of the issues from our past livestreams, principle of which were available bandwidth and the proper configuration and use of our in-house streaming equipment.
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Once the curtain opened, Hennessy worked the controls for the livestream and both directed and operated the switching between cameras, while I worked with the A/V company who was responsible for the camera operation, the demo switching for the presentation screen and livestream, and the audio.
After the presentation, because we know not everyone can watch it live, Hennessy and I stayed in the Crow’s Nest until 3am editing the demo segments and posting everything to YouTube as quickly as technology would allow. Challenges aside, we consider the entire event a tremendous success.
In addition to Gamescom, we continued our efforts providing an unparalleled amount of information to our backers through weekly webseries, comm-links and more. Of course, we get to do all that because of the continued contributions of our Subscribers. Thank you for enabling us to share as much content as we do, you guys are awesome, and we’ll never stop thanking you all for that. With that in mind, we started our #IMASTARCITIZEN social media initiative, with Digital Info Cards you can create for yourself at http://www.imastarcitizen.com and retro trading cards that are released every day on our Instagram account.
Finally, a special welcome to all our new backers who joined us in August. If you would like to follow our development on social media, here’s a page full of resources for everyone to enjoy.
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Howdy folks!
Jason Hutchins, here. I’m working with Disco Lando on the update this week since Ben is in Atlanta for DragonCon! Have a great time, Ben! If you’re at DragonCon this weekend, you should go check out the various Star Citizen panels and tell Ben I miss him.
The Big Merge Update
As we wrap up the staging merge this week, we go into final integrations of the Global Instance Manager that was recently deployed with the Social Module update. Some folks are going to work on this final merge step this coming weekend in order to make ready a code review based on the merge. If all goes as planned, we’ll be on a single dev stream early next week! Great news for the overall project.
To date, the CryEngine 3.7 SDK has been integrated, and the dev stream we used for both the Social Module release and FPS development have been merged into the game development stream. One of the things this has done is point out some conflicts to us, which we are finding and addressing. Many of them require a manual review, as newer is not always better when streams diverge, but we’re getting it done, and pushing every day towards putting Star Marine in your hands.
And now, because we’re talking about our First Person Shooter… BULLET POINTS! (DL Edit: I’m so sorry…)
UI:
Last week I mentioned a UI summit. That summit is over, the talking is done and the plans are made. This means that key members of the UI team are in Manchester to lock down the base UI systems that will be used all over Star Citizen – Visor (AKA Player HUD), Ship’s HUD, Diegetic screen displays, HUG and mobiGlas, they are working together to make sure all the systems integrate well and are unified.
While the UI team is looking at the work needed for the next major upcoming releases, they are also working hard to get the HUDs working properly in this pre-merge environment. Once the merge finishes, we can resolve conflicts and get back to work on the new HUD widgets needed for on-foot gameplay.
Up Next: The HUD’s integrated chat widget, and additional Radar functionality.
Engineers and Artists at BHVR are starting work on the interstitial Score Screens and LoadOut Lobbby screens for Star Marine this week.
Gameplay:
Merging staging stream to Game-Dev
Spent much of the week fixing crashes and getting a dedicated server connection to run, largely due to merge conflicts, and we’ve had tremendous success! As of today, we are now able to connect to an internal server.
Resolving merge conflicts in the stream, last hand merges should be done by EOD today, to allow for automated merges over the weekend.
Engineers are triaging FPS bugs, in general, looking at what must be fixed for launch and what improvements we can make for the next major release after that. We know you don’t want perfection right off the bat, and we also know you are going to help us find bugs we’re not seeing in our small-scale tests.
The next Game Mode that we’ll introduce for Star Marine gameplay is shelved and ready to integrate and start testing next week.
Cover system progress is being made, fixed up network syncing, other glitches, and moved it into the player’s moving state. This allows for proper transitions, smoother movements, and accurate
Start work on LH68 Gemini ballistic pistol art cleanup, added iron sights to it, other art clean up issues will continue into next week. We’ll have screenshots to share in next week’s report.
Weapons are almost all done and ready for reviews. What’s left?
Sniper VFX
A new gadget model for the Area Denial system, it is essentially an EMP claymore mine. With new VFX to match the gadgets new size. The old gadget we made was too big, so we are going to repurpose it to be another gadget with different functionality.
Working on line art for helmet interiors for the HUD, this is will continue into early next week.
Animation:
Editing the crouch to vault low mocap data.
Helping engineering identify missing assets.
Creating pistol walk slow and run fast sets from the matching stocked set.
Addressed feedback on the pistol mag check animations.
Captured video of weapon selects, deselects and reload for UK Audio team to review and sync.
Working on cleaning up sidling (AKA Front Press) left and right mocap data. Sidle and Slide, to very different motions.
Reviewing and breaking up Heavy weapon mocap data.
Fixed finger pose from re-targeted pistol idle. Finger straight until you are ready to shoot, people! Safety first.
Editing no weapon vaulting mocap data.
Editing the mantling mocap data.
Working on fall animations from vaulting.
In order to close down the animations needed for the Star Marine launch, we are systematically cleaning up all available assets, and cranking out the new assets. There’s still a big list to burn down but we have a plan and we are making good progress on it every week. We are all quite eager to get into the unified dev stream and to continue functional testing and playtests. As many people already know, these are not animations isolated to the Star Marine module, these are going to be seen in the hangars, planetside locations, and Arena Commander scenarios!
Audio
Setting up the general HDR mix this week.
Implemented sniper rifle audio assets.
Iterating on weapon reload sounds, using video reference provided by the animators at Illfonic
Music is being composed and recorded for the Star Marine simulation and its lobby and score screens. We don’t need music to ship it to you for testing of course, so that won’t hold us up.
Last Friday I mentioned that the Foundry 42 audio team did a recording session of a lot of different firearms for use in environmental audio. I’m happy to share that video with you today. Enjoy! Big thanks to Stephen Rutherford, and Matteo Cerquone at Foundry 42 in Manchester for putting this great explainer video together for us, and even bigger thanks for improving the gun sounds in the environments.
Next month, the following update will hit the game and change the POB siege system. It is the first part of a more global event system and first step of the POB rework. This was all supposed to land at the same time but recent events prompted myself and Blodo to finish this chunk of the new plugin first so it could be deployed.
The event status page is currently being polished and therefore we decided to give you some time to get acquainted with the new rules below before they are live.
POB Sieges
Steps to declare a siege:
- Head ingame with a character belonging to the sieging faction. Declare your siege with /basesiege basename. Eg.: /basesiege Long Island Station. The command will then inform you whether or not the siege request is valid. There can only be one siege active at any time on a POB.
- Fill the form in the declaration thread here. Do not forget to mention additional factions taking part in the siege if there are any.
- Wait for your siege to appear on the Event Status page. It can take up to five minutes.
- Once your siege is listed on the Event Status page, the 24h warmup phase begins. It will then be followed by a 48h attack phase for a total duration of 72h.
- Admins have the ability to cancel abusive sieges. While we certainly hope nobody will waste our time with fake sieges, the punishment for abusing the command will be ship deletion.
Warmup Phase Rules:
- The warmup is the first phase of the siege. The attackers cannot damage the base or the shield for the duration of the warmup.
- Attackers are allowed to raise the POB's shield to prevent a supplier from docking, raise does not equate to continuous fire.
Attack Phase Rules:
- The attack phase is the second phase of the seige. The attackers can now damage the base and shield.
- If the base is destroyed, a universe message will announce victory.
- If the base is not destroyed, a universe message will announce defeat. The attackers must cease the attack as soon as the message is displayed, no matter how much health is left. If the attackers wish to continue the siege, they must announce a new siege using the command and respect the new warmup phase.
Ships supplying the sieged POB can be treated as combat targets by the attackers. This applies only in the system in which the POB resides.
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Greetings Citizens,
The first release of Star Citizen’s Social Module is now available on the live server! We would like to thank the thousands of backers who helped stress test this release on the PTU early in the week; now we’re excited to make it available to everyone. You can access the complete patch notes for today’s release, Star Citizen Alpha 1.2, here.
The Social Module represents our first step into Star Citizen’s Persistent Universe. In the coming months, you will begin to see Star Citizen’s formerly-disparate modules come together into our long term vision for the game. Today, you can enter your Hangar, load up Arena Commander and take the elevator to explore ArcCorp with other players. From here, expect to see the universe expand!
Read on for word directly from Tony Zurovec, Star Citizen’s Persistent Universe Director. Tony has written an introduction to the Social Module and an outline of what’s coming next. We hope you enjoy your first steps outside your Hangar, and now we can truly say: we’ll see you in the ‘Verse!
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The Social Module
By: Tony Zurovec
Star Citizen is comprised of two fundamental pillars. Squadron 42, a single-player experience, is story-driven and linear in its progression. The Persistent Universe, on the other hand, is completely open-ended. You’ll have free reign to travel wherever you want within a huge, incredibly detailed galaxy filled with places to explore, challenging situations, an endless stream of diverse mission types, and hundreds of thousands of other players and AI characters.
The Social Module – which has been undergoing testing in the Public Test Universe for the last several days, and which will be released to the general community starting today – is the first basic component of the Persistent Universe to come online. As such, I wanted to take a few moments to explain exactly what it is, why we’re releasing it, and how it fits within the longer-term schedule of the Persistent Universe.
The Social Module allows you to select from any of half a dozen character configurations and explore the first of many planetary landing zones – ArcCorp’s Area 18 – with up to 24 other players. You can communicate with other players via a chat system, and express yourself via a variety of different emotes. An augmented reality display system allows you to view additional information about various objects in the environment, including the names of other players. A number of retail shops can be inspected, although they’re not yet open for business.
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There are three primary reasons for the existence of the Social Module. First and foremost, we wanted to open up a bit more of the Star Citizen universe to the community, and allow people to get a sense as to what some of the various cities you’ll be able to visit will look like. We also wanted to allow people to be able to gather together within the actual game and engage in real-time discussions – associating animating characters with speakers – rather than having to predominantly rely upon the message forums and the web chat, which equates to a far less personal experience.
The second major objective of the Social Module is to serve as a testing ground for a multitude of fundamental technologies. We’ll be gathering detailed information on a number of different fronts based upon what we see and using that to improve the game. The networking back-end, in particular, has advanced tremendously since the beginning of the year, and stress testing it now requires fairly large numbers of concurrent players. While we’re only exposing a small amount of actual functionality with this release, what’s going on behind the scenes is far more complex. An intricate dance of network services and systems controls everything from the way that new servers are spun up, registered, and told how to configure themselves. GIM – the Generic Instance Manager – and a host of related programs have been designed to support large numbers of simultaneous players, and determine everything from the server to which you’ll be routed to how chat messages are efficiently propagated. There have also been dramatic improvements to what I refer to as the low-latency network functionality – the code that is responsible for how efficiently information is passed between clients and the server, and which is one of the primary determinants with regard to how many players and NPCs we’ll be able to put onto a given server. Whereas only a couple of months ago fifteen players would absolutely bottleneck a server, the network is now a complete non-issue with twenty-five. Improved animation blending, interpolation, and prediction now renders characters far more smoothly, even on busy servers. All of these features have been tested internally and refined, but we’re now at the point where we need to see how things perform when exposed to a much larger audience. The really exciting thing in this area, though, is that there are still a number of major network performance optimizations in the works, such as event-based animation synchronization and more advanced dead reckoning. Needless to say we’ll be needing your help to test ever larger player counts in the not-too-distant future.
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The last major reason for the existence of the Social Module is the most important with regard to the future. It’s intended to serve as the basic foundation upon which new pieces of the Persistent Universe will be periodically unveiled. That, in turn, brings me to my final point…. What can you expect to see from the Persistent Universe going forward?
The Future
The Persistent Universe will be moving to a more frequent release schedule, with the idea being to routinely put new functionality into your hands to enjoy, provide feedback, and help us verify how well certain systems are performing. One important point to note here is that there is a lot of work involved in releasing something that’s at such an early stage in its development, as no game smoothly proceeds throughout the entire development cycle. At any given moment, there are typically a variety of systems that are in completely different states – some having only recently been started, and many being in the middle of having new functionality inserted. Locking down the code base to ensure that everything is in an acceptable state for release to the public takes considerable time and effort. Thus, there is absolutely a real cost to releasing updates. For that reason, the next half dozen or so Persistent Universe releases will be considerably more focused upon giving you exposure to new features and ensuring that what we need to get feedback upon or tested is included, and less about trying to give a truly comprehensive sense of the gameplay. To some degree, that will limit the expense of releasing more frequent versions – minimize the impact to the long-term schedule. In practice, this means that, for example, when the AI finally makes an appearance you’ll see a fair sampling of character behaviors, but the focus will be upon stress testing the underlying Subsumption, animation, and networking systems, and less about trying to give a particularly accurate sense of what a final city will truly feel like. In essence, then, you will often see some basic functionality appear before we really attempt to go “wide” with the implementation. The appearance of new features will be fairly abrupt, but the full exploitation of those systems will arrive more gradually.
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As has been noted elsewhere, Star Citizen’s code base split back in March when Star Marine – the FPS module – was targeted for release. The main development branch is called GameDev, whereas Star Marine’s was referred to as 1.2.0. Star Marine’s subsequent delay led to those two streams gradually growing apart, and a considerable delta now exists. The new back-end network service architecture was needed to ensure a smoother launch for Star Marine, and therefore all of the recent development and refinement was done in the 1.2.0 branch. This wasn’t supposed to be an issue for the Social Module because after Star Marine was launched GameDev and 1.2.0 were slated to be re-integrated, and the Social Module was to launch from there. With Star Marine’s latest postponement, though, the decision was made to flip the release dates and allow the Social Module to go out the door – something that the Persistent Universe group has been wanting to do for quite some time.
The re-integration of the two disparate branches has already started. Once that’s complete, subsequent updates to the Social Module will have access to other code that we developed earlier this year in the GameDev stream, as well as a number of major graphical and spatial partitioning optimizations done by other studios that should make Area 18 look and run quite a bit better than it already does.
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Persistence
The next major deliverable for the Persistent Universe will be called Persistence. Its namesake feature won’t generate much in the way of immediate visual rewards, but it’s an absolutely crucial part of the underlying massively multiplayer technology. It will involve everything from communicating with the web platform so that purchased items are converted into actual game items, database abstraction layers and caching functionality, integration with a new global entity ID system that will allow the seamless transition of items from one server to another, and deep integration into various parts of the game server. Ultimately, this update will enable objects to begin to retain state, which sounds simple but – in the context of a massively multiplayer game with seamless transitions between servers – is actually quite involved. Shared hangars will come online and grant you the ability to invite others back to your private hangar. You’ll be able to more easily jump into simulated games together…and eventually head out as a group into space. The Casaba Outlet store in the main Area 18 courtyard will be opened up, and you’ll see quite a few more visual upgrades to the city, especially in the realm of store facades and the main Astro Armada building. Players that previously purchased memberships in the Million Mile High Club – and their invited friends – will gain access to private lounges accessible from their hangar elevator. Additional emotes will be unveiled, with the intent being to really ramp up the variety and allow players to start to really express themselves in the way that they want. The chat system will be dramatically enhanced, with private conversations, the ability to ignore other players, and a much more robust user interface made available. The maximum player count will rise, with the goal being at least forty players in a given server instance. There’s a lot more that will be going on under the hood, including a massive update of the Hub Service that acts as the intermediary between your client application and all of the back-end services, and a considerable enhancement to the communications layer on the game servers. A lot of work will also, of course, be getting done in areas that won’t be exposed until subsequent milestones arrive.
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It is possible that Persistence will be split into two separate releases. The rationale is that once we’re back into GameDev we’ll be very close to being able to improve upon some of the basic features of the existing Social Module, and thus we might try to push an update out as soon as possible rather than wait for everything desired to be completed.
Shops
Following Persistence will come the Shopping release. It will allow a variety of items to be purchased in the Area 18 shops, including clothing so that you can begin the process of customizing your character. This update will devote considerable attention to the entirety of the shopping experience, including the augmented reality and mobiGlas interfaces, product delivery options, and how things like the medical scanner and healing apparatus in the hospital function. This release will also ensure that things like the product selection, pricing, and quantities available are connected to the appropriate back-end systems, which is a necessary step to eventually allowing such things to be impacted in real-time by the actions of players and NPCs. As will typically be the case, there will again be a lot of work expended in areas that are either improving the basic foundation – like a streamlined user interface programming architecture – or that won’t be ready for release until a bit later, such as facial customization. I’d expect a few surprises with regard to the types of things that you can purchase…and use…in Area 18 with this release.
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Subsumption
The next major update will be Subsumption, which will showcase some of the hard work that’s been going into the development of systems that will allow us to construct environments filled with intelligent NPCs going about their business and that really feels alive. We’ll be aiming to deliver a completely new environment – Nyx – with that release as well. Final Frontier will follow and enable you and your friends to accept some simple missions while planetside and then head out into space together to accomplish them. Quantum will unveil the full-blown solar system navigation map and allow easy access to any part of the current system, including cities on three other Stanton planets: Hurston, Microtech, and Crusader.
More details will be provided on these updates as they get closer, but that’s the basic roadmap for the near future. In between the major releases it’s quite possible that you’ll see smaller revisions since delivering content becomes far easier as more and more of the underlying foundation comes online. While there’s still a tremendous amount of work to do, the clouds are finally starting to part and the stars are coming into view….
This week’s Star Marine update is attached; we’re making good progress with the animation work needed to get the first release of the module finished, but as always it’s going to take time to make sure we’re doing it right. The effects of the great merge are also starting to subside; there’s plenty more work to do in that area, but we’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. What follows are the details of the work performed this past week.
The Big Merge
The staging merge to Game-Dev (from main-1.2.0 staging) began earlier this week, and a concerted effort is being made to resolve conflicts that the automated integration system finds as soon as they come up. Conflicts rarely go more than an hour before someone in ATX addresses the conflict themselves, or hits up a developer to do it. We are resolving conflicts nearly 24/7 with folks in Austin covering the weekends, and devs in the UK studio covering manual conflict resolution while the ATX team is asleep, and so on. That said, as of the time of writing we are at 5860 unmerged CLs, out of the 7718 we started with on Wednesday. Progress is being made, but if we keep the same rate we won’t be done for another 6 or 7 days. Once the merge is done, and then there will be time spent on doing a code review and getting Game-dev stable. Which would be about 3 weeks total! We’re going to have one of our engineers here do a manual merge review over the weekend, and allow for a code review during the week, with a cut off of next Friday 9/4. That means next Friday we can begin the work of making FPS work in Game-dev starting on Monday 9/7.
Todd Papy is visiting the team in Austin this week, and is continuing to direct efforts for the developers at all CIG and F42 studios from here. He’s heading to the next stop on his world tour next week, back to Santa Monica. It was great to have him here in Austin to sync up with the Social Module designers and the FPS QA team.
The QA team in Austin was largely booked up with the Social Module PTU releases this week, but they did manage to test some newly implemented features for Star Marine. The short gameplay video on the post shows a good cross-section of new features; the improved cover animation system in action, the new enemy grenade indicator, the personal barricade vfx, and a lucky explosion. Ricochets are a very real safety hazard, folks. Check your fire!
The Gameplay engineers at Illfonic are working on the objective based game mode that will replace Team Elimination. The F42 designers passed it on to them early this week, so they created the capture and scoring entities for the game rules, up to a point where they could test functionality of the systems today. We will be able to quickly enable playtest these changes as soon as the gamedev merge is complete and builds are stable.
Audio
Last week I mentioned that the Foundry 42 audio team did a recording session of a lot of different firearms for use in environmental audio. They made a video for us to review, and it does a great job of illustrating the weapon sounds and the way you can perceive them at a distance, and in different environments. Enclosed hallways, of example, sound different than wide open gallery spaces. I hope to be able to share this with you next week.
Gameplay
Gameplay changes were limited again this week, owing to both the work on the merge and the fact that we’re very happy with the progress made so far. The team worked on merging the streams and resolving merge conflicts (ongoing) and then on general Star Marine bug triage. For the new game mode, being developed now, we’ve finished work on capture object functionality and spawning rules, and the scoring system is now ready for testing.
UI
The UI team is visiting the UK studio at the moment for a global UI summit and sync-up, which includes a review of the ongoing work needed for Star Marine and the Persistent Universe. Expect to hear about the results of this summit next week!
Art
Work on the Devastator Shotgun is done, as you can see in the pictures and attached video! This work is shelved and ready to integrate once the merge is complete. Artists are now focusing on the Arclight material/decal revisions, which you can see in the work-in-progress screenshots (clean and dirty) included in this post. Artists also worked to get line art for helmet interiors for the HUD, which will continue into next week. Character art for the Lobby UI loadout screens are done and approved to add to the UI. Sent them to the UI artist to cut up to add to the Lobby Loading screens. They are static images for now, we will in a future patch, make the lobby screens more dynamic and animated. For now, we want players to know what their options look like. And as you can see, we wanted to give them some personality.
Animation
This week, the animation team finished the first pass for all animations for crouch juke steps. The team worked with an animation programmer in the UK, who helped identify some animation asset errors… now fixed! We also re-baked the right weapon bone to fix weapon orientation in the hand and re-exported all stocked/pistol files. There are not a lot of blockers on the animation side – just a need for more time to implement, test and fix. Base locomotion weapon sets are done, although they need thorough testing and another round of bug fixing. Start/stop/jukes first pass implementations are in but still need code support and tuning. Hurt locomotion sets are currently in progress, as are cover, mantling and sliding. Death animations, rag-doll clean-up and unarmed locomotion sets are also in progress. Work on EVA (Zero-G) will begin once this is complete. Other ongoing tasks include mocap cleanup for player cover animations, work on the pistol mag check animations, repairs to all animations to fix the locomotion locator and edits to the hurt walk fast, run slow and crouch mocap data.
Earlier this year, Aegis Dynamics revealed the A3G Vanguard Warden to the civilian market. Today, two additional variants previously provided to the United Empire of Earth military are now available. The Vanguard is the Empire’s premiere deep space fighter, designed for maximum crew survivability on long-duration missions. The military treats the Vanguard as a robust platform capable of being modified for any number of missions. Today we are pleased to reveal the Vanguard Sentinel and the Vanguard Harbinger, two of the most popular Vanguard configurations ever to dogfight in deep space.
The Vanguard Sentinel and Harbinger are now available as concept pledges and the Vanguard Warden is available again for a limited time. The art and design teams at Cloud Imperium Game have spent time fleshing out not only specific roles for the variants but also the functional interiors for all three ships. You can see the results of this work below, with imagery of everything from the internal escape pod on the base Warden to the new electronic warfare equipment on the Sentinel. We’re extremely proud of the work that has gone into these ships, and we’re hoping you enjoy this further look under their hoods!
OutLIVE: The Vanguard Warden
“The Vanguard Warden is the standard model, adapted from the rough-and-ready version used by the military.”
The original contract called for a ship capable of surviving a complete hull breach and up to a 33% structural loss… and time and time again, Aegis’ Vanguard has gone well beyond the letter of the law in bringing crews home!
With heavy hitting forward weapons, an enhanced weapons suite and the most advanced two-person escape pod currently available, the Vanguard Warden is a ship that’s designed to take a beating and come out on top.
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“Why take damage when you don’t have to? The Vanguard Sentinel is a ship that’s designed to fight smart instead of taking enemies had on.”
The conversion features an AR cockpit, an external e-War pod, decoy missiles and a set of EMP charges. In their military capacity, Vanguard Sentinels often provide necessary combat support for combined operations, helping to establish space superiority through so-called ‘trickster’ missions built around sowing misdirection and confusion. A lone Sentinel assigned wild weasel tasks is frequently paired with Harbinger bombers and Warden escorts for large attack missions. Working together, a mixed unit of Vanguards has been credited with confusing and rapidly eliminating ships as large as an enemy battlecruiser!Visit the Sentinel
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“Hit hard and get home alive! The Vanguard Harbinger is Earth’s standard fighter-bomber, converting the standard Warden model’s escape pod into a potent bomb bay.”
The extended range of the Vanguard and the relatively small profile mean that it can go where carrier-based planes or larger strategic bombers don’t… and then strike hard and make it back to frontier bases. With standardized parts and easy-to-change hull sections, the Vanguard Harbinger is a powerful bomber that can operate out of the roughest forward operating bases.Visit the Harbinger
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Ship sale
We are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. All of these ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game. Additionally, all decorative ‘flare’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches.
The standard model Vanguard Warden is available again for a limited time. The standard model includes two year insurance. The Vanguard Sentinel & Harbinger are being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar or to fight in Arena Commander. The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add a Vanguard poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Vanguard mini ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Life Time Insurance or these extras.
If you’d like to add one to your fleet, they’re available in the pledge store until Monday September 7th. You can also view a detail of the ship in the Tech Overview of the ship page!
Upgrade & Add-On Sale
Do you already have an Aegis Dynamics Vanguard from the previous concept sale? No problem! We have two upgrade options depending on your particular preference.
Upgrades will convert an existing Vanguard Warden into a Vanguard Sentinel or Vanguard Harbinger. The upgrade will convert your entire ship to the new variant in both appearance and specifications; essentially, you are trading in one ship for another (while preserving LTI and any other bonuses.)
A set of Battlefield Upgrade Kits are also available for those who would like to keep their older Vanguard Wardens. The upgrade kits function as in-universe part sets which convert the existing ships to the variant’s specifications. This allows you to swap between the abilities of the Warden, Sentinel or Harbinger at will! The upgrade kits exist in world similar to the interior Retaliator upgrade pods and do not change the styling of the individual ships, just the weapons and other upgrades installed.
Have another question?
We will be posting Vanguard Variant Q&A updates on Wednesday and Friday next week. You can post your questions to this thread on the forums and we will select the best we can answer.
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Last week, you read about our thrilling battle with merge conflicts, the issues that came about as a result of our merging multiple game development streams following Gamescom. This week, we have continued dealing with these merge conflicts where they appear, both in the game’s code and the assets (artwork, animations, sounds, etc.) and this has resulted in lots of broken builds to test and iterate on! Unfortunately, while that’s good for the project it’s bad for an interesting news update: dealing with the merge means we avoided adding much or testing the new features. Features are coming back online as we resolve conflicts, but we expect that the merge will continue into next week.
One thing we failed to mention about the merge is that it isn’t just having us integrate work done by different teams for Gamescom… it’s also adding an updated CryEngine SDK, CryEngine 3.7, to the Star Marine code base. There are lots of great new features in 3.7, many of which are coincidentally animation related (in addition to rendering improvements, the much hyped VR tie-ins and more.) As we said last week, it’s short term pain for long term gain!
As I mentioned last week, the merge into the GameDev stream is necessary because GameDev is the basis for Arena Commander 2.0, aka multicrew. So merging code bases doesn’t just give us extra functionality for Star Marine (though that means roughly three months of additional work we weren’t able to access before!) but also ensures that the multicrew release will have FPS and social properly integrated as part of one cohesive whole. And this whole is something truly special: the newborn Persistent Universe!
Now that the ‘bad’ news is out of the way (I should stress again that the merge was planned, and something we scheduled our work around), what follows is a rundown of what we did this week. Todd Papy and I (Jason Hutchins) have spent the week in Denver working directly with the team at Illfonic, and directing efforts from the developers at all CIG and F42 studios. QA in Austin gave us a comprehensive play through of the Free Play and Team Elimination gameplay modes so we could review everything that needs to be presented to the player via interstitial UI screens. When we implemented the Free Play mode, we rushed it out to internal playtest without polishing up all of the screens, countdowns, score screens, final results. That polish has continued to the present. QA also did a thorough check of all the level geometry, art, and collision proxies to see if there are any places that don’t allow you to move through or shoot though them. They found a few, and we’ll start working on them next week.
As I mentioned last week, Todd was working with the designers at F42 on the new objective game mode to replace Team Elimination. We have a design fleshed out this week, it will require some minor changes to the level, some custom UI and some gameplay engineering support. We have broken down the new2 mode into tasks and have started some aspects of this work this week. I’d love to tell you more, but I know that it’s going to change as we get the system online and prove it out. So let’s treat that as a surprise for a future post, when the sausage looks more like… sausage!
At this point, we have a full feature list for the Star Marine launch and we’re doing a great job of fighting off the monster known as feature creep as we play and tweak it. It’s extremely easy to say ‘we should add this! and that! And that!’ as we play, and much of what we imagine today will make it into the game someday… but we know that doing it now will slow down the release and impact other areas of development. So we have to stay strong! The remaining Star Marine features have been tasked out, devs are assigned to them, and we’re burning the tasks down as fast as we are able, considering the necessary merge chaos.
Let’s take a look at the individual disciplines. Please note that I have not bothered calling out the blockers by discipline this week, as they are largely unchanged from last week. And the biggest blocker is of course the merge itself that I already mentioned!
Audio
Last week the Foundry 42 audio team did a recording session of a lot of different firearms for use in environmental audio. This includes weapons firing in appropriate spaces and also a varying distances. This will be used for positional audio, and later for ambient audio in the world. This will likely take at least a week to integrate into the game. They also started testing their implementation of bullet and laser crack-bys
Gameplay
On the gameplay side we switched over to an intermediate staging stream to work during the merge. Think of it as an operating room for a video game where we can resolve merge conflicts, triage bugs and address issues without breaking anything too important. Our first fix was to a spawning issue, which meant that we could once again play in the staging stream build. We met to discuss the weapons component design system. Want sight options? So do we. Customization is a very complex topic, so we’re iterating on the design to make sure we have a good system for hard, meaningful choices to make AND good ways to personalize your guns with enough variety for our big, living universe (that is to say, the system needs to be something other than giving you the option to continually make your gun better; there need to be checks and balances.) Programmers are currently looking at issues with cover animation logic and a bug in which some weapons are not being properly zeroed at 50 yards (that’s actually a mix of code and art issues.)
UI
On the UI side, we conducted a comprehensive review feedback session about the FPS HUD. Design has worked to unify tutorial hints and action prompts on the HUD and we’ve been tw eaking the health paper doll display, ammo display and the hit indicators. The rework of the ammo counter has finished and we resolved an issue in which some HUDs weren’t displaying a blood loss warning (not what you want happening in the thick of combat!) We also submitted the code for the grenade UI indicator and the UI context component to hold them; we’re eagerly anticipating feedback on these.
We also began investigating a problem with match timers displaying in two places in the HUD (at least they showed the same time!) and the UI team is meeting with the audio team to get in sync on matching sounds to the interface. Last, we’re happy to report that the Star Marine UI team is prepping for a wider UI summit taking place in the UK next week. There, we’ll sync up on the ongoing work needed for both Star Marine and future Persitent Universe modules.
Art
The art team conducted polish edits and tweaks to the Devastator Shotgun; you can see some artwork attached to this post. There was also work on the Sniper Rifle’s ADS and the ability to have multiple zoom levels. We identified a problem that requires code support for a fix (and is a good example of what these merges are like): the CryEngine SDK zooms everything when you zoom in ADS. We want to do a much more realistic simulation, so the engineers will need to do a little work under the hood. There was also work on line art for the helmet interiors for the HUD and character art for the lobby UI loadout screens (in progress, not yet finished.)
Animation
Animation! As you know, there’s a lot of work to do, but we are having fun. All animators have now switched over to the main Game-Dev stream. Work has begun on crouch juke animations and we’ve started addressing feedback for the stocked magazine check animation and hooking up vent LODs. Then, there’s the cool new stuff: animators began editing the hurt locomotion, the stocked cover and the ledge mantle straight out of the mocap data!
Animation Blockers
The most important news here is that our animation retarget, now finished, took LESS time than expected (we had estimated it might take as long as two months… and it was done in two weeks!) A first for Star Marine, surely! Burning down those 3000+ animations needed for launch. As I implied, retargets are finished… and as you read above we are on to cutting up the NEW mocap items that are on that list. Again, it’s a big task and animators and engineers from all studios are working on it.
Let me go ahead and warn you that the proxy testing video below is extremely short… but I think it’s an interesting look at some of the iterative development we’re doing!
As you have certainly noticed, two smuggling satellites belonging to the Kusari update arrived early. We'll work with that!
Blood Dragon players (BD|, ]bd[, etc), consider starting roleplay leading to your presence on Tomioka.
GMG players (GMG, RG, etc) consider starting roleplay leading your presence on Kurile.
I insist on the starting part, when you reach a point where you'll actually be interacting with the planet/area, don't do it in your corner and get in touch with the other factions involved in these changes so they too can benefit from the roleplay surrounding it.
This is the first of several in a series of modular updates, which are aimed at fixing storyline stagnation and system bloat. Gallia, which was a fair bit too large, has been reduced to roughly 3/5 its former size. Its factions have all been progressed and many have (or will have) interesting new opportunities to discover.
System Changes
Anjou, Artois, Berry, Corse, Franche-Comte, Lewis, Savoie, and Tau-39 have been removed via retcon. Their base entries have been moved, reused, or recycled in various locations. Maine was also removed, but not by retcon. Instead, one of the stars began displaying signs of going supernova, so the system was evacuated and the gate in Picardy sealed.
The Languedoc-Dauphine jump hole connection was removed in an attempt to create more of a bottleneck at the jump gate. Tau-44 and Provence were linked via jump hole, which will serve as an alternative smuggling route and possibly an avenue for the Council to strike Gallia from the Taus.
Lyonnais joins Lorraine as part of Gallia that was split off when the Council took full control of Champagne. The two systems are well-defended by the local GRN fleets, but lawful traders have to take risks to travel to the core of Gallia.
Battleship Carcasonne of the Royal Navy is now stationed in the Magellan system, guarding the Leeds jump hole.
Faction Changes
As there were too many faction options for players, it caused to thin of a spread across them all. Two factions were therefore written off (not retconned), as they were the factions with the smallest member base.
Solar Engineering was forcibly merged by the Gallic Crown; its technology and manufacturing side went into EFL Oil and Machinery as a subsidiary, whereas Solar's own former subsidiary of Bouvet Space Entertainment was sold to IDF Shipping. EFL Oil and Machinery's ID has received the Solar Engineering ID's old clause that allows them to target Ageira and Unione Corse.
The Gallic Junkers, having long earned the ire of the Council, Maquis, and Unione Corse, were attacked by the forces of all three (but primarily the Maquis). They were forced to abandon some bases and sell others, but ultimately, the faction disbanded. Rumor has it that the Brigands are looking to take up the Gallic Junkers' old ties with the Outcasts and Cardamine, but that might put them at odds with the Council and Corse.
Battleship Oblique and most of its battlegroup have defected to the Council! They're now working a joint operation with the Crayter Republic to secure the system while the main fleets of the GRN are attacking Bretonia and Liberty.
Base Changes
Many bases from the removed systems were kept, either spread across Gallia or redistributed elsewhere throughout Sirius. Where, precisely? That's for you to discover. Also, many of the Space Colonies and Residences that were not GRP IFF have been changed to that. The Dev Team is aware that base bloat might be an issue in some locations, and we plan to look into that for the next series of updates.
Thanks
-- development oversight, system modifications
-- system modifications
-- development planning, development coordination, wrote 3 infocards
-- key input regarding changes, wrote 5 infocards
-- additional input regarding changes
-- additional input regarding changes, wrote 1 infocard
-- additional input regarding changes
-- additional input regarding changes
-- additional input regarding changes
-- minor input regarding changes
-- minor input regarding changes
-- minor input regarding changes, wrote 1 infocard
-- minor input regarding changes
-- minor input regarding changes, wrote 3 infocards
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Armed with 6 Standard Cruiser Turrets, 4 Heavy Cruiser Turrets, 2 Standard Battleship Turrets and 1 Light Battleship Turret, this new design from the Hellfire Legion is bound to cause trouble to the Scyllas in the neighborhood. As written in the Kitty Update, Hellfire indies will be able to fly this vessel in their ZOI.
Various modifications
- Repair guns are nearing completion, they will be made available for purchase later this month.
- Lots of economy modifications, ask Xoria about it.
- Yaren now belongs to The Core. Equipment for sale has been adjusted accordingly.
- Dabadoru now belongs to The Order. Equipment for sale has been adjusted accordingly.
- Connecticut's minefield has been moved further away to the edge of the system.
- Wraith's turret hardpoint has been moved to the front of the ship. Done by
- Fixed several projectile effects mismatchs. Done by
- Omicron Zeta is now about 33% smaller.
- Replaced the Havoc model with the new model from .
- "Experimental" AI Drone rebalance. I have no idea what it is so ask .
- Lhotse, Insurgent, Sunrider, Manta and Sutinga have been rebalanced. Ask .
Today we’d like to give you a more in-depth peak behind the curtain at the sometimes dirty and confusing aspects of game development. The week after a major demo like Gamescom is always hectic and fraught with issues. When we make demos like that we lock down development streams so that we can focus on stability and last minute fixes. When we unlock the streams and merge changes back into our development streams… things break, builds break, people break (just kidding about that last one; the Gamescom demo energized us all!)
This week was no exception, and is in fact a little worse for wear because of 3 distinct demo branches from Gamescom, as well as a live release of AC patch 1.1.6. So, most of this week was administrative code clean up and getting things back into shape to make regular builds and regular playtests with the developers. The UK team got one good playtest in this week, so for the most part we were focused on fixing broken things that had been fine the week before.
Moving forward, we have finished the big Gamescom merge this week and are going into next week starting a staging merge in order to get the FPS, PU, and AC modules back into one development stream. We expect that we will be continuing to grapple with these challenges through next week. While these ‘growing pains’ may slow us down, they ultimately will allow us to make faster and better progress in the future.
Todd Papy, the FPS design director from F42 in Frankfurt is at the Illfonic studio this week to work with the designers and engineers on some key gameplay features. Jason Hutchins, the Senior Producer from ATX Austin will be joining Todd at Illfonic next week as well, to work on the upcoming release plans and the changes we want to make to a new game mode we will release on the Gold Horizon map. Expect more info on that next week!
Here’s what we did this week, and what we’ll be working on into next week.
Gameplay
Fixes were the order of the day this week, largely because of issues caused in the merge. Many of these were specific to weapons: grenades not blowing up when you’re killed while cooking them, magazines not re-attaching to weapons after reloading, magazines swapping not appearing visually and an issue with the Arclight (laser pistol) battery display not working when a second client joins (likely because of ongoing network optimization work.) All resolved now! Other fixes included a default weapon selection bug, an issue with prone movement breaking with ADS, a crash when being killed during a reload and an issue with the ragdoll not playing after being killed (players would just stand back up!)
Beyond fixes, we worked on cover tweaks thanks to feedback provided by Todd Papy during his time at the Illfonic office, improving interaction with ammo crates (this had become inconsistent, likely due to the merge) and implementing a v7 loadout for game-dev so animators can test their new re-target work. We also kicked off work on the slide mechanic, now being re-implemented.
There was a good focus on the P4AR, with implementation, testing and tweaking of the selective fire mode (single, burst, auto) happening this week. This included work on the UI display and its respective text. We also added per-stance overrides for weapons positioning and investigated an issue with gadgets that was likely caused by the merge. Cleanup was performed on fall damage, and we generated a graph so that designers can make sense of the formula for future tweaking. The team fixed a bug that was allowing players to switch fire modes while firing, and re-enabled turn-in-place for remote clients. We deprecated a custom hit reaction RMI so that we can enable a different version. This addressed a bug with hit reactions not playing on clients (only on the server) which is now fixed.
Gameplay Blockers:
The Audio team in the UK did a LOT of work on the Gamescom demo over the last few months, so are getting back in sync with them to make sure we have support for FPS weapons, HUDs, hit indications, crack-bys, ricochets, other necessary Foley and ambient audio to make the game feel alive and responsive.
Network optimization, server stability, and general bug fixing are needed.
We’ll be working to integrate some engineers at F42 with the coders at Illfonic over the next weeks to give this the attention it needs.
Ladders. While they are more user friendly, there are still edge cases that we are tracking down.
UI Blockers
There isn’t much to report this week, save that several things that we had working last week were broken because of the integration. We’re fixing those up so we can get back to new UI development!
Art
Our artists, who were less impacted by the stream merge, continued their weapons work in earnest. They addressed material changes on the P4AR (pictured last week) and finished updates to the Devastator D12. Last week you saw an image of the D12 that had some glowing goo in the magazine. The goo is gone, and we’ve made some other changes to the art; check it out in this post! We also started making changes to the sniper rifle based on feedback, and you can see the latest version in this post. The environment team at Illfonic is ramping down their work on Gold Horizon for the FPS release; the remaining tasks include exporting props with collision updates and cleaning up scene files for handoff to the Foundry 42 team that will be one of those building future modules for Squadron 42.
Animation
The animation team created some new temporary animations to allow for cover tweaks, necessary this week so we could work with Todd Papy as a proof of concept. These included smaller steps when shifting left, right and back and a step out and hip fire. We changed all weapon pivot points to match up with the right hand parenting and started a magazine check animation for the new reload mechanics (we’re implementing a tactical reload with one in the chamber versus emergency reload of an empty gun.) We conducted a review of the new mocap data and started a fix for vent interaction animations which were having issues.
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The big news, of course, is that we started retargeting all FPS animations from the v5 rig to the v7 rig, which began this week. This included creating a file for retargeting pistol animations, exporting all CryEngine animation files, re-rigging the microwave cannon for retargeting, retargeting the pistol set (exported and checked in!) and retargeting the stocked set. Back in Austin, Tech Director Sean Tracy and animation lead Bryan Brewer lent a hand with the No Weapons animation set for v7 this week.
The big question is when we will make the company wide switch from the old rig models to the new ones. That will, as I mentioned earlier cause some legacy assets and scenes to break. This is a very good thing, as we’ll be on the new (albeit not thoroughly tested) rig for all modules. We’ve been developing on different rigs for most of this year. This is an exciting switch! Things will break, but we’ll take the hit now and make the fixes so we can move forward.
Animation Blockers
Remember those 3000+ animations we mentioned last week? We are just now starting to burn those down. Retargets are largely finished, now we are on to the NEW stuff on that list. Again, it’s a big task and animators and engineers from all studios are working on it.
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The first Retaliator module concepts are here, and we know you’ve got questions about this new system! These questions were chosen from the Retaliator Module Q&A thread on the forums. Enjoy!
Question & Answer
What happens to the old Retaliator? Does it stay as a solid block of torpedo only ship or will it be changed to modular base variant with torpedo bays?
Existing Retaliator pilots do not need to purchase another ship! Your current Retaliator is now equivalent to the base with two torpedo bays installed. You can purchase separate modules this week to swap onto your existing ship.
Will the Retaliator have variants in addition to the modules or does the modular system replace variants?
This will depend on the ship. Some will continue to have variants while some will have a single base with modular portions (think of how real world aircraft might have the ability to be retrofitted for different roles, while others might have several different types manufactured depending on missions.) As a rule of thumb, military ships are more likely to have traditional variants than civilian ones.
We do not currently plan additional Retaliator variants, although they’re possible. It’s likely the UEE has built several different hulls over the year! (Similar to how there’s a B-17D, E, F, G and so on with various improvements/changes.)
How will the Retaliator be without any modules installed, aka the unladen hull? Will it just be two holes in the hull?
A Retaliator without modules installed would have large portions of the interior inaccessible.
Will all ships have modules, if not which ships will get modules?
No! It will vary from ship to ship; many will have individual components you change and only some will be specifically designed to swap out modules. We can’t give you the entire rundown today, but we will go ahead and announce that the Endeavor platform is designed around a similar system of modules that change based on role.
Will these modules fit in other ships of relative size in the future?
Potentially! We imagine using them in a larger, interconnected system in the future. These will likely follow logical rules in the game universe: Aegis might build other ships to use the same modules, while Anvil ships would have their own process. Imagine, for instance, a future medium bomber similar to the Retaliator that might let you choose only one of these modules instead of two!
How is insurance handled on a per module basis? Will we always have to insure modules separate from the base vessel?
The insurance on the modules and the base ship are separate. This is intended to keep the original, torpedo-bomber version of the Retaliator unique: having one is the only way to get LTI on the bomb-related modules.
Does the installation of modules change the outside look of the hull based on the modules installed?
This will vary from ship to ship; modules will significantly alter the Endeavor, while the change to the Retaliator will usually be negligible.
What situations can the dropship module be used in? Or what was the idea of CIG when creating them?
This will tie into the gameplay we intend to introduce with Star Marine! We envision a future where there will be a need to deliver marines to hot landing zones or for boarding larger ships.
Why are front and aft modules with identical function not simply one module that fit in both locations?
As noted above, we see these modules as the first step to a larger system. Having two smaller modules in a single ship gives you much more customizability. Sure, you can build a pure cargo Retaliator or a pure living version… but you can also mix and match to perform multiple roles. As the number of ships that use modules increases and the number of options available goes up, this will allow for significantly more gameplay.
Will we be able to begin installing these modules in our ship with AC 2.0? If not when do you expect us to be able to do that roughly?
Modules will likely start coming online ‘in game’ after Arena Commander 2.0 launches; we do not have a specific date or patch to announce yet.
On modules in general: Will modules for all the possible jobs/roles in Star Citizen be available for all ships? Or will it be decided that perhaps a Retaliator can’t be used for mining or a Cutlass can’t be used for exploration? I’ve used arbitrary examples of course!
No, there will always be limitations – we don’t see every ship as being able to fulfill every role (and especially, we don’t see every hull as being effective for every task.) We do have a mining module in development for the Retaliator, but because of the nature of the ship it would be significantly less useful than the technology on a dedicated ship like the Orion.
How will the changing of the modules work, will there be a system in your hangar that does automatically, or is this something you have to manually install with a crane.
This will be done using a future version of the holotable, similar to how guns, shields and other components are changed.
What are the benefits of “living space”? Is it cosmetic as well as functional? (such as being able to transport passengers?) Or mostly cosmetic?
Living space will let you use the Retaliator as a personal transport and tie into the larger passenger system discussed during the Starliner rollout… but in addition to that, it’s intended to speak towards personal customization, a place you can set up as your own much like you will your Hangar.
Will the modules be added to the EA REC store once they are Arena Commander ready?
Yes, where appropriate (there likely won’t be a good reason to have a non-combat Retaliator immediately, but that will change as we begin prototyping other systems live.)
Will there be an option to reduce the needed crew for the Tali (e.g. swapping the turrets with something else, but also keeping some punch)?
Yes, but this type of customization would take place using the existing systems: you can remove turrets, guns, etc. without changing these modules.
The current base model Retaliator comes with LTI, a hangar, a model, and the poster. Will the original Retaliators have these items retroactively added to them as well?
Yes, we will grant the model and poster to all backers who purchase an empty Retaliator hull.
