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Greetings Citizens,
On the fence about Star Citizen? Why not give it a try and see what we’re building! For the next week, we’re enable Free Fly access to all accounts… which means that anyone can jump in to Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.2 today! The Free Fly event gives everyone access to three unique parts of the Star Citizen experience:
Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.2 – Also known as Crusader or the “mini-PU,” this is the nucleus of the world we’re building! Featuring multiple space stations and environments, scripted missions, places to explore and more, Alpha 2.1.2 is your first look at a much larger universe!
Arena Commander – Arena Commander is a ‘game within a game’ that we’ve used to develop our flight mechanics and ship combat balance. Take on human opponents or an AI swarm in single seat fighter.
Social Module – Interact with other players while you explore our first landing zone, ArcCorp! The Social Module is intended as a starting point for our world building,
You can register for an account here to get started. If you already have an account from a previous Free Fly, you’re all set! Just log in via the Star Citizen launcher. This is the first Free Fly that includes Crusader, so there’s more to explore than ever before. Free Fly accounts will have access to the Hornet F7C military fighter, the Aurora LN starter and the Mustang Delta interceptor.
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We’ve issued a minor patch for Star Citizen Alpha 2.1 today, focusing on a set of specific bug fixes identified during testing. Thank you as always to our talented backers who have helped us drill down on and now eliminate these bugs! You can find a complete list of changes here.
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At the December livestream, we announced that Squadron 42 and Star Citizen will be split into two separate packages in the near future. To update on this: the split will occur on February 14th. Squadron 42 will be available as either a stand alone game or an optional addon for Star Citizen rather than be included by default. If you want to lock in both games for the lowest possible price, consider pledging before this deadline. You can learn more about Squadron 42, our thrilling single-player adventure, here.
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Tokens allowing backers to use store credit to unmelt a single ship have been distributed to every paid account. Please note that these are single-use tokens that can be applied to only one “unmelt.” Additional tokens will be attributed once every quarter (three months) to allow additional unmelts in the future. Tokens do not stack, however, so be sure you use this one before the next distribution! You can access the buy-back page (while logged in) here.
Please note: Customer Service is not able to manually unmelt any additional ships. Please do not submit tickets with this request, as the team will be unable to assist you.
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Want a Xi’an Scout? The final concept sale ends on Monday, February 1st! You can learn more about the Scout, which will be one of the next ships added to Crusader, here().
Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches. Ship types sold during limited sales will be available to earn in the finished game.
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Dismantling the Dark Age
The dawn of the 29th century saw Humanity struggling to redefine itself. For over two hundred years, the dynastic and despotic Messer family ruled the UEE and its people with a callous authority. The pro-Messer propaganda machine crushed dissenting voices and opinions, keeping legitimate facts that might hurt the regime from coming to light.
This information dark age was brought to an end when the Messer regime finally fell in 2792. Erin Toi ascended to Imperator and immediately worked with the Senate to restore faith in the UEE government. The Tribunal system was quickly reinstated to provide a check on the Imperator’s power. The terrible terraforming policies that sparked the successful uprising against Messer were abandoned. And in 2795, the Fair Chance Act was officially adopted to protect the habitat of developing species. These and many other actions were slowly rebuilding a degree of trust between the UEE government and its people. However, mending relations between the UEE and starfaring alien species, who the Messers often vilified for political gain, would prove to be even more difficult.
In 2793, Imperator Toi met with a young, ambitious Senator named Marshall Leon and asked him to help repair Humanity’s interspecies relationships by accepting the position of Diplomatic Secretary. Imperator Toi believed a first-term Senator who never had to navigate Messer-infected political waters would be seen as an envoy of Humanity’s future, not its past.
Knowing the enormity and complexity of the task at hand, Secretary Leon immediately scheduled meetings with Xi’An and Banu diplomats. He acknowledged that the repair of relationships would take time, delicacy and — most importantly — trust, but also knew that his words and promises, or even those of the Imperator, would not be enough to mend the damage done. Only a bold act of diplomacy and peace could convince the entire universe that Humanity had truly changed its ways.
It was with that grand goal in mind that Secretary Leon conceived of the Ark.
The Dream
Secretary Marshall Leon named his project the Ark, after an ancient story about a seafaring ship that saved both Humans and the animals of Earth from a massive flood. As Secretary Leon remarked during his initial speech before the Senate, in early 2794, “Much like its namesake, this Ark will be a manifestation of one of Humanity’s greatest strengths — empathy. A trait that has sadly not been seen from our government in far too long.”
A bill was put forth that requested funds to construct an orbital platform with the dream that it would not be bound to any one location, species or government. It would travel between the systems of all species to promote and share universal knowledge while also providing a neutral, safe space for diplomatic discussions. Secretary Leon was convinced the future of the UEE depended on two things: access to information and stable relationships with other species. As Secretary Leon often said during debates over funding the Ark, “Humanity is better off with friends instead of enemies.”
The combination of Secretary Leon’s stirring arguments, the endorsement of Imperator Toi, and the desire to distance the UEE from its recent past led to the Senate’s overwhelming approval of the Ark. Construction was slated to start in late 2794 once a suitable location was chosen. A myriad of Senators, interested in the accompanying economic bump, campaigned to have it built in their system, but Secretary Leon wanted to keep the Ark apolitical. So, in a surprise move, he chose to have it built in Tayac; a system with no native population or representation in the Senate. A system long deemed off-limits to the public during the Messer era.
A system, like the UEE, looking to redefine itself.
The Reality
Construction on the Ark started in 2795 and progressed more slowly than anticipated. The plan was to cannibalize an abandoned platform above Tayac that the military had used for the recently declassified Project Vespa, a secret attempt by the Messer regime to weaponize the terraforming process. Secretary Leon hoped it would signify that the UEE was dismantling its warmongering ways in favor of peace. Disassembling the weaponized components proved to be more expensive and time-sensitive than expected, incurring major delays for the project.
As the initial budget ballooned, Senators who had previously supported the project started to question it. Mainly, they questioned the section of the bill that created a foundation, independent of any government, to oversee the Ark’s operation. Senators suddenly wondered why the UEE was paying for a project over which they would not have jurisdiction, and even briefly blocked funding as a way to regain control over the Ark. It was only after Imperator Toi brought her political might to bear that the project got back online.
While construction progressed over the following years, Secretary Leon frequently visited with Banu and Xi’An representatives to discuss the Ark. He passionately argued that its future belonged to all of them. It was during these discussions that Secretary Leon learned his vision was not being embraced by others species as he hoped. Although enthusiastic participants, the Banu had little to no historical records to share. Meanwhile, the Xi’An had serious concerns that the platform might still be weaponized and outright refused to allow the Ark into their territory.
Disappointed but not deterred, Leon decided to lead by example, so he pushed for as much Human knowledge as possible to be made available at the Ark. Human companies were encouraged and incentivized to contribute any information that would not hurt business. Meanwhile, the government released a trove of information. While classified government documents, military files and personal correspondences were considered off-limits, almost everything else was considered for admission. Critics complained that enemies could use this information against us. To which Secretary Leon responded, “If anything, it will be our actions, not our openness, that cause the next conflict.”
In 2800, Secretary Leon won a contentious election to become the next Imperator. Encouraged to run and endorsed by Erin Toi, Secretary Leon highlighted his work on the Ark during his campaign, claiming it proved he was a consensus builder who could also repair Humanity’s relationship with other species.
Shortly after his inauguration, construction on the Ark was completed. Imperator Leon invited representatives from the Xi’An, Banu, Tevarin and even the Vanduul to attend the gala celebration. During his introductory speech, Imperator Leon appealed for everyone to help the Ark succeed in spreading peace and knowledge. “I am proud to open these doors and beg all of you to fill it with the vast and colorful history that each and every species has to offer. Let this Ark stand as a testament and proud record of the lives that we and those before us have all lived.”
The Present
Today, the Ark still orbits in the Tayac System. Months after opening its doors, the foundation running it realized the cost of hauling it from system to system exceeded the expected revenue from donors and fundraising. Though Tayac I provides the perfect neutral ground to permanently station the platform, a lack of other interesting objects in the system does not help its visitation numbers.
While the Ark has failed to become the bastion of interspecies diplomacy that was originally intended, Imperator Leon would still be proud of its current operations. It is the authoritative repository of information in the known universe.
To this day, it collects and analyzes an awesome amount of information sent from explorers, researchers, scientists and everyday people for possible inclusion in the Galactapedia. The Ark also works hand-in-hand with a variety of prominent universities and research institutions to verify information, and even funds projects to help expand on what is already known. Among archivists and researchers, there is no job more coveted than a position curating a portion of the deluge of data submitted to the Ark.
The crown jewel of the Ark’s operations is the Starmap. This essential resource of interstellar navigation is the de facto authority on what can be found in the midst of the great, black expanse. It provides an object’s location, historical context, and data on a variety of useful related topics. Constantly updated thanks to the contributions of hardworking stellar cartographers and explorers, the map reflects the ever-expanding boundary of our universe and our understanding of it.
Even though the Ark may have not yet lived up to all of Imperator Leon’s expectations, it is still an astounding achievement. Its dedication to truth and commitment to collecting knowledge from as many sources as possible provides an important, all-encompassing view of the universe. In many ways the Ark could be considered one of Humanity’s most vital creations: an invaluable institution designed to preserve Humanity’s future by keeping us mindful of its past.
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Greetings Citizens,
We have pushed the Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.1 patch to the live servers! Alpha 2.1.1 makes a number of balance updates and bug fixes to the 2.1 release launched last week. Thank you to our dedicated PTU players for helping us test and develop this patch; it should make for a better Star Citizen experience for everyone! You can download Alpha 2.1.1 via the Star Citizen launcher, and you can find a full list of bug fixes and changes in the Alpha 2.1.1 patch notes here.
Bug Reporting
Remember, while there’s a lot to explore in Alpha 2.1.1 the game still just a portion of the Star Citizen experience! You can help the team improve future releases by reporting bugs and other issues using the Star Citizen Issue Council. The amazing feedback from STar Citizen backers is what has allowed us to interate on the PTU so quickly, and we’re eager for feedback about the Live release as well. You can access the Issue Council here.
We’re excited to introduce you to another member of the Squadron 42 cast: Gillian Anderson! Check out the embedded video for an interview and footage from the performance capture work she’s done for Squadron 42. We couldn’t be happier with her performance, and we can’t wait for you to meet the character she brought to life!
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The truth is out there! In honor of Gillian Anderson’s return as Agent Scully on The X-Files this weekend, we’re bringing back the most thematically appropriate Star Citizen concept ship: the mysterious Xi’An Khartu-al scout! This complex alien ship will be available in the pledge store for the next week.
The Khartu is the light attack craft of the Xi’An military. Contrary to Human ship design, the Khartu doesn’t have a traditional main thruster, instead featuring an array of maneuvering thrusters on articulated rigs. This design allows for incredible agility, making them the bane of UEE pilots, who bestowed the nickname ‘Quark’ because when all of the thrusters are firing, the ship looks like a spark flying through space. The Xi’an Aopoa corporation also manufactures an export model, the Khartu-al, for sale to human civilians as a dedicated scout/explorer. The export model features the same Xi’an maneuvering rig, but control surfaces modified for human use and a more limited armament.
The Scout is still a concept ship, meaning that it will not appear in your Hangar today… but we are happy to announce that it is currently in active development and will be one of the next ships added to Star Citizen’s Alpha in a 2.x patch! You can check out the latest WIP graybox images in this post to see how development is progressing.
Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches. Ship types sold during limited sales will be available to earn in the finished game.
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We are excited to announce that Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.0 is now available on the Live server for all players via the Star Citizen launcher. Alpha 2.1 features an array of bug fixes and balance updates aimed at enhancing the Star Citizen experience. Thanks to expert testing from backers on the PTU, we’ve been able to significantly improve the experience and stability of Star Citizen from the December 2.0 release. We’d like to thank everyone in the community who contributed their time and effort to making this patch happen!
In addition to these fixes, Alpha 2.1 features two new flyable ships in Crusader: the MISC Freelancer and the Aegis Vanguard Warden. (Surprise!) The Aegis Sabre is now hangar ready, for those eager to explore their brand new space superiority fighters! There’s more to discover in Crusader as well, including a new type of mission surrounding the Covalex Shipping hub. You can find a complete list of updates, fixes, balance changes and more in the full patch notes
.
New Ships from Aegis
Missed out on your chance to pick up a Vanguard or a Sabre? We’re making both ships available for the next week for anyone interested in picking one up for Alpha 2.1! The Vanguard is now flight ready, and the Sabre will appear in the Hangar. For anyone interested in the full squadron, we’ve created a limited edition pack that includes both ships with a small discount.
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Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches. Ship types sold during limited sales will be available to earn in the finished game.
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We’ve also added a new weapon to the game, the Apocalypse Arms REVENANT ballistic Gatling gun. This size 4 weapon can be mounted on the Vanguard, Constellation and (with an adaptive mount) the Cutlass and Hornet. You can learn more in the Voyager Direct storefront here.
Bug Reporting
Remember, while there’s a lot to explore in Alpha 2.1 the game still just a portion of the Star Citizen experience! You can help the team improve future releases by reporting bugs and other issues using the Star Citizen Issue Council. The amazing feedback from STar Citizen backers is what has allowed us to interate on the PTU so quickly, and we’re eager for feedback about the Live release as well. You can access the Issue Council here.
2015 was quite a year for Star Citizen! Since the launch of Alpha 2.0, the team has been glued to their monitors watching backers stream and play and adventure in the first corner of the universe we’re building. There’s plenty of work still to be done, but we’re thrilled to have a version of the game available for play that (we believe) shows the project’s true potential. We hope you’re enjoying 2.0 (or 2.1, if you’re a fan of the PTU!)… there’s plenty more to see in the coming days! But before we look ahead, we’d like to look back at what everyone accomplished in December. Cloud Imperium Games closed for the holidays, allowing our developers some much needed rest and family time… but that doesn’t mean we didn’t make a lot of progress. Read on for our December monthly report to find out just what everyone was up to…
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Happy New Year everyone! We hope you had a great month because we are really excited by what we got finished before the calendar turned over to 2016. We tackled some huge milestones such as the new ItemSystem, Loadout Editor, Character Clothing and more. Dig in to the information below to read about even more accomplishments from the LA studio.
Engineering
On the Engineering side, our primary objective was to provide as much stability to the 2.0 release as possible. As new builds of the PTU were released over the course of December, the stability in each iteration drastically improved. Stability will always be one of our top objectives as providing a reliable and exciting experience is a prime directive.
Lead Engineer Paul Reindell and Engineer Mark Abent have been aggressively working on what we’re calling “ItemSystem 2.0”. This system will allow greater control over the itemization on the back end. The first iteration has been integrated into our development code and we are starting to see the preliminary benefits of this new system that’s really exciting our developers.
Associate Engineer Chad Zamzow was responsible for implementing the various disabled states for targets struck by the EMP weapon currently employed on the Avenger Warlock. Further refinements will include flickering lights and possibly arcs of electricity across the control panels of the ship. So keep an eye out for the tiny details this new weapon effect will be adding to the game.
Ariel Xu created a new tool we are calling the “Loadout Editor”. This tool is designed to create a visualization of our entities. This will allow the designers to visually edit the loadouts of the Vehicles, Items, and Character rather than manually editing the XML file, which is even better and more intuitive for design and balancing than just having a menu or chart-based editor. Now that the Loadout Editor is completed, Ariel has started working on another tool called the “Port Editor,” a tool which allows designers to dynamically Add/Delete/Edit the contents of the port.
Flight engineer John Pritchett has been working on fine-tuning the EVA system to make it much more reliable and canny during flight. But most impressively, John was also the individual who helped create our planetary landing flight mode that viewers saw on our December 2015 livestream.
Design
Another very successful year has come and gone for the LA Tech Design team. Starting with new leadership, Kirk Tome took the reins of the team by accepting the role of Tech Design Lead. We have great expectations to come from this team in 2016 and the team could not be in better hands with this tenured industry veteran at the proverbial helm.
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During the development of the 2.0 patch, we reached several milestones that will drastically impact future development and provide exciting new content to our backers, players, and fans. We completed the white-box design of two ships; the Xi’an Scout and the MISC Reliant. The Xi’an Scout white box was completed by Tech Design Lead Kirk Tome, while the Reliant white box was completed by our item guru, Matt Sherman. Furthermore, as an added bonus, Calix Reneau also completed the grey box tech design of the MISC Reliant, bringing it that much closer to being hangar-ready.
Of course, balance is always a paramount for gaming and thus Calix and Matt have both spent a tremendous amount of time gathering input from the forums, chat rooms, and emails. The Freelancer is new to our flyable ship lineup, and a first round of weapon and ship health balance was achieved for its gaming debut. Expect more balance passes in the future as the flyable ship lineup fills out and go up against each other! Every release brings new insights and as more gameplay and customizations become possible, your testing data helps us home in on an inherently moving target.
On the feature development-side, 2.0 saw the release of the EMP system designed to temporarily disable your opponent. Further development and evolution of the EMP system was addressed using feedback from the release, such as improvements on how the system will affect the HUD, and various ship systems. Also, Randy Vazquez has completed a first pass on a gameplay design for the Salvage mechanic.
While December was a short month due to the holidays, we have laid the groundwork for a tremendous amount of progress.
h2. Art
We rocked it hard on the art side in LA during the month of December in 2015. We’ve been working tenaciously to build closer towards some anxiously anticipated releases, such as clothes shopping in the PU, and Squadron 42.
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On the character side we’ve been working on making “Old Man” Colton as great as he can be. You’ll be seeing him in Squadron 42! We’ve also been feverishly prepping some intimidating marines for some exciting action. We can wait for you to meet them! We also can’t wait for you to dig on the variety of stylish threads that we’ve been preparing for your character with our friends at CGBot, available soon (we hope!) for purchase in a PU near you!
While all this amazing character progress has been moving forward, we haven’t been neglecting our ships. We’re very much stoked for when we will be able to roll out the Reliant to the hangar. It’s with special pride that we imagine our supporters easing back into the pilot seat for the first time. (There are two seats, side by side. Can you guess which one it is?) We hope you’re as pumped about the Reliant as we are!
And that’s December! We had another great month of finished tasks that is leading to an incredible experience in both Star Citizen and Squadron 42. We’re looking forward to your feedback and can’t wait to get more done. We’re inspired by you and work as hard as we can to make our milestones a part of history. See you next month!
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Howdy Citizens,
December brought our year to a close in grand fashion! We had a great run of builds, fixes, and PTU testing leading up to the launch of 2.0.0 in December! And right after that we jumped into 2.1.0 testing for a fast follow up on PTU. Many people in the studio worked very hard in December to bring this content to the live server, and we have a lot to share. Thankfully we also got some time to relax and recharge a bit after the Christmas holiday and now the team is back hard at work on making the best damn space sim ever!
Persistent Universe Team
Howdy folks! Hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season. Everyone on the PU team here in Austin got a much needed break, but not before knocking some last minute tasks off our plate and finishing the year strong.
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To start, congratulations are in order to Chris Smith and Josh Coons, who finished up the much-awaited revamp to the Constellation Andromeda. This ship is gorgeous, and we love seeing you guys flying it around now out in the ‘verse. Chris and Josh have since moved on to the Xi’an Scout, and aim to finish that up later this month.
The other artists here have been trucking along on building and detailing the Levski landing zone in Nyx, supporting BHVR in providing lighting, VFX, and technical oversight. Mark Skelton continues to provide his fearless leadership and direction in helping to make this environment look as amazing as possible. In the Pupil to Planet video, we showed off a bit of how Delamar might look as you depart the Levski landing zone. Hats off to the team in Frankfurt for getting this tech up and running so quickly, but it does create an interesting challenge for Art. Before now, all we have really had to worry about is how the landing zone looks from the ground at a single time of day. Now we’re having to think about not just what a landing zone looks like from eye-level, but how it looks from orbit! Mark has his work cut out for him making sure that these landing zones look amazing not just from varying heights but varying times of day as well, in varying degrees of light, shadow, and everything in between. Eventually our planets will rotate just like real planets, and with that comes a full day/night cycle that we have to bear in mind when designing and art directing. It certainly is a challenge but we are looking forward to it.
Speaking of Pupil to Planet, before the break designer Pete “Weather Wizard“ Mackay spent some time using his weather wizardry to nail down elements of cruise speed. While we were doing seamless fly-throughs from orbit down to the landing zone we noticed that the speed at which the ship approached was a bit off. We wanted this approach speed to feel fast but without feeling ludicrous. Pete spent some time making calculations to determine the best approach velocity to get the feel just right. He’s still tweaking the parameters to get it perfect, but should have it nailed down soon.
Recently our Design Team has been focusing on additional landing zones in the PU, specifically focusing on breaking up all of our landing zones into Hero, Small Sandbox, and Space Station categories. Every landing zone is extremely detailed, and with that comes a lot of time and resource required to get them to the level of quality that we’re shooting for. Because of this, we are shifting gears slightly and shuffling our schedule around to get MORE landing zones ready in a shorter amount of time, which means everyone not only has to be efficient, but also be clever at the same time. We’re still focusing on hero locations like Hurston and Crusader, but we’re also prioritizing smaller landing zones like Sherman and Odyssa and space stations like mining outposts and research stations. Each of these locations will have their own points of interest and shops, and this requires a lot of design attention by the likes of Rob Reininger and Evan Manning.
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Our Animation Team continues to convert and integrate the raw animation data we captured last year for the PU. The Medical Unit animations are nearly complete, and the Nightclub animations are not far behind. Throughout this process we’ve identified and solved issues with female locomotion and vending machine metrics. Our Ship Animators helped prep the Sabre to be Hangar-Ready and get the Freelancer flying. Our next focus will be R&D on what we’re calling the Personality Overlay System. Lead Animator Bryan Brewer will partner with a programmer to blend animations together depending on an NPC’s personality as set by Design. This system would also allow users to select the idle animation that fits them best from a Character Customization UI to create variety amongst player animation. We’re excited about this system because this will enable us to use the hundreds of animations for PU and Players in a better, more adjustable way.
On the Networking side, Jason Ely and Tom Sawyer spent much of their time before the break prepping the Party System for 2.0.0. release. There is still lots of work to be done and these improvements will continue to be a focus into the new year, so if you think it’s still a little rough, please hang in there – we’ll be shoring it up. We know it’s a natural feature desire for multicrew play, and it has to start somewhere! Meanwhile, for those who own a Million Mile High Club, we also spent some time getting access and invites set up for that environment as well. We also made some headway on Persistence with the help of Jeff Zhu. This new year will see renewed focus on this critical feature, with new resources being recruited to help knock this functionality out once and for all. Soon we will see the first iteration of truly persistent data in the hands of the players with the release of Shopping v1.
Live Operations
QA
For the month of December, QA mostly focused on testing SC Alpha 2.0.0 and SC Alpha 2.1.0. After 14 deployments (!) to the Public Test Universe (PTU) in a very short period of time, we were extremely excited to finally release SC Alpha 2.0.0 to the live environment. Our thanks to the PTU testers who provided their enthusiasm, attention to detail, and real-time cooperation with us in order to get 2.0 out of the PTU and live into everyone’s hands!
That would have been a good place to start a vacation, but we didn’t stop there. We immediately jumped into testing SC Alpha 2.1.0, again with the help of our loyal and valued PTU testers. We had guarded hopes to release 2.1.0 to our live environment before the holiday break, but after 4 deployments to the PTU, we were unfortunately still experiencing some stability issues with the additional content. The decision was made to keep 2.1.0 on the PTU over the holidays but open it up to everyone to check out the new flyable Freelancer.
Over the course of the month we deployed fourteen 2.0.0 builds to the PTU, one deployment of 2.0.0 to live and four 2.1.0 deployments to the PTU. Supporting these deployments was a significant undertaking. For each deployment, the team would test each aspect of the game and raise any potential serious issues to production. The team also would conduct launcher/patch testing as well as compile patch notes. Following the deployment, the team would monitor the community feedback.
After each deployment, Jeffrey Pease would gather stability metrics on server and client crashes and provide a comprehensive report to CIG Leadership. Jeffrey Pease has done an amazing job in his various roles in QA and I am happy to announce he has officially transitioned into a development role as a LiveOps Technician. Congratulations to Bearded-CIG!
There have also been other movements within our ranks. Tyler Witkin, who you may know as Zyloh-CIG, has been promoted to the level of Senior QA. Tyler will be taking a more active leadership role on the team in his new position. In addition to his normal QA duties, Tyler has also been doing a great job keeping the community in the loop with regular updates on Discord and various social media outlets. Tyler has also obtained additional screenshots and videos requested by Marketing that were used in various updates on the RSI website.
In testing 2.0.0 and 2.1.0 the team has been working very closely with engineers Clive Johnson, George Kidd, Paul Reindell and other developers on extensive performance testing including AI spawning, Server bottle-necking, and server or client crashes. Melissa Estrada has continued with Automation development as well as working closely with engineer Francesco Roccucci on in depth testing of AI behavior.
Todd Raffray and Robert Gaither have ensured that contacts, the party system, Million Mile High Club and ArcCorp continued to be properly tested. Andrew Rexroth continued to test all FPS functionality sending a report each day highlighting any new or particularly serious issues.
Our Information Specialist Marissa Meissner has been ensuring that for each deployment, all fixes are verified and included in the patch notes. Marissa has been working very closely with Will Leverett in Game Support on messaging and accuracy of promotional mail outs and PTU invites as well as helping to update several FAQ’s to assist Customer Service. Marissa is also working with our Marketing Manager Vincent Gallopain to ensure marketing materials are accurate. Marissa has also been updating our internal knowledge base with a new workflow for reporting performance issues as well as routine updates of deprecated components and production ownership of certain ship manufacturers.
In addition to testing, QA has also taken on the task of providing feedback to CIG Leadership on various aspects of the game. Andrew Hesse has provided very detailed reports on ship behavior which have been very useful to our designers in their attempts to balance ship flight and combat.
During January QA will be continuing to test 2.1.0 for its inevitable deployment to the live environment and promptly begin testing 2.2.0. It is turning out to already be a very active new year. See you in the verse!
Game Support
Our (amazing) December was all about 2.0 and 2.1!
It’d be easy to overlook how well 2.0 went through the dev pipeline to Live, because from a process perspective it went so smoothly! Normally, such a major release takes several months to get from initial build to Live, but we did it all within a handful of weeks, in large part due to Game Support (and other teams) working alongside the community who did excellent work in helping us identify major bugs and game imbalances, which we triaged through Issue Council and got into the dev pipeline quickly. It was truly a quantum leap in terms of turnaround time and update speed, and this demonstrates the value of all the time that DevOps and Production spent last year re-engineering the development, build, and patching pipelines. Sometimes, to an outsider those long periods spent building development infrastructure may make it feel like progress on the game is slow, but once the benefits start to kick in, it really pays off, and we think the rapid patch cycle that brought 2.0 to you in December proves it!
On the topic of PTU, we understand that there was confusion on how PTU testers were selected for closed testing campaigns. Creating any level of confusion or frustration is obviously not our goal, and we FULLY realize how much players want in on early rounds of testing. That said, the PTU is not about privilege or early access – the mission of the PTU is to iron out a release to a quality sufficient for deployment to live, the faster the better. Ideally, a PTU tester is not someone who wants to be “first in line” for new content, but a true and dedicated backer who is willing to put in effort alongside QA, Game Support, and the various Operations teams to get that new content out to the rest of the community and reduce the amount of time it’s necessarily held back for troubleshooting.
So, while we’d like to stress that it’s not “early access to content” but rather instead actual testing, and this motivation continues to drive our ongoing revamps and reevaluations of the PTU access selection process.
Issue Council Participation
PTU Participation
We’ve graded players based on these two criteria, and should we have the need for a closed testing period, we’ll be inviting our players who have helped out the most in these areas on a scaled basis. Some PTU releases are open to everyone, but during the very early phases of a major release – particularly if it’s technically tricky – , we’ll consider restricting access until a more reasonable level of stability can be achieved. (Remember that in testing, different problems and bugs can have different root causes, and sometimes smaller, focused testing is what’s needed and sometimes a larger pool of testers for stress testing is needed. Access headcounts can vary from one release candidate to the next depending on what kind of testing is most useful)
We’re excited about the cool things to come in January, and we’re excited to work with you to get it done.
IT/Operations
Happy New Year from the IT Team at CIG! The month of December brought us many new challenges and even more successes. Much of what the IT department focuses on at the end of the year is boring software licensing renewals, software and user account audits, and internal system maintenance. This December the team has also been heavily involved in publishing support and for the 2.0 & 2.1 publishes. A portion of the team supported the project by providing network and storage optimizations to further improve the build system performance in order to help deliver more builds per day for internal testing. Moving the builds between studios also falls on IT so these services were pushed to the limits allowing us to find even more areas we could tune for performance. The QA teams pull a lot of builds throughout the day, so many that they can actually begin to stress the network in certain areas so new optimizations were added where needed to help QA get builds down to machines as fast as possible. Finally, the IT Team got to provide additional support for LiveOps publishes by prioritizing their traffic over all other outbound traffic because with the amount of publishes we did, every minute counts.
Live Ops
December may have been the most productive month ever for the LiveOps team. With back to back publishes happening nearly every day of the month, it became necessary to dramatically reduce the publish windows. This is the time it takes to deploy the servers, supporting systems, prepare and distribute all patches out to the edge networks. Reducing this time provides faster access to new versions by the backers but just as importantly, allows us to get feedback to the dev team more quickly. At the rate builds were coming out it became clear that we needed to create duplicate environments in order to pre-stage a publish without having to take down the currently running service for 4-6 hours.
Ahmed became the real rock star this month when he built out all the duplicate environments and modified the publishing process. Based on his work, we were able to reduce the publish window completely by simply flipping load balancers from one environment to another. Additionally Ahmed added a number of additional servers in order to accommodate additional logging which was ultimately instrumental to the massive stability improvements we saw in December. Ahmed also had a great time with the publishes during the month as well. We saw chat rooms light up every time he came on line because those backers helping us on the PTU became used to seeing him show up every time we completed another publish.
The LiveOps team also delivered major improvements to internal development, testing, and reporting tools. The build system experienced several improvements to reduce build times including one fix that allowed us to make use of even more processing power than before. The tools used to collect source code for compiling have been undergoing improvements as well with early reports of hours of reduction times under worst case scenarios.
Wrapping up 2015 with such a fantastic month makes looking forward to 2016 that much more exciting.
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Greetings Citizens,
December may have been a short month, but it wasn’t quiet! We had a lot to do at Foundry 42 UK, with team members from every discipline contributing to the project. Let’s find out what they were up to!
VFX
In December, the VFX team, Mike, Adam, Caleb, and Sean, focused on a flight-ready effects pass for the MISC Freelancer and AEGS Vanguard. A flight-ready pass includes both interior and exterior damage states (including a “deathmask”) thrusters, and weapons/counter measures.
We also continued to polish ambient environment effects for the Alpha 2.0 Crusader map. Mostly this was polish/optimization to tie in with some lighting tweaks. However, we also added new airlock depressurization effects, so there is a clear visual difference between pressurization and depressurization.
Finally, we focused on a “post-2.0 release” data clean-up. For the most part this meant removing and re-organizing our particle libraries and texture folders. Not the sexiest task in the world – quite laborious in fact – but necessary nonetheless as it will help us to hit the ground running in 2016!
Props
As 2015 came to an end the props team, Ben, Dan and our friends at Behaviour Interactive, put the finishing touches on the Casaba shop interior. The store is now complete in terms of prop work and we are just waiting on the stock to come in from our clothing manufacturers! It was an interesting environment to dress, taking on the role of shop fitters and adhering to a brand guidelines to really sell that retail experience.
The gold standard components are 95% there. They just need a final pass on the materials and then our first two will be ready. Work has also begun on the next set this week so we should have four by the end of the month. We are working closely with the tech designers and they are in the process of defining the sub-component list which is the final part of the puzzle from our point of view.
The rest of the team are now focusing on our core low-tech prop set in preparation for all the new environments coming in 2016.
I have been concentrating on getting a solid backlog / tracking of everything we currently have in game, the sheer number of assets is getting impressive and I needed a fast way of being able to track exactly where each asset is up to and also be able to quickly filter and search the assets so that when new requests come in we can prioritize them against what we have already in game. Once complete we should be in a really good place to start pumping out everything we need to bring the environments to life. This is really important from a game performance perspective, because the sheer number of assets, models, animations, and geometry in the game means that if you don’t do this intelligently, bad things can happen to your load times and FPS. It may not sound like exciting work, but when you want to maintain the pace of your gaming experience, it’s as critical as a lot of other things!
Finally we have a new hire here in the UK studio, the props team here is now up to three! We are still looking and have some strong candidates so hopefully will bolster our numbers again soon!
Ships
The ship art team led by Nathan were fighting hard in December to get you some new shiny ships to play with over the festive break, so we hope it was worth it!
Neil, Peter, Robin, Jose, and Jan managed to get the new and revised Freelancer exterior and interior art flight ready our 2.1 PTU release, and Paul and Ian also supported Nathan in completing the final art for the Sabre and the Vanguard (including damage states for the latter).
Many of you will be pleased to know that the Starfarer exterior and interior are well underway with Matt, Colin, Joe, Phil and Jay making good progress so we’ll be looking forward to releasing that to you later this year and also looking forward to releasing many more cool and wonderful Star Citizen spaceships in 2016.
Concepts
Paul and the concept team has been hard at work, the Javelin has had a bit of a nip-and-tuck with some remodeling to bring it into line with the Aegis brand.
Sarah has been valiantly battling her way through the many props needed, working on both high tech and low tech prop design styles, and on solidifying the design language should we need to outsource some of the work later on.
Jort has been working his Christmas magic on various space station interiors, dressing passes and additional concept work to help define what we need to make these areas come alive.
Stu has worked up additional pods for the ARGO RUV which we need for SQ42 and Gary finished up the Xian Scout and has really gone to town helping define further interiors for the Shubin Mining Facility.
Characters
Our two man team has been getting to grips with the new and improved pipeline where work has been done on Squadron 42 character Randall Graves by Jon (which you may have seen in the Livestream), both high and low poly models, along with some work to the Female officers uniform. As a good test for Michal our junior character artist, we set him the task of sculpting a stone statue needed for one of our future levels, and I must say the results were great!
In-Game Animation
Uisdean Ross and the UK animation team are continuing our push on the FPS AI and player mechanics. Player cover animation implementation is on-going by Colin and Dan and being refined and reviewed, this is an ongoing process working closely with the programming team.
The AI cover behaviors are currently going through a first pass by Spencer, and we are providing a base set for the AI programming team which will then be iterated on. Improvements are also being made to the no weapon (unarmed) locomotion set, as well as stops and starts.
Design
The Christmas break over and we are back in action for 2016. We have so much to do this year in the UK we need to make every day count!
The UI Director Zane and Lead Systems designer Karl are working on a simplified HUD UI to level out the learning curve when it comes to interacting with your ships systems. All the advanced bells and whistles will still be there for the more hard core players. They are also working with the engineering UI team to implement a functional EVA HUD for players to get all the information they need while experiencing zero-g movement.
The Live team of Luke, Danny and Matt are listening to your feedback and fixing up issues with the current Live build to make it more stable and fun. They are also looking at further iterations to some of the more basic design implementations that need further work, such as EMP. Syncing up with the ship release schedule in becoming a strong focus for this team going forward to make sure we cover the design functionality that is required for the various ships, such as cargo movers.
The Tech Design team led by John has scaled up over the last few months ands is now big enough to really get moving on the new ships as the Art team hands them over to us. We have also been looking into ways of addressing ship balance in a less reactive, more forward-looking way that is looking promising over the next month or so.
Mike and the Squadron 42 designers are transitioning the levels into the large world system rather than lots of separate CryFiles. We still need to get better at excluding SQ42 files from the current build process as you guys seem to find anything that leaks through and they sometimes appear as spoilers! This will be getting a more robust system in the future and will have the side effect of getting some of these intermediate patch sizes more under control.
All in all, we are geared up for a very busy year on Star Citizen here in the UK and with your continued solid support we know we can make this something very special! Thanks again.
Graphics
Over the last month the graphics director Ali and his team have made various performance improvements to the game.
The lighting shaders have had significant work and are now faster than the base CryEngine shaders despite having more features thanks to Ben. Geoff put in some hard work so that we can now cull rooms that you can’t see on ships and space stations much more accurately thanks to improvements to the culling system. The LOD system has been overhauled by Muhammed which should result in us rendering fewer polygons in the distance where you can’t really see them, and we’ve also made some significant improvements to the performance of our internal tools when generating LODs which could take several minutes on our largest levels and now takes just a few seconds. Okka and the rest of the team also spent a large amount of December bug fixing for the PTU and Live Releases.
Our focus now is on planning our work for 2016, and focusing on the features that Squadron 42 requires. The first features we’re working on will be improved HDR effects such as bloom, lens flares and eye adaption to give a better impression of the stark lighting you get in space and sci-fi scenes in general. We’ll be revamping some shaders such as the glass shader so we can improve the quality of the cockpits and helmets as well as increase their performance. We’ll also be getting back onto our volumetric gas cloud work which had been paused during the work on 2.0 but is crucial for both Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe.
Environments
Ian and the environment team hope you’re all enjoying playing Crusader, our team is having a great time watching you play!
Jake and part of the team has been doing final bug fixes and lighting improvements for the 2.1 release of Crusader, so it should look and perform better than in 2.0. Eddie and rest of the team has been focusing down on one of our Squadron 42 levels, not too much we can reveal at this stage but it will be our test bed for creating sandbox locations with terrain and multiple landing points.
Engineering
For obvious reasons this has been a shorter month for us here in the UK and people have been taking some well-deserved time off. That’s not to say we’ve been taking it easy whilst we’ve been in though!
The highlight for Derek and the engineering team in December was getting Alpha 2.0 finally out to everybody after a huge effort from anybody concerned. We’re really proud of what we’ve managed to achieve, especially as it has gone down so well with the community. We keep an eye on all the forums and Twitch streams and people do seem to be having a blast which makes all the hard work feel worthwhile. But of course as soon as one milestone has been hit we’re onto the next. We’re now in the final stages of getting Alpha 2.1 hitting the streets so we’re in the general stabilization phase, with many engineers including Rob, Clive, George, and Craig getting those horrid random crash bugs which have crept in fixed and some performance optimizations.
More general ongoing work. One of the big things Jens and the FPS code team have helping working on is the new physicalized EVA which is a big departure from the current implementation. Rather than “faking” the fidelity of the player movement as we have been doing currently we’re going down the route of using a proper physical simulation, in much the same way as we do with the ships. As part of that the character is also put into a ragdoll state which gives the whole movement a much more fluid and natural feel to it. The effects of this should include a slight opposite impulse to you to help make it feel like you’re firing a real weapon.
It does bring up a whole host of new problems to solve, many of which are nasty edge cases. For example, as you EVA around and then hit a gravity area you need to come out of rag doll and transition into the normal locomotion again with it feeling natural and fluid. Also when you’re in EVA you generally can’t see where your legs are and it’s really easy to clip a piece of geometry with them, which will send you into a nasty spin, which gets really annoying really quickly. We’ve got a number of ideas from getting your character to automatically tuck in their legs, to have an IFCS to counter any unwanted spin. There’s going to be a new EVA HUD mode as well to give you some more feedback. When you’re in the middle of space away from any nearby geometry you have very little point of reference to give an indication of what speed and direction you’re moving in, which isn’t much fun.
But mainly we’ve been working on our eating, drinking and chilling.
QA
After November’s hopeful anticipation of 2.0.0 going LIVE to all backers, Andy and the QA team were very proud (and a little relieved!) that it finally launched this month. We’ve been working on it internally for a while!
Hopefully you’re all appreciating the hard work we put in to get it ready for release – there was a great feeling of satisfaction felt in the department, and like I mentioned last time, we’re really getting to grips with the nature of the testing for Star Citizen’s future development.
Some of the UK QA team have had a busier end to the month of December than others… ahem! While some were off enjoying the festive season (me, Andy), the rest of our dedicated team were on hand to make sure that the first 2.1.0 patch made it live to PTU on Christmas Eve. “Merry Christmas”, is probably what they were thinking at the time!
While some might have considered a lack of a full LIVE release of 2.1.0 disappointing, there were a few good reasons why this release was unfortunately not possible. Without going into too much detail, the performance and stability of the build had regressed, meaning we were not comfortable with a release for you guys. This is not unusual any time you add new content or new gameplay, and particularly not when one of the additions is a completely new class of flyable ship. Post-Christmas, this is going to form the majority of our testing in the department – helping to reproduce all the issues and ensure the quality of the experience is back where we want it to be.
2.1.0 has meant that the lucky PTU players were able to experience and help test the Freelancer for the first time – a ship that has prompted plenty of “Starbug roleplay” within the QA team. Hopefully before too long everyone will be able to play the “Rimmer role” once 2.1.0 goes LIVE…
In other news, the UK QA Secret Santa was a great success – highlights include: Pokemon trainer badges, a genuinely horrifying 1980’s E.T., a Transformers lunchbox with flask and a Corinthian Kevin Keegan figurine.
Audio
For Lee Banyard and CIG Audio, December was mostly taken up with ensuring things were as solid as they could be with sound for SC Alpha 2.0. With a game such as ours, testing every possible thing where audio is concerned can be difficult, so we spent a lot of time trying to cover all the bases, going through PTU feedback and issues that came up via QA as well as stuff we found ourselves.
What was everyone up to? Luke, Darren and Stefan were immersed in supporting ships such as the Freelancer and Vanguard. Matteo and Stefan (again, he gets around!) looking more at EVA and FPS elements, while Ross was running the rule over the environments in 2.0 again and again to ensure that all worked as it should, testing out the music logic system, planning battle-chatter system and just general testing. Phil continued with UI audio and with PU environments, especially the Million Mile High Club. Bob was engaged in hammering out anything to do with dialogue, and the larger dialogue system, and last (but not least) Jason continued his stellar work in supporting everyone from a technical standpoint and ensuring the audio build system continued to do its thing.
We continued to plan the orchestral sessions which should be happening in the next month or so, which should align nicely with the progress Ross and Sam Hall are making with the dynamic music system assuming all goes ahead as planned.
And Lee tried to help everyone with everything as much as he could!
Also the team received CIG Audio winter hats as seasonal gifts. I think photos were posted to the Ask A Developer audio thread in case you’re interested. Hope you all had a great winter break!
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Hallo aus Frankfurt (Hello from Frankfurt),
Christmas has come and gone, we’re into a new year, and the team is now back from their well-deserved holiday break.
This month we’ll have 4 new people joining the Frankfurt team, bringing us up to 34 strong.
I hope everyone had a good holiday, read below on some of the stuff we did before the break.
Pupil to Planet – Procedural Tech
This past month we showed off the procedural tech we’ve been working on, both in the video Pupil to Planet, and with Chris and Sean playing it live on the livestream.
Marco, Carsten, and Pascal spent a good amount of time working on the tech and environment art, and Hannes came in with final touches and camera work. We had support from others both in and out of the DE office, such as Sean Tracy, Chris Bolte, etc. The character used is a story character from SQ42 called Joachim Steiger. Music was done by our Pedro Camacho and turned out fantastic. Thanks to everyone that pitched in, seeing and navigating around this 1000km diameter planetoid live in-game was and is an absolutely surreal and a mind blowing experience.
The base planet tech of the procedural work was started a few months earlier, in September. Besides the planet tech, there are several different systems helping to make this possible, including the Large World (systems were converted to use 64 bit positioning to allow large seamless worlds), inverted depth buffer and camera relative rendering (which renders everything relative to the camera to minimize loss of precision), and the Zone system (which was worked on mainly by Chris Bolte).
Some generated planet terrain parts are still too big to fit into 32 bit float vertex buffer chunks for the GPU, so they are computed locally and displaced on the appropriate location on the planet, which, when combined with the aforementioned systems, avoid any jittering or loss of precision.
Keeping the entire planet in memory won’t be possible, so the planet surface is allocated a fixed memory budget and procedurally generated on-demand at different level of details as the engine camera moves around the planet.
Then procedural texturing and colors are applied to the surface in realtime depending on terrain shape and other information.
the atmospherics are based on a physically accurate model of light transport taking multiple scattering into account, this allows to render atmospherics correctly and automatically from any viewpoint from outer space to ground level.
We already have some improvements in the works, and we will be updating as the new year goes on. The current plan, as shown in the prototype, is to experience the entire Star Citizen game world in first person, including from walking into your ship, flying and seamlessly landing from space to a docking station on a planet, walking around in first person, entering buildings and doing things at the higher visual fidelity we have shown. Our next steps besides improving the planet generation and visuals would be to integrate the procedural tech into the multiplayer environment so it could be experienced in the PTU.
Engine
On top of the above work wrapped around the procedural tech, the engine team gave support to various areas of the current PTU release. We’re also making further progress on the public crash handler to gather relevant data on why clients crash which should help speed up stabilizing future PTU and public releases.
We’re pushing towards enabling asserts in profile builds to further help catch runtime errors early. As part of this, the internal crash handler and callstack collector service of CE has been totally overhauled.
Cinematics
We’re currently completing our full breakdown of every scene in SQ42’s script and all material that was shot in regards to scene types.
SQ42 features every type of cinematic you could think of. Ranging from relatively straight forward 3rd person cinematics with filmic cameras without player presence, to 1st person player perspective cinematics with look control and then crossing over into more gameplay oriented conversational scenes with AI characters and full player control. Transitions from cinematics into AI characters most of the time needs to be fluid and conversational scenes often can be interrupted by the player so this requires lots of planning and case handling on animation and AI tech side. The amount of material is massive so getting it all sorted and categorized correctly is essential for production.
We are also working on a scene with Admiral Bishop going planetside to view battle damage and a first scene with Captain Maclaren but both are in their early stages of implementation.
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For cinematic environment work, we finished up geometry for the Retribution skydock, started working on the Corvo ruins scene, and started with some terrain RnD of the big background mountains and crater.
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Our system designers are busy coming up with consistent designs for cargo and looting so we can have a clear path of where we need to take these systems and at the same time come up with a tier zero implementation for the baby PU so the players can loot items, move them around and sell them in various stations. The goal here is to implement an initial light version of the system that we can build upon in the future without having to redo it from scratch when the full system will be ready to deploy. These systems should help stimulate different types of gameplay in the baby PU, from cargo transport to market research and even piracy or escorting other players.
Both system and level designers here are now working together with programmers in creating a mission generation system that is modular and that can offer great variation of gameplay. We’re still in the early stages for this system but we’re hoping we can get some early version of it in the baby PU as soon as possible. This system should be able to take data from the universe simulator and generate missions based on that data so let’s say if a system is under heavy pirate threat then we can generate more missions to fight pirates, and even tailor those procedural missions to that specific pirate faction.
Level designers have been pushing through with their Power Management System prototype that they started last month and hopefully we’ll get to play it soon and see how it fits in our current plans for the stations & ships. Also a lot of research & prototyping time was put into various models of asteroid bases and facilities trying to get away from the conventional “planet-like” looking base and exploring all the possibilities that life on a low/no gravity asteroid can offer.
TechArt
TechArt in Frankfurt is continuing to work with the other studios Tech Artists on our bigger DCC pipeline, this month we finalized our puppet from animation perspective.
We’re currently working on finalizing in-game internal rig setups. Further supporting various department RNDs and bug fixing is daily routines for us.
QA
Aside from the usual bug-hunting, I worked mostly on Automated Testing solutions for Star Citizen, developing automated test levels with timed demos with the help of Francesco Di Mizio in the hopes that automating a simple test-run of a level could lead to further automation down the line. Right now a simple test level involving spawning in a location, equipping a loadout and running through the map shooting at AI can test everything from level loading and chainloading to AI-Hit Reactions, bullet physics and particles, character physics & ragdoll, falling damage and a whole host of other functions vital to the core gameplay of S42 and the Persistent Universe. Additional test map demos can now be made and implemented using the same framework that will allow developers to see which changelists cause any problems for any area of the game on a daily basis as changes go in.
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The weapon art team has finished the Apocalypse Arms Revenant Ballistic Gatling. As already mentioned in the previous monthly studio report, this is the first weapon to use our new Multi-Layer shader and we are quite happy with the results!
While working with the new shader and being in direct communication with the graphics programmer wizards in the UK we have learned a lot and identified some issues as well as given feedback to further improve the shader in the future.
Environment Art
Last month the Frankfurt environment art team was working on the Shubin space station, a high tech mining facility whose role is to “crack” asteroids in order to mine the valuable minerals that they contain. Shubin will be featured heavily in the Squadron 42 campaign and will differ from the other stations in its design, being a very high tech facility. The station is going to be one of the biggest so far, giving the player the freedom to fly around the huge superstructure and, of course, land and explore the interior on foot. From an artist’s point of view, Shubin has been a huge challenge but at the same time a very rewarding one, giving us the freedom to explore new designs and really try to develop something that we think will provide a real sense of awe when players initially experience it in game.
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Greetings Citizens,
Another month of hard work here in Montreal. Here’s what the team have been working on.
Design
The Behaviour design team wrapped up the year with a few things. First, Lead Technical Designer Francois Boucher continued to set up shops and shopping items for the upcoming Casaba Outlet and current stores as well. In parallel, we are working on a streamlined shopping interface that hopefully everyone will like.
Level Designer Jesse Kalb added a bunch of new flair objects to the game as we wanted to get some kind of cushion leading into the new year. We also worked hard solidifying 2.0 and subsequently 2.1 before leaving for the holiday.
Finally, we cooked 3.5 pounds of Canadian bacon for the Star Citizen Behaviour team to celebrate the end of the year. Yummy!
Art
This month, the Environment team continued to work on Levski. Mainly optimizing complex geometry like rock walls and tunnels. Also, we began dressing the interiors, trying to give to each a theme. This will help navigation but also to make it visually interesting when exploring the map. A couple of minor bugs were fixed on ArcCorp and Hangars.
For the Prop team, the next flairs were completed and we are planning the next ones for 2016.
The background and static props where completed for the clothing store. We are now moving on props for industrial/mining planets.
On the Concept Art team , we worked on paint-overs for Levski`s interior shops. You can admire the amazing work done by our concept artists Seungjin Woo on Cordry`s armor shop.
Engineering
Coming to you shortly in version 2.1.0 are a few cool new features. Customizing your ships with the HoloTable will be a little easier. You’re probably used to seeing only your loose ship parts that can be equipped, and you still will by default. However, with a new UI widget you’ll now be able to filter items to see what’s available and what isn’t. For example you’ll now be able to see items on other ships, so you can equip them directly without having to load and strip that other ship first. You can also your whole inventory for a given part category, which could help you plan the loadouts of your personal fleet at a glance. All of this will come with color highlighting and some clearer labeling of the various parts and their stats. For those of you who play well with others, we hope you enjoy the new updates to the party management and contact list UI systems. We’ve also worked hard to improve stability of options, customizations and emotes so you can continue to have fun mingling with others planet-side (or crashing your buggies into each other, whatever floats your boat).
For subsequent updates, we’re working to provide you with a full AR shopping experience, where you can purchase gear for your character in-game and preview the various modifications on your avatar. We’re continuing to work on optimizing ship customizations, allowing you to make temporary modifications in Crusader from a HoloTable, load them into a dock and take flight without returning to your hangar. Any of you who are upgrading your computers this winter may appreciate our modifications to the graphics menu options. Quality settings will apply immediately, allowing you to see their effects without having to leave the menu. You’ll also have a timed screen resolution confirmation dialog, which will help if you try configurations that don’t quite agree with your graphics card or monitor/TV setup. If a resolution doesn’t work for you (no, not the New Year’s kind. unfortunately), it will revert back in 15 seconds. More party and Crusader ship features will continue to be improved as well. Hopefully you’ll have your hands on all of these pretty soon!
On our side, we’re continuing to update our dev tools to help bring you more content and exciting new features in the near future.
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Greetings from frosty Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month, in-between snowfalls :
Pledge Buy Back
In December, we launched a new feature called Pledge Buy Back. Most of you knew it by another, more obscure name, “unmelt”. It allows anyone to undo a mistake they made, like exchanging a limited availability pledge they had for store credit. Anyone will be able to undo such mistakes and do themselves what used to take hours of Customer Service exchanges. This feature is now accessible via My Hangar. Note: there will be a handful of pledges which are and will stay ineligible for Pledge Buy Back : some limited offers, offers linked to third party companies, pledge packages including physical merchandise… The system still allows buying back 99.9% of all pledges ever available, and to date close to 5,000 pledges have been bought back, making it one of our most popular features already!
Organization Invitations
Last month, we completed development on the new Organization invitation email template, so that it would reflect your Org’s identity better and make it less ambiguously linked to RSI Itself. The new layout is currently being tested on different email programs and devices, and once it has passed QA, we’ll go live. Coming soon!
Of course, we haven’t forgotten other Org improvements either! While there’s nothing to report in those regards this month, rest assured that we haven’t forsaken you, and that more robust updates to the Organization are still waiting in the wings for gameplay elements that will support them.
Subscription campaign
We are currently in the Design phase for the new Subscribers section of the website. In addition to the look-and-feel of the new landing page, we are creating a new logo and many other assets which will then be used to promote subscriptions to the general public.
Ship Happens
December was a busy month for ship sales, with the Holiday livestream as well as the end of year free for all sale to close out 2015. The livestream saw the release of the Reliant variants, including a researcher, a reporter and a skirmisher model, each with their own unique loadout and expertise. In 2.0 the new Constellation Andromeda model became available in hangar and crusader. This version also included the Vanguard Warden as hangar ready. As 2015 came to an end, there was also one last free-for-all sale for the year giving everyone a chance to get their favorite ship during the holidays, and serve as what we’ve been calling a grace period before the new Euro rate came into place.
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Greetings and salutations from Chronos. For my returning friends, a warm welcome back, and for those of you who are wondering just what the heck you’ve stumbled onto, well, I’m Ol’ Jegger and this here is my little slice of the Spectrum called Far From Home.
You know, I actually got stopped by a jumper out Nyx way one time who wanted to know why I called the show Far From Home when I live in my ship. ‘Isn’t Shana your home?’ he insisted and I had to admit that he was right on that point. I’ve lived in the ol’ girl longer than about anywhere else I’ve hung my helmet over the years, so yeah, on one level, I’ve got my home with me everywhere I go, and that’s a big part of why I love this life of mine. But, there’s another part to flying solo; the part where you look out your cockpit and see nothing but black and know that you are absolutely alone; just about as alone as a person can get. That feeling right there — freedom, tranquility and sadness, all rolled into one — that to me is the feeling of being far from home, and I guess on some level, what this here show is about.
Yeah. I know. Didn’t make much sense to that jumper in Nyx neither.
Oh. Before I forget, wanted to say thanks to all of you who somehow remembered it was my birthday this month. Those kind words and vids left me smiling for days. Being that happy can hurt your face if you’re not used to it. Though, to tell the truth, I probably should be by now. No matter how many times I’m reminded of it, it near knocks me on my ass to see just how kind and caring the folks of this ’verse can be.
My birthday is actually the reason why I’m hanging out in Chronos. Believe it or not, me and the Synthworld project were given birth to on the same day. The planet seed was moved into place just as I was popping out. You can see then why it is sort of a tradition of mine to wander this way around December and take a gander at how it’s getting along. The sheer size of it still takes my breath away. Synthworld is one of those things that pretty much everyone has an opinion on: waste of money, proof of the Empire’s hubris, the future salvation of Humanity, or whatever. The only thing I know for sure is that it is one hell of a sight to see, and try or fail, the fact that we even attempted it makes me a little bit proud. Though, to be completely honest, I’m not sure if I ever want to see them finish the thing. I know it sounds silly, but somewhere along the way I got it into my head that I’m not going to be finished until that planet is. Us being siblings of sorts and all.
Other than my birthday, the other thing this time of year that is almost as popular is Traveler’s Day. It’s a pretty big todo amongst us wandering types. I haven’t run into many out there who don’t have some spectacular tales of how they spent their January firsts, myself included. Those of you who were tuned in a few months ago may remember me going on about one Traveler’s Day in particular where the crew of the Evo Horizon really pulled my kiester out of the fire. Well, since sharing that story, I’ve been mulling it over, and rather than celebrating in my normal sort of way, I’ve decided that this year I’m going take inspiration from their kind deed and find some way to pay it forward. What better way to honor Traveler’s Day than by being able to create new tales of charity and giving. So to that end, I’m about to head over to a CTR, load up on as much fuel, food and repair gear as this ’lancer can carry, and jump over to Odin. Come the first, I am going to be out there looking to lend a hand however I can. I may not be as spry on the float as I used to be, but I can still patch a hull something pretty when I need to.
Now the best part of having this show is that not only do I get to do something nice, I get to speak my piece and hopefully convince a few of you to join in too. Like I said before, it is damn incredible just how kind and caring you folks can be. Maybe together we can make home feel a little bit closer to those who need it.
I look forward to hearing your tales as well as sharing my own in the new year. Until 2946 …
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Greetings Citizens!
We’re excited to announce that we’ve opened up 2.1.0 on the Public Test Universe (PTU) to all players!
We’ve feverishly been working to get Star Citizen Alpha 2.1.0 ready, but we’ve discovered a couple of issues that prevent it from being a fully enjoyable and stable gaming experience (particularly, temporary significant drops in framerates). The last thing we want is to jeopardize all of the fun everyone’s been having with 2.0.0, and certainly not over the entire holiday period!
With that in mind, we’ll be keeping 2.0.0 on the Live service and opening up 2.1.0 on PTU for all players!
We know some of you really want to check out the flight-ready Freelancer as well as the hangar-ready Sabre, so take a look at the updated 2.1.0 Patch Notes available on the forums:
Important things to keep in mind about PTU, which is a true test environment where we can stage our builds before deploying to Live in order to stabilize the service and catch critical bugs:
- Playing on PTU is completely optional!
- PTU capacity is somewhat restricted compared to Live. If you find that you cannot join a match, we advise waiting for another time.
- PTU is not about “early access” to content; it’s intended for actual testing of features, content, and updates. Opening PTU up is opening up the option to be a tester to help us accomplish near-term development goals.
- You’ll have 60GB+ of Star Citizen installed if you decide to play both on Live and on PTU: 30GB+ for the 2.0.0 client on Live, 30GB+ for the 2.1.0 client on PTU. Make sure you have enough space before you start the install!
- We frequently update PTU with large patches. PTU is not advised for those with bandwidth/download caps.
For those players who are not familiar with how to get onto PTU, all you have to do is:
- Start the Star Citizen Launcher and log in with your normal credentials.
- Once logged in, click the gear cog on the top right of the launcherto go to Options.
- Click Copy Account on the lower right.
- You’ll get an email notification with the copy process is complete. This process can take up to an hour if there is a large concurrent influx of players all copying their account concurrently.
This basically wraps up our year, and what a year it has been in building the BDSSE.
We hope you enjoy your time on PTU and Happy Holidays from all of us here at Cloud Imperium Games!
As we announced during the 2015 Holiday livestream, as of January 1st we are updating the RSI site’s Euro exchange rate. For the next five days (through December 28th) we are unlocking the previous ‘Weapons Free!’ sale to give everyone one last change to pick up limited ships and packages at the old rate. We hope this helps you pick up the ship of your dreams as we continue to build the ‘verse!
Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this go directly to the game’s ongoing production. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
Explorers
Endeavor
Musashi Industrial & Starflight Concern is proud to present the Endeavor-class research vessel, a fully modular space platform designed to be adapted for a variety of scientific and medical tasks. Initially developed as a floating laboratory, the MISC Endeavor can be outfitted for everything from spatial telescopy to use as mobile hospital.
Carrack
The Anvil Carrack features reinforced fuel tanks for long-duration flight, an advanced jump drive, and a dedicated computer core for jump charting operations. Originally a military exclusive, the Carrack is now available for civilian use. On-board accommodations include crew medical and repair facilities, and a mapping-oriented sensor suite.
315p
Exploration is man’s highest calling. Prepare to chart distant horizons with man’s most sophisticated piece of technology, the ORIGIN 315p. Featuring a more robust power plant and a custom scanning package, exclusively designed by Chimera Communications.
Pirates
Cutlass Black
Drake Interplanetary claims that the Cutlass Black is a low-cost, easy-to-maintain solution for local in-system militia units. The larger-than-average cargo hold, RIO seat and dedicated tractor mount are, the company literature insists, for facilitating search and rescue operations.
Cutlass Red
The Cutlass Red converts the standard cargo hold to a well-equiped medical facility including an Autodoc. This starbound ambulance features the Nav-E7 Echo Transponder, a long range scanner, and a Secure Plus Docking Collar, making it ideal for search and rescue. This model also features a unique Red Crossbones skin.
Cutlass Blue
Sleek, mean, and royal. The Cutlass Blue adds missiles, a more aggressive engine, and Durasteel holding cells in the cargo bay to the standard model. The Cutlass Blue is the outworld militia standard ship of choice for patrols.
Caterpillar
Drake maintains that the Caterpillar, a sprawling, modular spacecraft which appears at least somewhat like its namesake, is for legitimate commerce and extended search and rescue missions… but at the end of the day, the Caterpillar is truly the evil twin of the Freelancer.
Herald
The Drake Herald is a small, armored ship designed to safely get information from Point A to Point B. Featuring a powerful central engine (for high speed transit and generating the power needed for effective data encryption/containment), advanced encryption software and an armored computer core, theHerald is unique among personal spacecraft in that it is designed to be easily ‘cleaned’ when in danger of capture.
Military
Gladiator
The civilian model of the Gladiator appeals to those that want explore the ‘Verse with a bit of added security. Supporting a maximum of two the Gladiator is perfectly equipped to explore and fight with or without a wingman. The Civilian model allows pilots to choose between an extra cargo hold or a bomb bay.
Gladius
The Gladius is an older design which has been updated over the years to keep up with modern technology. In military circles, the Gladius is beloved for its performance and its simplicity. A fast, light fighter with a laser-focus on dogfighting, the Gladius is an ideal interceptor or escort ship.
Sabre
Part of Aegis Dynamics’ Phase Two of new ship models, the Sabre was designed as a space superiority fighter for those situations where you need to leave a lighter footprint. Designed to be a rapid responder, the Sabre is more than capable of establishing battlefield dominance for any number of combat scenarios.
Hornet
To the enemy, it is a weapon never to be underestimated. To allies, it’s a savior. The F7C Hornet is the same dependable and resilient multi-purpose fighter that has become the face of the UEE Navy. The F7C is the foundation to build on and meet whatever requirements you have in mind.
Hornet Ghost
Through a combination of low-emission drives, low-draw weapons, and Void Armor technology capable of diffusing scans, the F7C-S Ghost is built for the pilot who wants to keep a low profile. The Ghost is capable of slipping past the most ardent of observers to accomplish whatever goal you need to accomplish. Don’t worry, we won’t ask.
Hornet Tracker
If the Ghost is made to hide, the Tracker is made to seek. The F7C-R Tracker boasts an advanced radar suite making it ideal for deep-space explorers who require depth and accuracy in their scan packages. Local militia and larger merc units will also repurpose Trackers to act as mobile C&C ships for their squadrons.
Super Hornet
The closest to the Military load-out as is legally possible for a Civilian model, the F7C-M Super Hornet reattaches the ball turret and offers near milspec parts under the hood. Proving that two heads are better than one, a second seat has been added to split the logistic and combat duty, making the Super Hornet a truly terrifying mark to engage.
Retaliator and Modules
The Retaliator is the United Earth Empire’s premiere, if aging, jump-capable heavy bomber. Massive formations of these spacecraft running long-range strike missions is not an uncommon site around the fringes of the empire. With a distinctive elongated silhouette that is dotted with turrets and carrying a massive bomb load, the Retaliator is an effective symbol of Imperial might. As such, they are the frequent centerpiece of Space Force recruiting posters. Retaliators are ground-based, with all but the largest carriers unable to operate them effectively. Heavily modified Retaliators are becoming commonplace on the civilian market as the design ages and earlier production runs are sold off en-mass. Outfitted to carry cargo instead of antimatter bombs and with the waste turret positions typically swapped for makeshift living quarters, they make a good medium freighter or a basic explorer. Some have even been converted into long-hop passenger spacecraft!
Starfarer Gemini
The United Empire of Earth military uses an adapted ‘rough and tumble’ variant of the Starfarer for their front line operations. The G2M Gemini, more commonly the Starfarer Gemini or ‘Star G,’ trades some cargo capacity and maneuverability in exchange for reinforced armor, increased shielding, more powerful engines and stronger versions of the three manned turrets. The Gemini also includes an optional missile pod, which can be swapped for the fuel intake unit on the ship’s nose (see below for details.) Missile pods can be mounted to either Starfarer variant.
Racers
M50
If you want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible and with as much style as possible then ORIGIN’s M50 is for you. Featuring supercharged engines that counter a tiny weapons loadout, the M50 is a ship for going FAST.
350R
The combination of a Gangleri BP 707 Standard powerplant with a 300i fuselage re-engineered to accommodate twin Hammer Propulsion HM 4.3 thrusters makes the 350r the fastest personal craft you’ll ever call your own.
Mustang Alpha
Inspired by Consolidated Outland CEO Silas Koerner’s cutting edge vision, the Mustang Alpha is a sleek, stylish spacecraft that uses ultralight alloys to push power ratios to the limits, albeit sometimes unsafely. And now, with the optional Cargo Carrier, you can have the Alpha’s advantages without sacrificing carrying capacity.
Mustang Beta
The Mustang Beta, with its unprecedented range, is made for long duration flights. The factory standard Tarsus Leaper Jump Engine enables the Beta to travel to the galaxy’s farthest systems with ease, while the ship’s unique Com4T living quarters will make the journey feel like you never left home.
Mustang Gamma
Consolidated Outland’s design and engineering teams have managed to tweak and refine the Mustang into an admirable racer. The end result, the Mustang Gamma, has smooth acceleration, and power on demand thanks to an innovative package featuring three powerful Magma Jet engines for maximum thrust.
Mustang Delta
While it may not be able to go toe to toe with some of the military specific ships, by reinforcing the Mustang’s already strong hull construction with Consolidated Outland’s own line of Cavalry Class Mass Reduction Armor, the Delta has a reduced cross-sectional signature that evens the playing field.
Alien ships
Khartu-al
The Xi’An Aopoa corporation manufactures an export model of the Qhire Khartu, the Khartu-al, for sale to human civilians as a dedicated scout/explorer. The export model features the same Xi’an maneuvering rig, but control surfaces modified for human use and a more limited armament.
Merchantman
Banu traders are renowned for their merchant prowess, traveling the spacelanes and trading with everyone from humans to the Vanduul! Their sturdy, dedicated trading ships are prized beyond all other transports, sometimes passing from generation to generation of Banu.
Reliant
Following on the success of the Freelancer “Built for Life” campaign, MISC has begun development of a smaller, introductory-class spacecraft that can be operated by a single pilot. Although roughly designed to compete with the RSI Aurora and the Consolidated Outlands Mustang, the Reliant is a very different animal. From the broad, sleek wings to the multiple flight modes and the second, fully-articulated crew seat, the Reliant is a small ship with a great deal of potential!
Worker Ships
Reclaimer
The Aegis Reclaimer is an industrial salvage ship. Equipped with a reinforced cargo bay, a long-range jump drive and launch pods for unmanned drones, the Reclaimer is an ideal ship for taking advantage of deep space wrecks. Tractor beams, floodlights, scanner options and docking ports round out the tools on this capable, utilitarian spacecraft.
Starliner
The Genesis is yet another landmark in Crusader Industries’ proud history of transport designs. This ship utilizes award-winning manufacturing techniques and the highest quality parts to create one thing; a next-generation passenger ship at a price that won’t break your budget. Crusader Industries’ proprietary NeoG engine technology offers some of the most efficient flight for a ship of its size.
Orion
Roberts Space Industries’ goal has always been to make the stars available to individual Citizens. Now, with the RSI Orion mining platform, RSI is letting individuals take over a process formerly controlled by mega-corporations. The Orion’s features include high-grade turret-mounted tractor beam arrays, plenty of mineral storage and a cabin designed by the team that brought you the Aurora and Constellation!
Aurora LX
Be proud of your roots with the brand-new Aurora Deluxe, built for the discerning pilot who never forgets where he or she came from. The LX features patent leather interior to guarantee comfort for those long stretches in the deep black.
Starfarer
The Starfarer differs from traditional bulk freighters in one key way: it is a dedicated fuel platform. The Starfarer is designed not only to load, store and protect fuel stasis units, it is designed to take in spaceborne hydrogen and then refine it for use without landing. The Starfarer can be used to ferry traditional bulk cargo pods (see diagram) but in such cases the fuel refining equipment would be useless. This equipment is modular and can be swapped out for another mission package for dry operations!
Cargo ships
Freelancer MIS
The Freelancer MIS is a limited edition militarized variant of the classic mercantile ship developed by the UEE. These were produced in very small quantity due to some early payload incidents. This version sacrifices the majority of the cargo capacity to make way for missiles.
Constellation Phoenix
A dedicated luxury spacecraft for the discerning star captain. The Constellation Phoenix can be operated as an organization command ship and features a luxurious redesigned interior. Standard amenities include a hidden sensor-dampened area to secure your most precious cargo, the renowned Lynx rover for landing zone exploration, and an elite Kruger P-72 Archimedes Fighter, making this ship one of the most desired in all of UEE space.
To that point, the Constellation Phoenix has proven so popular that RSI produces only a select number every sales season, a tactic that has done well to preserve it’s high demand and resale value year after year. For 2945, Roberts Space Industries is proud to release another 5000 hulls, matching it’s generous rollout from the year before. This year however, in order to maintain a finite and limited stock, Cross-Chassis Upgrade to the Phoenix will not be enabled. This ship will remain on sale throughout the weekend, ending either when time runs out, or the limited stock is exhausted.
Hull A
The smallest, most affordable Hull. The Hull A is great for those just striking out in the galaxy on their own. The Hull A is most similar to the Aurora and Mustang, but lacks the ‘jack of all trades’ nature. Where the others trade cargo capacity for firepower or speed, the Hull A is 100% on-mission transport! Additionally, Hull A (and B) are often used as station-to-orbit ferries.
Hull B
The Hull B is a more rugged option most often compared to MISC’s own Freelancer. But where the Freelancer is equipped for long range exploration and other roles, the Hull B is a pure cargo transport. Hull B are often used as corporate support ships, and it is not uncommon to spot several in different liveries during a single flight.
Hull C
Often called the most common ship in the galaxy, the Hull C is the most-produced of the range and is considered by many to be the most versatile. Intended to hit the ‘sweet spot’ between the smaller single-person transports and the massive superfreighters that make up the rest of the range, the Hull C offers the expansive modularity of the larger ships while still retaining a modicum of the maneuverability allowed the low end of the range.
Hull D
The Hull D kicks off the larger end of the spectrum with a massive ship build around a rugged frame. The Hull D is affordable enough to be operated by mid-sized organizations and companies. Hull D are often used as flagships for mercantile operations, but their bulk means that they should be operated with escort fighters while not in safe space. The UEE military uses modified Hull D as part of their supply chain, arming and refueling the soldiers on the front line.
Hull E
The largest specialized freighter available on the market today, the Hull E is generally owned by major corporations and operated with a high degree of planning. The lack of maneuverability inherent in such a large ship means that anyone planning to operate them should be careful about equipping turrets and providing escort. Their potential load (and modularity) is unparalleled, however: no other ship allows as much room to store goods or to modify towards another role!
Master Packs
New Ships
Crucible
A so-called “flying toolbox,” the Crucible is Anvil Aerospace’s first dedicated repair ship. Featuring a rotating control bridge and a detachable pressurized workspace, the Crucible is a versatile mobile garage equipped with repair arms, a drone operation center and all the equipment needed to overhaul a damaged craft back into fighting shape.
The Crucible, our penultimate Wave Four concept ship, is now available! Designed by the legendary Ryan Church, this repair ship is just the thing for keeping your fleet up and running. When closed, the detachable workshop allows crews to repair single seat fighters internally. When open, the Crucible can use its remote arms to attach and repair larger craft! You can learn more about the Crucible here, and Star Citizen’s overall repair mechanic here.
Avenger Variants
Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 will see the addition of flyable variants for the Aegis Dynamics Avenger! The base Avenger available today is now the Stalker, designed with the needs of bounty hunters in mind. A basic Titan cargo ship and an advanced e-warfare Warlock are also available… and all three will be available for combat in Star Citizen’s next patch!
The Titan and Stalker are permanent additions to the pledge store, the Warlock will be on sale through the end of the anniversary sale (Sunday, November 29th.) Please note that these variants will be available as separate modules in the future. The initial release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 does not allow changing modules, so we are offering them as distinct, playable ships first. We would encourage you to CCU to the Avenger you’re most interested in trying rather than picking up all three!
Avenger Titan
Lacking the Prisoner Cells of the Stalker or the EMP Generator of the Warlock, the Titan’s hold is free to carry cargo. Couple that available space with the Avenger’s tried and true combat abilities and you’ve got a light cargo hauler that’s more than capable of handling itself in a fight.
Avenger Stalker
Initially designed as Aegis’ frontline carrier ship for the military, the Avenger Stalker took a different path, ultimately having a long and storied career as the standard patrol craft of the UEE Advocacy. Utilizing its cargo hold for prisoner transport, the Avenger features a sturdy, reliable hull and the capacity for larger-than-expected engine mounts.
Avenger Warlock
The Avenger Warlock was built towards a single design philosophy: stop ships, don’t destroy them. Probably the closest to a non-lethal fighter, the Warlock is outfitted with a Behring REP-8 EMP Generator, capable of emitting a powerful electromagnetic wave to disable any electronics unfortunate enough to be within the blast radius.
P-72 Archimedes
If you’re looking for something a little more agile, blaze among the stars with Kruger Intergalactic’s P-72 Archimedes. Whether for added security, exploring a system or simply the joy of flying, the Archimedes is the perfect companion snub craft. Featuring an extra intake and a lighter hull than its sister ship, the Archimedes delivers exceptional handling and boost capabilities in a sleek package you’ll want along for the ride.
The Archimedes is here! Concepted by Gurmukh Bhasin, the Archimedes is the speedy, luxury alternative to the P-52 Merlin. Initially included with the Constellation Phoenix, the P-72 is interchangeable with Kruger’s other snub fighter and can be attached to any snub-capable Constellation. The Archimedes is available this week as a concept sale.
Vanguard
The A3G Vanguard is the United Empire of Earth’s dedicated deep space fighter. Initially developed as a bomber-destroyer, the Vanguard is a hard-charging bulldog of a ship which features extensive forward-mounted weaponry designed to tear through the shields and armor of other spacecraft. Four high-caliber forward laser cannons and a massive central Gatling gun give the Vanguard an unprecedented amount of sheer striking power. So-named because their multiple-jump range allows them to form the forefront of any military expedition, Vanguard have seen extensive service against the Vanduul.
We’re proud to announce that the Aegis Vanguard will be available as hangar-ready in Star Citizen Alpha 2.0! Going forward, we intend to make ships hangar ready earlier in the process than previously allowed, starting during their advanced greybox phase. The Vanguard will be the first of these ships! In its honor, we’re making all three variants and their BUK options available again this week.
As 2015 draws to a close, I would like to thank everyone in the Star Citizen community for your incredible support. It’s amazing to think that this journey started out just over three years ago with the simple idea that there had to be more people out there than myself who liked space and PC games. Why weren’t the big publishers interested in supporting space games? Why did they think the PC wasn’t a viable platform?
To say that all of you proved them wrong is an understatement. To date, you’ve done that to the tune of over $102 million in crowd funding raised to build this game and a million Citizens signing up to follow what we’re doing here. It’s the game I’ve been dreaming about ever since the moment I learned to program… and I’m pretty sure it’s the game all of you have been dreaming about, too!
For making all of this possible, I can only say: thank you. With this funding we are now building a game that can compete with any AAA publisher backed game out there. No corporate suits deciding what franchise to milk or license. I promised a long time ago that the funds that we raise prior to what we consider the commercial release of Star Citizen would go towards additional development. Because of all of your support we can build this game bigger and better than anyone thought possible a few years ago.
With big numbers comes big attention. Some people look at the number and say “Why should they have all that money?” Well it’s because you want to build a big, bold game that doesn’t compromise! This is the secret. The additional money that comes in doesn’t go towards dividends for shareholders or making analysts happy with our profitability. It gets invested into making Star Citizen the best it can be. Hiring the best talent possible and allowing them to reach for the stars. Your contributions are going towards making the game better for you and all your friends. How could that possibly be a bad thing?
Technology like the procedural planet that we demonstrated in the Pupil to Planet demo during the December livestream is a direct result of your contributions. Without it we wouldn’t have the Frankfurt office or the technical wizards that reside there. Or the incredibly talented team in Manchester! Without the continued support and enthusiasm of the best community in gaming we would have never been able to hire up in the UK, Germany or expand our US development team. Thanks to you, we have been able to build a truly world class team.
But Star Citizen isn’t really about the money, that’s just what’s allowing us to build a game of the ambition and fidelity that people thought wouldn’t be possible.
A huge milestone towards achieving this goal was the release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 earlier this month, with the ability to play in a huge area (the biggest yet in gaming thanks to 64 bit floating point positional coordinates) and offering up all of these exciting options in that world: walking around a space station on foot or boarding a space ship by yourself or with friends… walk around that ship and/or have your friends man various stations while you are flying… fly thousands or even hundreds of thousands of kilometers, engage in ship to ship combat against AI or other players, exit your ship to EVA and explore space stations… engage in FPS combat (on foot or in EVA), rescue stranded players, perform various missions. All of this happens seamlessly without loading screens at a fidelity and scale that has not been seen before in any game.
Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 is the first time that you can see how the various elements; space combat, FPS, social interaction, huge play spaces will all fit together into one seamless holistic game experience. You can really see the dawn of the first person universe. Combining the fidelity that we are aiming for with the scale we want has always been our biggest technical challenge. We’re aiming for detail that is as good or better than any AAA first / third person game but that can go from picking out details from several centimeters away to seeing planets hundreds of thousands of kilometers in the distance, all simulated and rendered from the 1st person view of your avatar that can go anywhere.
2.0 shows the naysayers it can be done!
We still have a lot of work to do, many game systems to complete, content to generate, code to optimize, bugs to squash but you can now see what Star Citizen will feel like and in 2.0 you can get an experience you can’t get with any other game. I know that’s a pretty bold claim to make but you just have to visit our forums, or Reddit, or watch hundreds of YouTube videos or Twitch streams to see this happening every day.
The aspect that most excites me is that players are building their own narrative around what happened to them in their 2.0 game sessions. It reminds of when Wing Commander first came out and I noticed people talking about their wingmen / women as real people – not just a game character who you should team up with to complete a mission or level. Instead people were picking their flying partner based on personality and who they liked. That was the moment that I realized something special was happening and the whole was more than the sum of the parts.
Just imagine what you can do with the Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 experience but with even more content and features? More locations and interactions? It’s not really a space sim as we understand them. I find it hard to put my finger on why it seems so liberating but I think the ability to really feel like you can go anywhere and have the universe rendered with such detail and fidelity gives a different sense of immersing oneself in a game. With a lot of other space games, the experience still feels like a game. This feels different. You can even see it in the player behavior in 2.0. There is no win. Just experience and adventure.
And this is just the beginning!
What’s coming next?
Star Citizen Alpha 2.1 goes live to all backers on the PTU today. 2.1 includes a couple of new ships; the re-modeled Freelancer is now flyable and the Sabre, the new experimental medium fighter that we announced at CitizenCon 2015 is hangar ready. Both the Freelancer and the Sabre have benefited from the new ship modeling processes that the Ship Team has developed. Once a manufacturer’s style and look has been defined and we have built out its material set, the process of taking a ship from detailed 3D concept to in-game is much faster than it was previously. As we flesh out the various manufacturers in this manner expect to see quicker turn around from concept to in-game.
Going forward we will be changing our patch release strategy to be less feature driven and more date driven. Our goal is to release a new update every month (so January’s would be SC Alpha 2.2). We have many features in development separate to the release stream, and the idea is that we assess which features are ready for prime time a few weeks out from the release and then greenlight them for inclusion in that month’s release. We would then have a good PTU test, make sure the features really are ready for primetime, fixing up the issues we see and in the case of a feature needing more work, we would pull it out of the release. Physicalized EVA is an example of this. After testing in PTU we felt we needed to do some more work in order to polish it for better usability in certain circumstances.
We feel like this strategy will be better for both development and the community at large. It will ensure constant updates and patches and a good flow of features. But as we’re not defining which features make a particular release, we won’t be in a situation like we were earlier this year where the delays on the FPS development in Star Citizen ended up blocking game updates for the community.
With 2.0 as our foundation, which combines the various game modes into one holistic experience we now have a good strong framework for any new feature updates whether they involve FPS, ship, social or planetside. Expect to see us flesh out a huge amount of the Persistent Universe and its functionality in this coming year.
In addition to this we’ll be hard at work in completing Squadron 42, which is something I’m incredibly excited about. I had a lot of fun working with a great script and amazing set of actors earlier this year and it’s a lot of fun to start seeing all this come alive inside the engine. I will be personally spending a lot of time in the UK with the Foundry 42 team in 2016 closing out Squadron 42 for all of you to play. I can’t wait as Squadron 42 really is how I would have made a next generation Wing Commander. The fluidity that is so compelling in 2.0 only serves to enhance the feeling of immersion and being inside the story for Squadron 42. Combine this with some amazing performances and technology that can transcribe the performance into our game engine… I think the sense of emotional connection to the characters and story will take it to a whole other level than people are used to.
2016 is going to be a great year for Star Citizen!
I’d like to end the year by thanking everyone who is working to make Star Citizen better than I had thought possible. First of all, our amazing, million-strong community. Without you, we would not be here today. Your pledges have made all this possible… the sharing of your passion with others have allowed us to grow… and your excitement and creativity routinely reinvigorate the development team. I can’t properly express what you have meant to Star Citizen. In honor of the $100 million milestone, we’re attributing a UEE War Bond to each of your Hangars. The bond will be issued in the year you started backing (2942 for 2012, 2943 for 2013 and so on). For now, it’s just a small piece of decoration… and someday, when this cruel war with the Vanduul comes to an end, we’ll give you the option to redeem it for credits! (A small example of the kind of fun, immersive things a larger team lets us add to the game.) A special thank you to Algared, the backer who pushed crowd funding into the triple digits. Here’s to our “$100 million dollar man”… and everyone else who got us here.
Next, the incredible development teams around the world who have already transmuted Star Citizen from imagination into reality. I am honored to work with several hundred of the most talented game developers in the world, people who are truly passionate about this project in the same way I am. We have come so far from the tiny original troop of volunteers working to build the proof of concept demo and the crowd funding campaign. I know how hard each of you work, how much you put into Star Citizen. I know how much each of you believes in the universe we’re creating. And most importantly, I know that we will all someday look back, like the backers who supported us, and find incredible satisfaction in these five words: I helped make Star Citizen.
Here are some other ‘end of year’ numbers that speak to the incredible scale of what we’re doing on Star Citizen:
The Roberts Space Industries website served 178 million page views, with over 9.5 million visitors in 2015
Citizens have downloaded more than 30 petabytes of content this year.
80,000 backers have explored Crusader in 2.0 in the week since its launch.
The development team created 16,503 tasks in 2015 and resolved over 15,000 of them.
Developers made 204,716 Perforce checkins/changelists.
The team generated an average of 6 game builds per day.
QA has generated over 17,000 bug tickets this year, and the bugsmashers have since resolved almost 12,000 of those.
Finally, I would like to add a sincere thanks and well wishes to the other development teams around the world that share in our passion for space sims. I often see arguments online about which game to play; Star Citizen or Elite, Elite or No Man’s Sky and so on. The truth is that there’s no right answer: the space gaming renaissance is nothing but good news for gamers everywhere. Just as Wing Commander and X-Wing improved one another through competition, so too has Star Citizen been improved by other space games in development. The fantastic teams behind Elite: Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, EVERSPACE, Infinity: Battlescape and others inspire us daily. I wish you and anyone else expanding the frontiers of space and PC gaming all the best for 2016 and beyond!
Thank you all. I hope that everyone has a merry Christmas, a happy holiday and that you will join us again in 2016 for an incredible new year!
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< BEGIN TRANSMISSION >
We are locked and loaded, with today’s episode of TRACKER ready to shoot. At the trigger, as always, is me, Garret Coliga, delivering another round of the latest official Bounty Hunter Guild news, tech and tips brought to you by today’s sponsor, Apocalypse Arms. Manufacturer of such fine ship ordnance as the Revenant Ballistic Gatling and the Strife Mass Driver, Apocalypse has just introduced a new line of personal weapons that are as well-crafted and absolutely devastating as their larger siblings. To celebrate, they are having a fantastic Citizen Day special where all customers who earned their Citizenship this standard Earth year can send in a rebate for 25% off. The deal only lasts till the beginning of the new year, so all you newly franchised hunters out there, get shopping. Don’t forget to tell them that Garret sent you.
It’s only been a few weeks now since the declaration of war — about damn time I might add — but already the Guild is seeing an uptick in contracts. With the government sights turning to focus on the Vanduul threat, it seems that there is all the more business coming our way. Doubly so thanks to more than a few brave members stepping up to do their part and enlisting to serve. Our thoughts and well wishes to our brothers and sisters, as well as all the starmen fighting to protect us, but since the boards are being overrun with government bounties, I figured I’d use today’s HotSheet to highlight some of the jobs that are a little more off the beaten path, so to speak.
First up, a mechanic on the make. It seems one Silas Rapapo of Rapapo Repairs out near Vann was trying to up his profit margins by telling people that he was patching up their ship with high-end materials when, in reality, he was slapping on low-grade steel bonding covered in some nice paint work. A scam he apparently had going for a few years, silencing complaints with apologies and bribes where he could, until his shoddy work wound up getting a family of five nearly killed after their hull ruptured during what should have been a routine landing. Mr. Rapapo skipped bail, and has been on the lam since late November. Here’s hoping he escaped in a ship he repaired.
Moving on, we have a refugee gone rogue. After being sent to a Xi’An labor camp as a political dissident, Suec’ath managed to escape to UEE space in the hope of finding asylum. However, the request was denied and the Advocacy are looking to extradite Suec’ath back to Xi’An space. Turns out, the Xi’An are especially eager for the return and are being very generous on this one. Since Suec’ath has already been able to give a highly secure labor camp the slip, you can bet that this is one slippery slink. Smart credits are on them trying to make their way across yet another border to try their luck with the Banu.
Next, we have a lost little one. Eugene and Marigold Helms have listed a private contract for information on the whereabouts of their 13-year-old daughter. She ran away from their Cestulus home three months ago, and there has been no word from her since. The locals have turned up dry, and since the child left of her own will, it hasn’t been much of a priority. Not much of a contract either if I’m being honest, but sometimes the reward is about more than creds.
Which brings us nicely to today’s special guest, Ted Morales, the chair of the Guild’s Committee on Ethical Practices, to talk to us about what it means to have a code of ethics as a bounty hunter. But before we get to Ted, just need to add real quick that for all jobs on the HotSheet and any contract in general, you’re going to want to consult your local Guild or Law Enforcement office to double-check any bounty before confronting a fugitive, as bounties may have been cleared. And of course, jobs must be performed by licensed Guild Members in good standing.
With all that said and done, I’d like to welcome Ted to the program.
Ted Morales: Thanks for having me, Garret. Real excited to be on. I have been listening to TRACKER since I first got involved with the committee about two years ago. It’s a fantastic resource.
Thanks, Ted. Means a lot to me. Really. Now, first things first, I’m sure many of you out there are asking: wait, the Guild has an ethics committee? And the answer to that is a resounding yes. Ted, why don’t you explain to those not in the know what you and the committee do?
Ted Morales: Of course. While there are official laws set by the UEE outlining what a bounty hunter can and cannot do in order to be licensed, the Committee of Ethics is there to help establish guidelines for what a member should or should not do. Or as one of our committee members likes to say, the black and white stuff is easy; we’re there to help with the gray.
I know how easy it is to get wrapped up in the hunt and to justify questionable means because it’s all to help put away bad guys. I’ve done some stuff in the heat of the moment that I’m less than proud of now. An incident involving a suspect’s cat and an airlock comes to mind.
Ted Morales: Most hunters have stories like that. We are doing dangerous work where we interact with criminals every day. It is important for us to have a support system we can lean on to make sure we don’t get caught up in the mire. That’s where the committee comes in; not to make the tough choices for you, but to provide a helping hand so that guild members can be ethical and still perform their job.
I’m a firm believer that it’s worth the effort to make a living that you can live with, but when it comes to doing what’s right or doing what’s going to put creds in your account, it can definitely be a tough call.
Ted Morales: That’s why we’ve developed what we like to call the Four P’s of Responsible Hunting: Purpose, Pronouncement, Proportionality and Prejudice. If you take the time to ask yourself these four things before taking a job, or even in the middle of the job, it could help steer you in the right direct.
For example, with Purpose you ask yourself is there a good reason to be doing what I’m doing? Is there strong evidence for why I should be taking this case? Any hunt or investigation can lead to significant harm to the person or people being investigated, so it’s good as a first step to stop and see if the job itself feels justified before undertaking any action. That’s Purpose.
Right. Does this job seem like it’s a contract worth doing, and not just from a money side. What’s Pronouncement?
Ted Morales: Pronouncement is asking if the job or actions you are undertaking have been made public to the Guild or to the proper authorities, and if they have not, would you feel comfortable if they did come to light.
The old ‘would you be embarrassed if your parents found out’ test.
Ted Morales: Exactly, thinking about your peers’ or mentors’ reactions can definitely be a good guideline. If you wouldn’t want them to know, then maybe you should reconsider what you are about to do. The next ‘P’ is Proportionality. Are the actions you are taking appropriate to the task at hand?
Okay. Like how blowing up a ship might be totally valid for chasing down a violent suspect, but a little out of hand if you’re trying to nab someone who is delinquent on their support payments.
Ted Morales: Right. Just because a certain level of violence is justified in one case does not mean it is universally ethical. It is important to constantly be evaluating and making sure you are using the appropriate tools and techniques for the job at hand.
We’re going to have to take a break in just a second, here, but if my count is correct, I think we just have one ‘P’ left.
Ted Morales: The last one is Prejudice. Not only discrimination against people of different races, species, economic class — which is important — but also in the sense of your own personal feelings on the case. Have you had a problem with a shipjacker in your own line that may change the way you approach a contract? Did your parent’s store get robbed once, and you have —
Hold that thought, Ted. We need to hop to commercial for a minute, but when TRACKER comes back we are going to talk through how to use the four ‘P’s on some real life case examples, and explore what to do if you do make an ethical mistake. Plus, we’ve got a review of some new facial scan tech that you’re not going to want to miss. More TRACKER on the way.
Your whole life, you’ve had your feet planted on the ground, but felt the pull of the stars. You’ve come close to buying ships in the past, but didn’t because you never found a ship that inspires the same awe and wonder that you feel every time you look at the night sky.
That’s about to change.
Introducing the new Reliant. Proudly continuing MISC’s legacy of award-winning reliability and engineering ingenuity, MISC’s new Reliant is a versatile and durable multi-crew ship that is priced to own and guaranteed to last.
Speak to an authorized MISC dealer today for options and take that first step off your world.
The MISC Reliant variant lineup is here! We’ve imagined MISC’s entry into the starter market as an elegant yet utilitarian design capable of fulfilling a number of specific functions. Each Xi’An-tech infused variant has a specific role intended to offer expanded gameplay to the Star Citizen ‘verse. Whether you’re holding off rogues on the frontier, studying distant stars or broadcasting the latest action from the front lines, there’s a Reliant for everyone. We hope you enjoy the work our designers and artists have done developing three distinct new Reliant types!
About the Sale
The Reliant variants 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 three year insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add a Crucible poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Reliant variant 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 December 28th. You can also view a detail of the Reliant in the Holo Viewer in the Tech Overview of the ship page!
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game. 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.
Reliant Kore – Mini Hauler (Base)
With the Reliant Kore, MISC adds to its already impressive lineup of ships, a smaller introductory-class spacecraft. Utilizing advanced Xi’An designs, the Reliant features broad, sleek wings, omni-directional thrusters and a fully-articulated two-seat cockpit that supports horizontal and vertical flight modes. All of this combines with a larger carrying capacity than many ships in its class to make the Kore a natural choice for short-range hauling, or with the simple addition of a few optional components, this can-do ship can do anything you dream of.
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Reliant Sen – Researcher (Variant A)
Magellan, Pierce, Croshaw, names that echo through history thanks to their adventurous spirit, a curious nature and a reliable ship. The Reliant Sen is a versatile mobile science platform; outfitted with long range capabilities to take you further, longer, and an advanced sensor suite. Perfect for the aspiring explorer who wants to whisper their name into the halls of history.
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Reliant Mako – News Van (Variant B)
The Empire depends on up-to-the-second information, which is why reporters need to be able to go where the news is happening: wherever, whenever. Enter the Mako, all the flexibility and dependability of a MISC Reliant combined with a state of the art Image Enhancement suite and turret-mounted optics to capture every moment as it happens with the clarity and accuracy that makes headlines.
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Reliant Tana – Skirmisher (Variant C)
With Humanity ever-expanding through the universe, the need for a versatile lightweight fighter has expanded with it. Easy to maintain with a rugged construction, the Reliant Tana makes for an ideal choice for frontier and outpost defense thanks to its custom high-yield power plant, stronger shields and additional weapon mounts.
What a month! It’s likely that many of you know exactly what we were working on, as we’ve been publishing updates to Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 on the PTU as quickly and as quickly as possible. As you’ve observed, your testing and feedback has allowed us to zero in faster on the various bugs that were preventing us from going live. We’re pleased to announce that as of today (December 11, 2015) Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 is available live! But before you start exploring Crusader, let’s look back at what we did in November.
We’d also like to invite you to tune in on Wednesday, December 16th at 11 AM PST for our annual Holiday livestream. We have some exciting content we’re looking forward to sharing with everyone before our teams enjoy some hard-earned time off for the holidays. Tune in and help us round out a great year!
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Hi all!
November turned out to be such an amazing month for us here in LA (as well as the entire company). We knocked out huge milestones to help bring 2.0.0 to the PTU all while moving into a bigger and better space that’s conducive to improved communication and more efficient work practices. The level of finalized work has helped us put the month of November on the map here in CIG LA. Below is the in-depth breakdown of what we accomplished. Enjoy!
Engineering
Creating a true multi-crew universe in Star Citizen is a seriously daunting and ambitious goal. The Los Angeles Engineering group is incredibly proud of their accomplishments in creating a unique gameplay environment with unprecedented potential. Associate Gameplay Engineer Chad Zamzow and Gameplay Engineer Mark Abent are the individuals individual behind the programming of our new EMP weapon, implementing the various effects the EMP weapon will have on its targets plus smashing any bugs that arose.
Server stability is always a major priority for our Engineers, and our engineering team has been one of the groups responsible for the markedly increased performance of the 2.0.0 PTU servers over the past couple weeks. Not only has the team been working on reducing server crashes, they’ve has also been integrating the new ItemSystem 2.0 code into the development code branches for future releases after 2.0.0. They have has also been working with other coders on the ItemSystem 2.0.
With a sharp eye towards improving the flight dynamics in-game, our flight engineers have been fine-tuned the new Flight Modes to our IFCS, allowing players finer control over their ships at differing velocities. While not directly game-related, we have built a tool called the Loadout Editor. This powerful tool makes it far more efficient and convenient for our Designers to directly edit the loadout of the Vehicles, Items, and Characters, instead of the error-prone practice of manually editing the XML files separately. This providing our designers with greater ability to focus on design with less potential worries.
Design
If anything can be said about the Los Angeles (formerly Santa Monica) Tech Design Team, it is that they are an endless wellspring of innovation and creativity. The excitement of having pushed 2.0.0 to the PTU is a massively important milestone for Star Citizen. Allowing our players to captain ships with other players in a multi-crew environment is one of the keystones that the vision of Star Citizen is hinged upon.
The LA Tech design team achieved milestones that are as awesome as they are astronomical. One of the most anticipated ships in the game, the Constellation, has been their responsibility for finishing the tech setup of the ship and getting it out into our backer’s hands in the 2.0.0 release. Designers have retro-fit many of the legacy ships to utilize the new component system that he’s been efforting. So far, the 300-series, the M50, Avenger, and Gladius have been retro-fit as of this update.
That’s not all: they have also been diligently designing the Salvage mechanic and has been working hand in hand with our Design Director. The Repair mechanic has also passed its next step in the design process as we inch closer to sharing how these features will work with the Anvil Crucible ship.
The first implementation of the EMP system is running through the final tests with our QA team giving it a shakedown ensuring it will be as effective as it is stunning when directed at your enemies. Furthermore, we have been fine-tuning how exactly the EMP weapon will affect its targets; from causing screen corruption on the HUD to causing distortion damage to the pipes, the EMP system on the Warlock Avenger is a feature we are excited to debut.
Art
Now that players are able to disembark from their ships and explore the various sites in Star Citizen such as the Crusader space station, our artists are putting their styluses into heavy gear to create a beautiful, living, breathing universe. Our character concept artists have penned the concepts for a variety of uniforms and armor in the universe. Most recently, their skills have been bent towards designing a unique style for the UEE Marines from the Light Armor to Medium Armor and even how the Marine under suit will look and feel. One of our artists even had the envious responsibility of creating the game assets for Mark Hamill’s Steve “Old Man” Colton’s space suit.
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Within the Star Citizen universe, we have designed each vehicle manufacturer to have its own unique design language. This not only allows each ship to possess a recognizable silhouette, it also maintains a level of consistency for each manufacturer’s brand image. The concept art team has helped create style guides for the vehicle manufacturers within Star Citizen, much as your favorite brands of automobile manufacturers do in the real world. This internal consistency of manufacturer styles is apparent in various ships such as the AEGS Gladius and AEGS Retaliator, making each brand more distinctly recognizable. They’ve also completed the elegant concepts for the Archimedes.
Speaking of ship designs, the MISC Reliant single-pilot ship incorporates alien Xi’An technology, so the art stylization of the Reliant needs some additional aesthetic cues while still reflecting MISC’s distinct design language. Our artists and rigger have grey-boxed the MISC Reliant, moving it out of the concept art stages and bringing it that much closer to becoming flyable. The milestones that have been crossed are the modeling of the cockpit, cargo area, and exterior tail. The Drake Caterpillar has reentered the concept stages for further exploration to help catapult that into production soon.
Writing
For the PU, the writign team has been juggling a handful of different areas. In addition to combing through the old Galactic Guides to bring them more in line with the Starmap, they’ve been delving back into landing zones, working on fleshing out the locations themselves as well as the characters who inhabit them. Writers have been organizing the clothing system by determining an initial batch of styles and manufacturers to make it feel really robust, versatile and (most importantly) expandable.
For Squadron 42, they’ve just finished a complete review of all the sequences from Chris’ selects sessions last month. In a nutshell, the process is effectively sitting and watching each of the edits side by side with the script to confirm what’s been shot/edited and what hasn’t. Tremendously exciting stuff, I know, but with all these scenes, characters and files flying around, it’s very easy for things to slip through the cracks, so this is a helpful check to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’s also being done to understand what would be needed if additional shoots are required.
Finally, we’ve just been playtesting the 2.0 PTU demo which has been really amazing to see come to life this month.
There we go! November wraps up with some top-notch work from a dedicated team willing to do what it takes to deliver the best game possible. We’re bringing a close on several major developments for Star Citizen and we’re excited to share with you. We greatly appreciate the trust you’ve put in us to make the game you (and we) have always dreamed of. Until next month.
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Greetings Citizens,
November has been a full month with many great moments. We’ve been testing 2.0.0 internally for some time and now we have allowed (at the time this was written) more than 125,000 accounts to help us test 2.0.0 on the Public Test Universe! We had a great Live Stream from the LA studio mid-month, and had a very successful AnniVERSEary sale and celebration. Here are detailed reports from each team in the Austin studio!
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With Thanksgiving on the brain this month, the Persistent Universe team in Austin has had their hands in all kinds of pies! The Art Team have been focused on several different environments. Cort Soest spent a lot of time drilling down on performance optimization for the Crusader map for release in 2.0.0, trying to get it to run as smoothly as possible. Lee Amarakoon and Emre Switzer also took the Nyx>Delamar>Levski landing zone environment that BHVR has been working on and gave it a first pass on VFX and Lighting. While it’s not in 2.0, that environment is in Final Art Polish phase and we’re rounding out the finishing touches. The Casaba Outlet clothing shop has also received a polish pass, and lighting for that environment has wrapped up as well. Lastly, concept artists Ken Fairclough and Ted Beargeon have been helping develop some look/feel concepts for the [REDACTED] environment for Squadron 42.
Our concept team has also been hard at work developing a gigantic Star Map poster to be included in physical and digital version of game packages, at which point you’ll be able to see all the crazy detail that has gone into this painting. We’re highlighting some of the near-term landing zones and…well you guys will just have to wait and see the rest!
Our Animation Team has had their hands full as well, and not just with turkey legs! We’ve been retargeting male animations to the female skeleton in preparation for her release. The female character can now enter, exit, and interact with all of our ships thanks to initial implementation by Jay Brushwood. We still need to do a polish pass on those animations but we’re getting there. We’ve also gotten the female locomotion set running smoothly (no pun intended) except for a few hiccups that need ironing out. Bryan Brewer is working on ironing those out with the help of Sean Tracy. We’re looking ahead to our NPC AI release, and Vanessa Landeros and David Peng are implementing Medical Unit and Nightclub animations, respectively, so our NPC’s will be a little more lively out in the PU. Lastly, we’ve had our hands on several ships prepping them for launch. We tackled the character interaction animations for Avenger variants earlier this month and are now focused on the Vanguard, Freelancer, and Xi’an Scout.
On the Design side, we’ve wrapped up creating blueprint documents for the shops on Levski (including the bazaar area). We now know what exactly is going to be sold in the shops on Levski, and have added these items to our Shop Inventory Matrix. We’ve also identified props, characters, and gameplay functionality required for these environments and are now mapping out a plan of action for these assets and features. We’ve been looking ahead towards future landing zones and points of interest for the Stanton system recently, trying to flesh out the “in-between” space amongst the major hubs of Hurston, MicroTech, Crusader, and ArcCorp.
Tony Zurovec has been up to his eyeballs in all kinds of design discussions around the company. Topics discussed include Shopping, Character Customization, Persistence, Remote Storage, Jump Point travel, Exploration, and Mission Types. Some of these are pretty near term and you should be able to see the fruits of these discussions fairly soon. Others are longer term but on our radar nonetheless. Those who have been paying close attention will likely be able to distinguish which features are which!
On the Programming front, Jeff Zhu wrapped up work on the brand-spankin’ new Main Menu. Now that we have Crusader as a locale option, we thought it was important to allow you guys to jump right into the action wherever you choose. Getting where you want to go as quickly as possible should be much easier now thanks to this new feature. Much of the rest of the month has been spent on fixing bugs found in the Party System since we want this feature to be as clean as possible for our next release.
Work on Persistence continues to plug away on the backend. Jason Ely, Tom Sawyer, and Jeff Zhu are all contributing to this work and we’re hoping this team effort will allow us to be able to show something more front facing here in the near-future. Our first goal is to get Character Customization and Shopping persisting across gameplay sessions.
Live Operations
QA
QA has been very productive for the month of November. The month began with QA well into SC Alpha 2.0.0 testing. The team conducted daily playtests and promptly reported all issues to production. With each passing day and more fixes, we were able to witness the game slowly evolving into a very fun experience!
We could see the potential but the game was still suffering from multiple serious issues including server and client crashes that hindered game play significantly. Although SC Alpha 2.0.0 was far from being ready to release officially to our live environment the decision was made to deploy to the PTU to a small group of backers. This proved to be incredibly valuable. A big thank you to these dedicated backers for suffering through these issues to help us test the initial PTU deploy.
Going forward we will look to the PTU as a true test environment. More builds will be deployed in earlier states so we can begin testing features with larger numbers of people and start implementing fixes as early as possible. So keep in mind that testing on the PTU will not be for the faint of heart, nor for the selfish of spirit. PTU is neither Alpha nor a pure privilege – it is participatory QA, and a PTU tester’s job is to help us identify and nail down problems that are keeping the release from the rest of the backer population.
After multiple fixes and seven daily deployments to the PTU the game is much more stable. As of this writing we still have a few must fix issues but are well on track to officially releasing SC Alpha 2.0.0 to our live environment very soon.
Everyone on the QA team is doing an amazing job. Our newest addition QA Lead Vincent Sinatra has settled into his role in the LA studio. Vincent wrote up a comprehensive report comparing each ship’s flight behavior between SC Alpha 1.3.0 and SC Alpha 2.0.0. With this information our Technical Designers were able to tune flight behavior for SC Alpha 2.0.0 to their intended specifications. Vincent is also working very closely with our ship expert and Austin QA Lead Andrew Hesse testing the new IFCS modes as well as providing valuable ship balance feedback.
On the Automated testing front Melissa Estrada has been continuing to work very closely with Engineer Miles Lee and Global Environment Tech Lead Cort Soest. We are now able to fully automate our various editor tests. This will be incredibly helpful to ensure any issue that would hinder development is reported and fixed as soon as possible.
Jeffrey Pease has been amazingly helpful this past month. He has taken on the colossal task of monitoring our game servers and back end services during a very challenging phase. Each day Jeffrey combs the server logs and provide comprehensive reports and metrics to our producers and engineers. This information has been integral in their efforts to stabilize the servers during our initial deployment of SC Alpha 2.0.0 to the PTU.
Todd Raffray has been heading up testing of our party system, chat and Area18. Robert Gaither has been assisting Todd and also each day compiling and providing an updated SC Alpha 2.0.0 must-fix issues list to production. Andrew Rexroth has been ensuring all FPS related features and issues are continually tested. Marissa Meissner has been compiling patch notes and known issues, verifying each reported fix, and documenting best practices. Tyler Witkin travelled to LA to help train Vincent and also conducted workshops with the LA designers and engineers to ensure they know how to obtain and play the latest builds QA is testing. Besides their individual areas of expertise, everyone is also working together heavily testing Crusader.
This has been a very busy month, but all of our hard work is paying off with how SC Alpha 2.0.0 is shaping up. We are very much enjoying watching and reading about everyone’s experiences. The excitement is palpable! The team is doing great and we are incredibly excited to share SC Alpha 2.0.0 with everyone! See you next month!
Game Support
November was a pretty big month for Game Support for a few reasons, not the least of which is because we’ve doubled our staff size. That’s right, everyone… we’ve gone from one to two!
Will Leverett in Austin, Texas has been joined by Chris Danks at Foundry 42 in Manchester, UK. Chris comes to us not only with a wealth of technical knowledge and support experience, but he is also a backer! Chris has started recently and is already hard at work, and we’re excited that we now have a presence in both Europe and in North America that allows us to expand the hours of coverage for players.
Aside from this, our biggest news is obviously related to 2.0 on PTU. Part of Game Support’s mission is to assist in managing playtests, coordinating with Production, QA, and LiveOps. Getting 2.0 on PTU is a massive step forward for Star Citizen, and we’ve been very excited to help construct the mechanisms that allow players to test and contribute back to the game’s development.
To prepare for the coordination of testers, we’ve set up a special PTU Issue Council plus a Discord chat server so that testers can chat and test together. We’re also collecting information to push out notifications and updates to our forums, to Reddit, and to Discord. Different players like different mediums, so we want to hit everywhere that our players congregate.
This has easily been our best testing period yet. We’re excited to do our part to help make the BDSSE, and we can’t wait to get 2.0 out to everyone else as soon as it’s ready!
IT/Operations
Our big project for this month was the complete relocation of the LA studio. Dennis Daniel, our IT Manager in LA, has been working tirelessly preparing the new office for this move, from overseeing the network wiring installations to coordinating with contractors on every level ensuring that the server room meets standards including fire safety, physical security and access controls to name just a few prep items. During the move itself, Dennis personally handled most of the system tear down and packing as well setting up and testing every single developer workstation in the new location.
This type of physical move affects the entire network and can disrupt secure communications between studios. In order to reduce downtime for the dev team the move was effected over the weekend and continued around the clock so developers could start work first thing Monday morning. Paul Vaden, Network Services Manager and Mike Jones, IT Director came out from the Austin studio to help migrate back end infrastructure while our system engineers, Mike Pickett and Chris Graves provided network programming support remotely from Austin. Due to the extensive prep work and planning, the LA studio was only disconnected from the rest of the company for 1 hour while the servers were physically transported from the old location to the new server room and reconnected. IP ranges were not migrated so it was necessary to change all the firewalls and tunnels from Austin. Mike and Paul installed network upgrades and secure communications between studios were restored quickly and after a few hours of testing, monitoring services were restored well within the planned outage window.
The new studio looks amazing and thanks to the extra planning during construction, we were able to include several other upgrades for the team including greatly improved storage performance, wireless networking, and a revamped phone system. Sometimes the small things really matter and cable management falls in to this category. Development areas have only two wires per workstation coming down to floor pockets, making for very clean cabling. The server room received new racks and cable management making the new LA server room a showpiece _that is, for the very few people who will ever get past the new multi-tiered security systems locking down the studio’s central network.
Live Ops
The publishing team has spent considerable time this month on improving publishing efficiency and reducing downtimes specifically within the PTU. We’ve accomplished reduced deployment times again as well as internal reporting on server load and health. Star Citizens helping us test the PTU will have noticed numerous back to back publishes this month as well as dramatic improvements in client and server stability based largely on their help and these new reporting stats. We’ve also significantly increased the number of servers supporting the PTU cluster as part of our continued load testing scope. The information provided in these tests has been invaluable to the dev teams and we plan to keep this type of testing going for the foreseeable future. We expect this will lead to a much more predictable publishing cycle on the production servers.
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Greetings Citizens,
Another busy month on Star Citizen! We have a lot to celebrate as the year draws to a close, and there’s a lot coming down the pipeline to share with our backers. Here’s our department-by-department breakdown of what was accomplished this month, as we march onward towards Squadron 42 and close out the year with Star Citizen Alpha 2.0!
Animation
This month we’ve been working closely with the animation director and programmers with the view to getting the locomotion sets, lookposes, stop starts, reloads, weapon select and deselects up to shape for the FPS portion of the game.
We’re also still looking to recruit a few more members to the team to handle the work load next year.
Graphics
This month has all been about getting 2.0 into the backers hands, and a lot of work has gone in behind the scenes to improve the underlying tech to make this release possible, but unfortunately the details aren’t as interesting as our usual graphics work! We’ve been crunching through dozens of bugs including Crossfire/SLI issues, light & LOD ‘popping’, shadow ‘peter panning’ and shadow ‘acne’ among many many others.
Other than bug fixing our other major focus this month has been on performance. The 2.0 release threw up a LOT of performance issues due to the scale of the map and the amount of content the design team are pushing in, and so our team helped the rest of the studio diagnose and fix these issues. Most of the performance issues were with the CPU and not the GPU, and so that’s where our focus has been, and after several weeks of optimising we got the base frame-rate up from 20 fps to above 60 fps. Many of these were ‘easy fixes’ where the game was processing a lot more objects/lights/whatever than it need to (easy to happen with such a large complex map!), and after improving the logic and/or culling algorithms we were able to vastly improve the performance. Unfortunately not all the performance issues were so easy to address, especially those relating to increase the number of ships in the levels, and so there’s now a few bigger improvements in the works from the game and core-tech teams that will greatly improve the performance in later releases but couldn’t be completed in time for 2.0. As we continue to resolve the CPU performance issues the bottleneck will then likely move towards the GPU and this is what we’ll need to focus on for the next few releases. On a related note we’ve noticed that a lot of our keen backers are tweaking their user.cfg file to change a lot of rendering settings to squeeze some extra performance out, but not always in the best way. So in a future release we’ll hopefully write a quick guide as to what exactly these settings do and how you can set them up to get either the best visuals or performance.
Engineering
Again this month we’re beavering away working towards the 2.0.0 live release. Our first main concern has been trying to get stability sorted, followed by performance, and then general bug fixing. Because this is such a big release with so many new features and new technology this has been quite a big challenge, especially when we start stressing all the systems getting more and more players in. For example one the big issues we had before we could get the build out to the PTU was that spawning in the big ships, such as the Retaliator or the Connie, would immediately cause everybody to disconnect with a network error. Not great for a release designed to bring multicrew gameplay out to the public! Because the standard CryEngine assumes everything is loaded at the start of a level, and doesn’t expect entities to be spawned in dynamically, we were fighting some of the network code to behave with how these larger ships are built. Finally after much head scratching a solution was found, and now it’s up on the PTU and so far it seems to have had a really positive reception, with people really having fun out there. There are still a few nasty bugs showing up, both on the clients and the server, which we’re hammering away at before we can get it to go live.
In the meantime… on the UI side. We’ve been working on a couple of new applications for Mobiglass. Firstly there’s the new mission viewer app. This allows you to track what missions you’ve received, which are currently active, and which have been completed. Similarly for the active missions you can then drill down and see what objectives they currently consist of, which you’ve completed and which are currently active. All active objectives can have HUD navigation markers so you can tell where you next need to go. The other app is another system to track all the information you’ve collected on your travels. As you go through the game you’ll be required to find information to help you complete your missions. This information can be uploaded to your Mobiglass as you go along, and this can be just from some interesting text, to images or audio and video clips. The app will allow you to browse and organise everything you’ve collected for future reference. Other UI work includes an ongoing optimisation pass, as it can get surprisingly expensive, especially when they’ve been initially prototyped and implemented in ActionScript.
Work is also continuing on the changes for the new component system, which again will help make the update of the entities more efficient in the longer term, and moving all the old GameobjectExtensions over to the new components. This is a pretty big change, and no doubt will cause some new issues, but it will in the long run mean more robust and faster code.
QA
At the risk of re-treading what the other departments may have already said in their updates, November has been all about working hard to get the next iteration of Star Citizen to the public; in other words, the push of 2.0.0 to the PTU and eventually to Live. However, for the UK QA team, the long hours were quickly forgotten as soon as we started to get our first glimpses of the Largeworld map being played by the backers. It’s really been a great reward to see all the examples of emergent gameplay we knew were possible (and which the constant test cases kept us away from!). It’s like they always say, a PTU Largeworld Star Citizen patch is as good as a rest. Thankfully this was never truer than now.
Not only has the 2.0.0 patch going to PTU given us a chance to revel in the Largeworld map being played by backers for the first time, but it has also been the first proper opportunity for us to gauge the effectiveness of the Issue Council heading towards it’s long term use – especially with the less than perfect stability of the servers and client on the first push! So thanks to everyone that helped us in working through and entering Bugs into the site – you may have noticed some of the UK QA team joining you in the PTU servers – I’m sure they were perfect gentlemen.
Hopefully at the time you read this we’ll have gone through many more deployments of patches (at the time of writing we are at 2.0.0e) and we’ll have managed to get things stable enough to release 2.0.0 to the whole community. In order to get there, the UK QA team has been working with the network engineers at F42 to track down the server crashes (those which cause all users to receive a disconnection error) via a local Linux box server, as well as entering and reproducing all of the client crashes you’ve been encountering.
In summary, this was a very big month for the company as a whole – and the effects were felt in all studios and departments, not least in QA. For us, the way 2.0.0 has shaped up and come together clearly informs all future testing of Star Citizen in a way Arena Commander never could; not only is 2.0.0 a taster of what’s to come for the Star Citizen community, it’s a taster for the QA team and the challenges ahead. We’ve learned so much in the last few months, November in particular, that it would be extremely difficult for me to quantify everything we’ve been through. All I can say for sure is, we’re still enjoying the journey!
Art
We’ve been sharpening our magazine cover skills this month, both PC Gamer and GameStar magazine feature a collaborative effort by all the studios and given us further insight into the areas we need to figure out with the high fidelity characters. The Concept team has been working on defining the Freelancer interior, rocket launchers and method of entry and exit, as well as additional work to the Shubin Facility for Sq42 story line areas. This will be ongoing to help define a clear vision for the art team. Set dressing concepts have started for Alpha Bravo and Charlie Space stations (Crusader), this is so we can start to add personality to the levels rather than them being a vanilla modular kit. Last but not least, we worked on ‘low tech’ area props and how to bring them into line with our new art pipeline. On top of this we have our first dedicated lighting artist start and a senior tech artist – both positions we have been looking to fill for a very long time!
Environment
The primary focus of the environment team was polishing and optimising the Crusader environment for SCA 2.0, this isn’t the most Hollywood part of the development process but it is the most crucial. We’ve been optimising everything from our per asset LOD chain, vis areas setup, lighting etc. Also due to the scale and quantity of POI’s in the environment we’ve been fixing plenty of visuals bugs to improve the quality of the user experience as much as we possibly can.
As we’re ramping down on SCA 2.0 we are now beginning to look into the next environments which we will put into production – more on that next month.
From all the environment team, we hope all you space explorers enjoy SCA 2.0. We’ve been watching a few of the streams and it’s great seeing all the antics you guys get up to!
VFX
The VFX team’s focus has been very much on polishing and optimising all effects for 2.0. To do so, the team have been play-testing the game in a way only VFX artists can – deliberately crashing ships, shooting each other (a lot!), running around inside burning ships, Quantum Travelling in obscure camera positions, deliberately flying into incoming fire instead of avoiding it, etc.!
As well as being a ton of fun it’s been an invaluable process, as we discovered – and subsequently fixed – several issues which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. We’ve also been paying close attention to all the excellent PTU footage that our backers have been showing off. This too has been really useful to help us spot any issues and choose some key effects to improve (the laser impact sparks for example).
Away from 2.0, we also made a start on effects for another couple of ships that are due to be flight-ready in the near future. A flight-ready effects pass for ships usually includes: interior and exterior damage, all ship items (thrusters, weapons, counter measures) and anything else required. We have also begun looking at another couple of environments that will be due an effects pass in the very near future.
Character team
Well, we doubled the team here last week – i.e. we went from one to two character artists, yes, we are understaffed, we are looking for talented folk, there seems to be a worldwide shortage! On a positive note, we are making some top notch characters that Chris is happy with and looking forward to revealing more as we progress.
Props
The ship component pipeline has been the order of the month, to get final resolution on poly counts, materials, style, the tests are looking good, still some polish to do but ideally this will meet the gold standard. We do need to strengthen this team too so if you are looking to build a massive variety of objects then please apply, prop nirvana awaits!
Ships
Production is pushing forward on several ships. The Freelancer is in the middle of a complete makeover to bring the ship up to current tech and required standards. It will be Flight ready very soon for everyone that has been patiently waiting for the last of the initial pledge ships to be fully flyable. The Starfarer is making great progress towards being Hangar ready. Both the Freelancer and Starfarer share a lot of similar design elements and materials as they are from the same manufacturer which helps.
The Aegis Vanguard is into its last couple of cycles of production to flight ready and the Aegis Sabre is also approaching hangar ready with its cockpit taken to final for all other departments to get running with.
Design
November was a great month for the UK Design team. Even though we haven’t got 2.0 in a robust enough state for full release we made a ton of progress on fixing up some critical blocking issues that have hampered progress on Squadron 42. The designers are now moving ahead at a healthy pace on both the Live Build and Squadron 42. There are still loads of fixup, balancing and additional layers of design to implement in the coming releases, but it feels like we are starting to get a solid platform to work from now.
We have the Squadron 42 game-world map now put into the new “Large World” system for the first time, so we are no longer looking at the locations in isolation, but as part of the overall Odin system. This is really helping with placement and pacing for the campaign as a whole.
The AI is coming along well in our test map and will really start to look incredible when the final animation sets begin to come in.
Also this month, we have spent a lot of time working with the engineers with regards to optimization allowing us to have more life, be it AI or player in the current Live Build. Again, we still have a long way to go, but the processes and approach is starting to pay off. We created a test map with a bunch of characters placed in Port Olisar, going about their daily business, repairing things, interacting with vendors or just talking and it made a huge difference to the feel of the place. So now we are in a process of analysing where the performance hits come from adding theses to the build and systematically fixing them up.
So all-in-all we are feeling happy about where we are currently with 2.0 and where we are heading with the Live build and Squadron 42 in the future.
Audio
Hello all!
In CIG Audio we’ve had quite the busy month working on Alpha 2.0. What kind of audio went into this release? Outlaw placeholder voice sets (three total), UI sounds for the Port Olisar ship selector, the black box beacon for Crusader, sounds for datapad interaction, Charlie Station’s internal sounds and dialogue, repair drone SFX, audio log SFX and even the Warlock’s EMP module charge-up and release! There was a great deal of audio work that went into spaceflight notifications, too: planetary boundry notifications, fly by sounds, green zone notifications and more.
Of course, there was plenty of work on ships, too. We continued with the Aegis UI cockpit revamp and are preparing to move on to other manufactures. We’re trying to create a ‘sonic indentity’ that will parallel the different visual identity for each manufacturer, separating them from other ships of the same size and class. We worked on audio for a number of impending ships, including the Vanguard, Constellation (the cargo door and main elevator sounds!), the Freelancer and some fixes for the primary thrusters of the Origin 300 series and the Avenger. We have also begun prototyping the sound of the ship’s power-plant, which will become crucial to defining a ship’s signature. Additionally, we are planning to provide a much richer ambient soundscape within our ships by having piping, computers, engine drones and damage all react from appropriate positions within the ship, rather than just approximating it all with a static 2D ambience.
Work on the ‘back end’ includes setup for FPS battlechatter hooks, code for the chatter system, code for the music logic system and setup for ambient states, work on the interactive music system and the first plans for FPS & EVA music states. We spent some time rewriting the Cry-Engine’s Area Manager which is responsible for implementation of the area-based audio functionality (ambient sound effects and reverbs). We’ve now integrated it with the Zone System, updated and streamlined area priority management logic, refactored and simplified the logic that handles area geometry. The new Area Manager should be able to scale much better for the large worlds we are building, and should be easier to extend with the new geometry types that better suit our needs.
Thanks again for all the fantastic support and have a great holiday and new year.
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The Cinematics department’s Senior Environment Artist is currently working on finalizing environmental art for the UEE MacArthur Skydock, a location for an early scene in Squadron 42 that features Admiral Bishop. Our new lead Cinematic Artist is doing a full blocking of the cine scenes featured in Chapter 02 and we also did a first public teaser of Mark Hamill as LtCdr Steve ‘Old Man’ Colton as he climbs into his Gladius cockpit onboard the AEGS Idris featured in Squadron 42. This scene is the backend of his introductory scene with the player character.
In-Engine renders of this scene were also used for the PC Gamer & Gamestar cover reveals of Old Man.
Next up is our first scene with Gillian Anderson’s character. Character art is prepping her costume and we have a first version of her scanned head to work with. Exciting!
Engine
We finalized our WAF build system integration which now dramatically cuts down build times and allows code analysis runs. The Linux targets can now also be built using Clang.
Assisted in making progress with seamless 1st/3rd person animations. We helped to stabilize and optimize the 2.0 release.
We’re in the process of implementing an automatic crash information collector for PTU and PU. This is to ensure that we get critical information in case the game crashes on clients so that we can more quickly stabilize builds and better assess how common certain crashes are.
There was also a lot of work in CryPhysics to improve the control of the stiffness on arms and legs for zeroG.
We have some other cool items we’ve been focusing on that will be presented in the near future.
Audio Code
We recently spent time rewriting the CryEngine’s AreaManager which is responsible for implementation of the area-based audio functionality (ambient sound effects and reverbs). We integrated it with the Zone System, updated and streamlined area priority management logic, refactored and simplified the logic that handles area geometry. The new AreaManager should be able to scale much better for the large worlds we are building, and should be easier to extend with the new geometry types that better suit our needs.
Animation Code
The Aim-IK system is the foundation of the shared 1P/3P shooter experience and this month we spend a lot of time on a bigger refactoring and cleanup of that system. This encompasses a total rewrite of the low-level code in CryAnimation and all related interfaces (aim- and look-poses are now driven by the transition queue, rather than individual interfaces), new setups in the XML-files (aim- and look-poses operate on different joints on the same skeleton) and also a major change in the assets (aim- and look-poses are now separated assets with special procedural adjustments). Along the way we improved the method for eye stabilization and the look of aiming in extreme directions. When aiming with a scope or aiming down the sight, the right eye of the player is perfectly aligned with the weapon. In zero-G we can use the same system for 360-degree aiming, where a character can aim at a fixed target while his body is arbitrarily rotating in spaces. On top of the Aim-IK system we added an improved version of procedural weapon sway and weapon inertia. The goal is to have a unified system that allows us to use all 3P animations in the first person view.
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As a part of our bigger DCC pipeline right now we are concentrating on the part of the pipeline where all the cleaned/Uncleaned motion capture animation data could be transferred to our Maya DCC and to our Maya Puppet.
We’re building and designing many tools like character picker and animation binder which will make the animators work efficient. This is a first building block of our major pipeline where we are aiming animation sharing, transferring , character swapping and batch exporting. We are also scaling our character pipeline in a way which could be suitable to various departments.
Build
We’ve been working on trybuild, we have the waf now in for our game-dev branch. Once we move Transformer to use waf, trybuild can be enforced and which will be more efficient for builds, at least from a code point of view.
Been working on feature testing automation, still a few issues to iron out, mainly due to builds being made in ATX and tests running here in DE. It’s 90 % done. Chris Speak, our Senior QA, put together a simple feature test map against which I can easily run the py tool I wrote some time ago to drive the test.
Been helping the ATX guys who have been working on optimizing the assets job. In particular the idea is to break the huge assets job into smaller jobs, one per pak, that can then be assigned to multiple agents and run at the same time. This will also allow us to write our own paker instead of using RC for paking. All the above was sided by the usual troubleshooting, mainly due to a couple tools that went in recently and made their way into the build system
AI
A lot of progress for the FPS AI has been made in the last month.
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We have mostly been focusing on our first FPS combat scenario and we are iterating on the development of the behaviors of our first enemies. First of all we are completing our first pass on the combat from cover implementation: NPCs can now correctly select between the available shooting postures, selecting the best cover they can fight the players from and smoothly play animations to shoot from covers.
We created a Token system that will allow AI to coordinate their behavior decisions. As an example, imagine a group of NPCs in a situation where it would be really good to throw a grenade. The token system will the allow us to specify the amount of characters allowed to perform that action, that is achieved acquiring a “Throw Grenade” token that can be shared only between the specified n NPCs. This system is going to be used both for FPS and ships behavior, it is very useful for a lot of different type of coordination and we will share more with you as soon as we will have some concrete example in game.
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This month we also started working on character reciprocal collision avoidance integrating CryEngine ORCA implementation with our current movement code. We are planning to make some research on this topic, we want to have a couple of collision avoidance implementation to properly compare them and maybe use them in different scenarios.
Since last month we started iterating on the functionalities that will allow us to have multicrew ships fully controlled by the AI. We are working towards having specific crew members taking care of the different seats. That will allow us to have one NPC that can pilot the ship while the others can use the additional turrets to shoot. This is also the first step to allow in the future to have NPC crew members in a player-controlled ship!
In addition to all of that, the Frankfurt office is always continuing coordinating the work made by Moon Collider. This months that was mainly focused on spaceships formation, systemic take-off/landing, behavior improvements and a lot of optimizations and general improvements!
Design
On the design side this month there has been a lot of back and forth trying to unify the Power Distribution System for ships and stations and defining technical elements that need to get built for power piping to work. What we aim for is to have power management, for anything in the game, use the same systems, the same logic and the same UI elements. We do not want to have players learn a new system when they board a station. The visual part of the UI might be a bit different from one ship/station to another but ideally they should all work in the same way.
Life Support systems also have been going through a very similar process. We are looking towards having depressurisations affect players, AI and physicalized objects, dynamically creating breaches, having atmosphere compositions with a mix of benign or toxic gases and lots of ways in which these gasses will affect your normal gameplay and the environment around you.
On the FPS suit side of things we are taking a hard look at our inventory management. We’re trying to figure out how the player’s inventory will work while in first person, how do you loot, how do you change loadouts, how you reload weapons and all other activities that involve items the players might be carrying with them.
Todd has been writing up designs on new weapons, both ship mounted and for use in FPS, working closely with Toby, our Lead Weapon Artist, to make sure they fit in the existing manufacturer guidelines.
On the level design side, work is moving forward with the prototyping of modular environments, we will be using to build our procedurally generated stations, satellites etc. At the same time these building blocks are being used to create realistic looking levels to check their viability and make sure they don’t end up looking artificial and contrived. Ideally our aim is for the player to never be able to tell the difference between procedurally generated and hand crafted.
Level design also took on the task of prototyping a basic version of the Power Management System and all its components. This will allow us to drop it into an existing level and see how it plays out and what gameplay possibilities it opens and what problems it might cause even before we invest any coding time into it. Everything from consoles, generators to lightbulbs is being prototyped right now and hopefully soon we will have a clearer vision on how this will impact the game and how much of a change it will be.
The entire team, both systems and level design have been busy with a lot of interview work as we’ve got some very talented candidates and will be recruiting some really great guys & girls for the design team in Frankfurt.
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The VFX team has recently been working on the EMP weapon for the Avenger Warlock variant. This has required considerable support from the coders in order to function how we intend. There are several action states the weapon goes through before it fires. Charging, fully charged, discharging, and detonation. All of these states had to be added by our coders and unique particle effects had to be created for each state. All of these things must work together seamlessly in order to bring the EMP to life!
Weapons
The weapon art team has been working on a new ship weapon, a Size 4 Ballistic Gatling Gun manufactured by Apocalypse Arms.
This will be the first ship weapon to use the Multi-Layer shader and serve as a gold standard for all future weapons to come.
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We worked on some really cool features this month that we’re excited to share with you all. The big one was the addition of ship formations. This is a general purpose system that allows designers to define all kinds of group formations for ships to fly in, and then simply tell ships to join a formation. The AI will then take over and constantly adjust the ships as needed to keep the formation from then on.
A lot of work went into making formations robust and easy to use, and we think it will be a very powerful feature in the hands of the designers. They can control the system via flowgraph, with a simple node that lets them designate a ship as the leader and specify a formation pattern. Then, other ships can be told via another node to follow the leader, at which point Kythera assigns them to slots in the formation pattern that they will then try to keep up with until they’re told to stop flying in formation.
It was important that we didn’t end up with formations where the ships all look glued together and moving in perfect synchrony. However, that follows naturally because all the movements go through the same IFCS constraints as any other. The formation system calculates the ideal position for each following ship as an offset from wherever the lead ship currently is, and then each ship tries to reach its target point. Depending on the capabilities of each ship in the formation, some ships may struggle to keep up, particularly if the lead ship is doing aggressive maneuvers. This gives really nice results in practice because the following ships behave much like human controlled ships would in the same situation.
A great side effect of the way we implemented it is that formations can be used in controlled sequences when the lead ship is following a spline, or in dogfighting scenarios or other situations where the lead ship is using regular systemic behaviors.
We also allow following ships to deviate from the formation in order to avoid obstacles. So, for example, if the lead ship flies through an asteroid field, the following ships will break formation as needed to avoid collisions, and then reform again. This also means that designers don’t have to worry about whether a formation can neatly fit through some area, since the AI will just naturally do the right thing.
Another nice feature we added this month is the ability to trigger events when a ship reaches a certain point on a spline. Basically, designers now have the ability to name points on splines, and they can then set up their flowgraph to listen for when a ship reaches a point with a given name, and then trigger something cool. This is obviously really useful for having better control over scripted sequences, but it can also be really useful in other places such as dogfighting because it doesn’t have to be dependent on any specific spline. So, for example, we can now set up death spiral splines and name a point on all of them where we want to, say, trigger a nice explosion effect. We can then listen for this point to be reached, and it doesn’t matter which specific death spiral spline was chosen.
Finally, we’ve been making some improvements to our Inspector debugging tool, with a particular focus on streamlining the workflow when developing and iterating on AI behaviors. Normally, when working on behaviors, there is a constant cycle of editing the behavior, jumping into game to see how the change worked out, then tweaking the behavior based on the result. Thanks to the DataForge behavior tree editor we can now do this all without having to exit the game or recompile anything, but we saw some room to improve the workflow when using the Inspector to view the state of the behavior trees of characters or ships as the game is running.
One big time saver we added was better tracking in Inspector of what you were previously doing, such as which character or ship you were debugging. Then, even if you need to exit the game and make code changes for some reason, as soon as you jump back into game the Inspector will pick up right where you left off. When you’re doing dozens of iterations on behaviors the time saving can really add up!
Another improvement was to make it easier to find the parts of behavior trees that are currently executing. We now have really huge trees for character behaviors in particular, and this means that it can sometimes be hard to find which part of the tree the AI is currently running. So we’ve added in a new mode that zooms in on whichever part of the tree is currently active, allowing behavior designers to watch the tree live in one window and their game in another window and keep track of what is going on without having to pause all the time. These various time savings add up to faster behavior development, and that’s a win for all of us!
It’s been really satisfying to get these solid new features in, as we expect to be a little less involved over the next few months. We will be mainly focused on supporting the bugfixing effort for 2.0 as we head towards the holiday break. More significantly, as the internal AI team has ramped up in size this year they’ve been able to take on more of the front-line tasks, allowing Moon Collider to switch to more of a supporting role rather than leading development ourselves. In the new year we’ll continue supporting the AI team in helping to make Star Citizen bigger and better, but we’ll probably have fewer awesome new features to present in the monthly reports.
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Greetings Citizen,
A lot of work is going on here at BHVR! Here’s what the different department are working on.
Design
First, we wrapped up the integration of the Million Mile High Club, polished the experience overall and fixed a few bugs to get it ready for release. We finished the whitebox for Nyx, it’s shops and their location. We integrated a few subscriber flair items that are going to be released later this year and beginning next year. We are also planning the next big collection of subscriber flair items. I cannot say much but it should be pretty cool. Working with ATX and UK, we ironed out the design for shopping and shopping interface in general, we are starting the work right now. Finally, we are overhauling the Revel & York hangar to welcome the Starfarer. Setting up shops and all theirs items is going to be a big chunk of work in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
Art
This month we spent quite a good amount of time polishing and debugging Million Mile High Club map. It’s finally completed and we can’t wait to see what people think of it once is released.
We made big advancements on a new clothing store map. Mostly on the architectural assets and static props.
Finally, we revisited Levski, to do an art quality update and to finalise the map. Once again, we’ve been working hard on optimising the map, so we can have a solid performance when NPC and players will be walking around in the map.
Engineering
With the incoming Alpha-2.0.0 release, a good part of our development time has been spent on stabilization of the various new features that some of you might have had the chance to fiddle with on the PTU. As such, part of the team at Behaviour has been focusing on implementing the final few features and bug fixing for mobiGlas, the Elevator Terminal, Port Olisar’s Ship Spawning Terminal as well as the new Party System. We’ve also worked hand in hand with the UI Team from UK to integrate additional features to the user interface for the two new Multi-Crew ships that are part of this release, the Constellation and the Retaliator.
In addition to the usual support for the incoming release, we’ve also started to implement features that planned for later releases. As part of some incoming changes concerning the various ship components (weapons, items, etc), we’re doing a few minor tweaks to the current Holotable to make it a little more user friendly, with changes such as having specific visual language (color) on items as well as always displaying the name of items to make them more easy to identify. We’re also simultaneously working on making the Holotable accessible from the multiplayer Crusader which will allow ship loadouts to be customized more easily.
Finally, we’re just restarting to do some work on the planetside shopping experience. Part of the implementation mostly comes down to supporting the design team with new game objects & functionality that they can use to properly setup a physical shop on any location. At the same time, we’re also putting together a new version of the user interface. Once all of this is in place, we’ll be ready to plug in persistence into the system so that the shopping experience can be transported between different game sessions.
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Greetings from Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month:
AnniVERSEary Sale
November is always a fun month, since it marks the anniversary of the end of Star Citizen’s original funding campaign. In addition to the Livestream, there was an AnniVERSEary sale to thank members for their continued support and dedication to the project. Turbulent worked behind the scenes to provide the back-end support for those events, setting up all the ships in the store and related cross-chassis upgrades. For more details, check out the Ship Happens section below.
Pledge Buy Back
Remember the time when you had to make an agonizing decision to melt one of your favorite ships in order to buy the new Vanguard? Well, agonize no more! We have been working on a new feature called Pledge Buy Back, which allows you to “un-melt” a pledge. Although there will be a handful of pledges that are ineligible for Pledge Buy Back (for example: limited-item ships, physical merchandise), most of them will be. This new feature will be accessible via My Hangar. Coming soon!
Organization Invitations
The Star Citizen ‘verse is vast, and you can’t conquer it alone. That’s why you might consider joining an Organization. Currently, Organizations can send email invitations to prospective members via the RSI website. We are refreshing the look-and-feel of the invitation, to give more prominence to the Organization. Don’t worry, you’ll still find the RSI logo at the bottom, so you will know that the email came from our system.
Orgs 2.0
Speaking of Organizations, Turbulent and CIG are working together to plan and design the next component of what we refer to as “Orgs 2.0”. There are many modules that comprise the term, including microblogs and communication tools. We are determining which module will deliver the most “bang for the buck,” and laying out a roadmap for future modules.
Subscription Campaign
Subscribers are important cogs in the Star Citizen machine; thanks to their ongoing contributions, CIG are able to provide video series such as “Around the ‘Verse”, “10 for the Chairman”, “Bugsmashers” and other programs on a regular basis. We are currently refreshing the look-and-feel of the Subscribers section of the website, and reorganizing the information to make it easier to discover all the exclusive benefits you earn by being a Subscriber.
Bar Citizen
Toward the end of the month, some members of the Turbulent team had a chance to lunch with FlisherOfatale, head of the Quebec-based Organization called “Les Gardiens du [LYS]. They are close to 200 members, and growing. It was great to chat about his in-game experiences, as well as pick his brain for feedback on the website and forum. At the end of the meal, he gave us some cool swag from his Org. Thanks, Flisher!
Squadron 42 Teaser
We were thrilled to learn what Mark Hamill’s character would be in the Squadron 42 story. His IMDB page is simply staggering; a veteran of movies and computer games, he will add a strong presence to the single-player campaign. Check out the Squadron 42 page on our website for his “bio” and portrait. Answer the call!
Ship Happens
This was an exciting month for Star Citizen, which saw the launch of many new ships and the sale of many existing ones. To kick off the Anniversary Livestream, 4 new ships were revealed. First, the Crucible, an adaptable repair ship to get damaged ships back up and running in no time, large and small. Next, the sister ship of the P-52 Merlin and the companion ship of the Constellation Phoenix, the P-72 Archimedes, which was designed to be a quick and agile fighter. Finally, there were the two new variants of the Avenger, each with their own specialization and distinct internal loadout. There was the Avenger Warlock, an electronic warfare focused ship with an EMP module to help fulfill its role. Then there was the Titan, which with its large, specialty module free internal bay, allows it to be a light cargo carrier with teeth. Each day, there was a different themed sale (e.g. Explorers, Pirates, Military, Aliens, etc.).The livestream was followed by a week and a half of daily themed anniversary sales, showcasing the various ship roles in the Star Citizen universe. These sales were capped off with a 5 day free-for-all sale, putting all ships previously available in the previous week and a half back up in the store.
Behind the Scenes
With all the excitement surrounding the AnniVERSEary, it was bound to have an impact on the website and pledge store. We expanded our server capacity and continuously monitored the website traffic and activity during the month. Fortunately, our infrastructure allows us to adjust capacity upward or downward as needed, so the cost impact was minimal.
We are also looking into what we can do for future versions of the Starmap to add even more depth and interactivity. We want to load it up with even more data for you to discover!
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Greetings Citizens,
Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 is here! Today, we are proud to make the next major step in Star Citizen’s evolution available to all players. This major update to Star Citizen is available now in your launcher. With Alpha 2.0, we introduce a wide swath of features, including large world maps, multi-crew ships, seamless first person combat, missions and much more. In short: this is the biggest update to Star Citizen yet!
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Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 is set in the environs of Crusader, a gas giant in the Stanton System. We’ve packed this area of space with multiple points of interest and player options that will deliver our first true multi-crew experience. You will begin your adventure in Port Olisar, in your quarters. From there, you have the freedom to meet up with friends, choose a ship or help crew another. Olisar is huge and is the launch pad for all player ships in the current release. The area around Port Olisar is an “Armistice Zone” meaning that all weapons will be on lockdown in that safety zone to prevent any disagreements or unpleasantness.
Once out of Olisar’s Armistice Zone, it’s a different story: players are weapons free and can engage anywhere they come across each other. What can you explore? Crusader has three moons, Yela (with an asteroid belt), Cellin and Daymar (each with orbital stations.) Security Post Kareah is in the orbit of Cellin and the derelict Covelex Shipping Hub hangs over Daymar. Kareah is now a hotly contested proving ground for the most adventurous player, a good resource for weapons and glory. Those interested in exploration are invited to investigate the eerie abandoned Covalex Shipping Hub in zero gravity. The asteroid field around Yela seems like a never-ending battle between the UEE security and opportunistic pirates wanting salvage rights to the wrecks around the belt.
Additionally, there are many service stations run by Cry-Astro dotted all over the map that will allow players to refuel, rearm and repair. These cannot be guaranteed to be totally safe to approach and you may find yourself the target of the odd pirate or smuggler wanting rich pickings for salvage.
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It’s time to take the fight to the ground! Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 includes our first drop of first person combat, complete with combat armor and an array of hidden weapons to be discovered. Here’s the situation: Comm Arrays around Crusader have fallen to pirates wanting to create communication black zones in under which they can carry out their illegal activity. Crusader Industries security forces are attempting to repel the pirates, but any help that players can give in defeating them and must be restoring the Arrays’ uplinks will be appreciated and players will find more opportunities are open up for them thanks to the improved flow of communication. Some of these opportunities can be found at the Imperial Cartography Centre which scans deep space and is tasked with identifying unknown signals which explorers can land a hand with.
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But that’s not all! Players will now have three previously un-flyable ships to take out on first forays into the ‘verse. Starting with the multi-crew vessels, the Constellation and the Retaliator, allowing teams of players to work together for the first time within one ship. You can also now take out your Avenger Warlock and start creating havoc with its formidable EMP weaponry. Finally players will be able to admire Aegis latest offering, the Vanguard available to explore in its hanger ready state.
In the bigger ships, the Constellation and the Retaliator, players will now be able to interact with the first tier of some of the multi-crew seat actions and get a feel for how much fun it will be to crew these ships with friends in the future.
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New flight modes are available now, too; Precision Mode, for complex maneuvering such as landing; Cruise Mode, to get maximum speed with little maneuverability and Standard Combat Maneuvering that has been the default in earlier builds. Afterburners are now available to push a ships main thrusters to their limits for short bursts, useful for catching up to an enemy or a making quick getaway.
Quantum travel is now the best way to move around the vast distances in space, but remember to keep an eye on your fuel gauge or risk being stranded. In the event that you actually do get stranded you could always message a friend to pick you up, but you may need to leave the cockpit and EVA over to their ship. The system of leaving your ship is now a bigger feature with all ships allowing players to de-pressurize and EVA from their local gravity grid (inside their ship) out into space to enter a station or a friends ship. Ground based gameplay is coming along leaps on bounds…literally. Players will now be able to pick up weapons, recharge weapons and administer healing.
To the Stars
We’ve packed a lot into the massive area around Crusader… but this only the beginning! Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 will evolve as development continues, based on our plans for expanding game features and mechanics… and of course the testing and feedback provided by players. This release should give you your first taste of Star Citizen’s future. We believe this is a very special release, and we can’t wait to see what you think!
A Special Thanks
The release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 on the live service would not have been possible without countless hours of testing from thousands of members of the Star Citizen community working with the development team on the Public Test Universe (PTU.) Brave test pilots, we salute you! (But don’t let your engines cool just yet… there are more bogies inbound!)
Feature List
You can find the complete Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 patch notes here.
Open World Missions
8 Comm Array missions involving dogfighting and EVA, 8 Research missions involving protecting civilians or recovering lost data and 1 Exploration mission of an abandoned station.
20+ Random Encounters – Most are random dogfighting encounters, often with a mix of friendlies and hostiles. 4 are random exploration missions involving finding lost wrecks.
First Person Shooter
Recharging energy weapons.
In-game pick-ups including ballistic weapons, ammo and MediPens.
Player healing.
Due to the open-world architecture of the Crusader system, FPS combat can occur on space stations, on the decks of ships, or even while engaged in EVA.
A space station location specifically designed for and dedicated to FPS combat, including many stores and caches of personal weapons.
Spaceflight
Constant and ongoing skirmishes and space dogfights between Pirate factions and insystem security forces in the Yela asteroid belt.
Wreckage to scavenge in the Yela asteroid belt.
Ship Repair, Refuel and Restocking at Cry-Astro.
EVA – Extravehicular activity.
Multicrew Ships.
Multicrew ship gameplay! You’re not tied to your seat, you can walk around inside your ship with friends, and assume different responsibilities at different crew stations, such as ship’s pilot or copilot, engineer, or turret gunner.
Ship to space transitions.
Seamless first-person gameplay! Transit between the interior of your ship to outer space and back without any loading screen! Fly, fight, and spacewalk all in the same game.
Quantum Travel, complete with limited fuel mechanics.
All non-snub craft have a Quantum Drive that allows them to travel through local space at genuinely 0.2 speed of light.
Mobiglass Mission and Journal system.
EMP warfare in the Avenger Warlock.
Large World tech that allows for extremely large expanses of space to explore without loading screens.
New IFCS Flight models.
Ship repair refuel and restock.
Party system.
Multi-ship crew stations.
IFCS Flight Modes – Precision, SCM, and Cruise flight modes.
Afterburner.
Ship-to-ship EMP and disruption damage.
Locations
1 planet: Crusader.
3 moons: Yela with its asteroid belt, Cellin with a station and Daymar with a station.
3 distinct stations: Port Olisar (The new local shipping hub, a space hotel players get their start in), Security Post Kareah (our FPS PvP location), Covelex Shipping Hub (Abandoned shipping hub, acting as an EVA exploration location for players).
1 Cry-Astro repair and restock station.
9 Comms Arrays with encounters, missions and EVA exploration.
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Social media! It’s everywhere! There seems to be no way to escape it!
All kidding aside, social media has become a great way for our team members to connect directly to the fans, not necessarily about Star Citizen, but about our shared interests and activities. We’re more alike than we realized! Because one of our favorite parts of the development process is connecting with backers and sharing our thoughts and ideas… here’s an updated list of Star Citizen staff that want to share their social media with you!
Of course, social media is not your source for Star Citizen news. Our Facebook and Twitter primarily link back to the Comm-Link, which is the ‘newspaper of record’ for Star Citizen. But they’re still a great way to connect to the team, to share your support and to stay in touch with Star Citizen on the go. We feel strongly that the Roberts Space Industries website should be the first place official news is revealed… but we’re aim to continue making our social outreach more fun, too. Additionally, many individual developers have their own social media feeds that they are willing to share with the community (listed below.)
Here are the official Social Media channels for Star Citizen:
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CIG Citizens
PLEASE NOTE: These are the personal feeds of Cloud Imperium Games’ developers. The statements and opinions expressed do not represent Cloud Imperium Games, and should not be taken as the final word on any element of game design or planning. The following developers are willing to connect with backers and share information about their lives when possible:
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The Crate
Dalton Colabello could never have predicted how drastically his life would change because of one inauspicious crate. A construction magnate with Credits to burn, Colabello’s passion for collecting antique weapons led him to buy a strange crate at a military surplus auction in Cestulus. Inside, Colabello found prototype parts for ship weapons unlike anything he had ever seen. The crate’s contents fascinated Colabello and started him on a journey that would end with the creation of Apocalypse Arms. After the auction, Colabello returned home and unsuccessfully attempted to reconstruct the weapons. Though he couldn’t get the prototypes working, he was captivated by their unique design and potential power. Colabello quickly became obsessed with uncovering their creator. Comms with the military warehouse only turned up one clue; the crate had been in storage since 2792. The year the Messer regime finally fell.
Fueled by the possibility that these weapons might be a lost part of history, Colabello hired private investigators to chase the digital trail and took the weapons to numerous experts, hoping that one of them could provide answers. Eventually, a Messer scholar at Reis’ Carey University found an archived datalog of shipments into and out of the Davien warehouse where Colabello had purchased the crate. A cross-reference against the extensive log scored a hit; the crate had been sent there from an address in Newcastle, Magnus.
The Elusive Engineer
Much to Colabello’s disappointment, a Casaba Outlet currently occupied the Newcastle address. Doubting that the fine purveyors of affordable fashion briefly made an inventive and bold set of ship weapons, Colabello searched the site’s 2792 property log. Records revealed that Genly Engineering Solutions was renting the space when the crate was shipped to Cestulus. Still, answers did not come easy. Outside of the name on the rental agreement, Genly did not seem to exist.
Years passed without any further information coming to light. Requests to the government uncovered nothing. The lack of progress sunk Colabello into a deep depression and he even considered selling the weapons. Yet his curiosity could not be extinguished. Hopeful that a brute force method would bear results, Colabello went to the Ark to meticulously checked Magnus’ 2792 census by hand, which, after months of pouring over names, led him to discover one Genly Maupin. Colabello was disappointed to learn that Genly was only six years old in 2792, but since he was still Colabello’s best lead in years, he kept digging and found out that Genly’s mother was Juliet Maupin, a former Aegis Dynamics engineer.
Months later, Colabello found the great-granddaughter of Juliet Maupin living in Lo and paid her a visit. He showed her the prototypes and asked if she had any idea if they were her great-grandmother’s creation. She explained that she had heard stories from her mother about the awards her great-grandmother had won for her scanner designs, but nothing about weapons. However, she was happy to allow Colabello to examine Juliet’s old notes. There, in an unlabeled folder, he found what he had sought for so long: Juliet’s original designs for the prototypes and a journal describing their creation.
The Unknown Genius
Prior to designing the weapons that would eventually inspire Apocalypse Arms, Juliet Maupin worked as a lead engineer for the titan of Cestulus industry, Aegis Dynamics. She led the team responsible for the 2783 revamped Retaliators still coveted by today’s “bomber boys.” Following that success, Maupin was introduced to Sylvain Evans, a high-ranking member of the UEE military. Evans enlisted Maupin for a classified project to produce a new line of powerful and advanced combat systems for the Messer government. Maupin leapt at the opportunity to design weapons with the freedom only government funding could provide.
In 2790, Linton Messer XI felt his Empire crumbling. From without, the ongoing Xi’An cold war and the emergent Vanduul threat were exacting a sustained toll, while from within, the death of Anthony Tanaka had begun to transform the dissenters among the public from mere activists to operational revolutionaries. Messer XI knew his time was limited unless he created a strategic advantage, i.e. bigger and better guns.
Evans provided Maupin with a high-tech lab and an able team in a non-descript building in Newcastle. To keep their work secret, the project was given the codename Genly Engineering Solutions in honor of Maupin’s young son. Building off the work she had done at Aegis, Maupin developed prototypes for a ballistic Gatling gun and a mass driver, the weapons that would eventually find their way into Colabello’s crate.
In 2792, the military picked up the prototypes with the intention of shipping them to Kilian for testing. During their journey, footage of the Massacre of Garron II leaked to the public and the entire UEE military was mobilized to quell the rebellion. The crate containing the weapons was offloaded into the Cestulus warehouse and forgotten until Colabello bought it well over a century later.
After the collapse of the Messer regime, Juliet Maupin grew concerned that her association with the corrupt government would be revealed. She swore off weapon design and fled with her family to the Corel System. Eventually, Maupin went to work at a Lo engineering firm where she worked on a project that built advanced scanning machines used to detect contraband along the UEE-Banu border. Many of the scanners still in use today are based off her designs. Maupin passed away in 2862 never knowing that her greatest contribution to the world was still to come.
After unraveling the mystery, Colabello knew what to do next. He purchased the original design documents from Maupin’s great-granddaughter, sold his construction business and poured all his assets into launching Apocalypse Arms, a name inspired by a line in Maupin’s journals that described her desire to “build guns that could overcome any situation … even the apocalypse.”
With the full designs in hand, Colabello was finally able to get the prototypes working and the first line of Apocalypse Arms branded munitions hit the market in 2913. Though updated to take advantage of modern technology, most of what Maupin had originally conceived over a hundred years earlier remained untouched, especially the weapons’ unique style and overpowering performance. In a bold move, Apocalypse Arms’ inaugural sales campaign did not shy away from saying the guns were built for the Messers. Many found the strategy obscene, but sales proved it to be effective. Colabello went on any Spectrum show, whether hosted by friend or foe, to talk about the weapons’ history, and how these innovative and powerful guns were saved from being used by a despot. From his perspective, Apocalypse Arms was a Human success story.
Today, the specter of the Messers still hangs over Apocalypse Arms and has driven some to shun their products. Many more automatically associate the name with its prevalence in chaotic conflict zones like Nexus IV and Charon III. Still, the guns’ quality and effectiveness cannot be denied, and over the years, the brand has built a loyal fan base. Using Maupin’s innovative designs as inspiration, Colabello has hired new engineers to continue to expand AA’s catalogue. All of this makes Apocalypse Arms one of the more interesting, and deadly, manufacturers in the Empire.
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Welcome to what we all hope is one of the last 2.0 development update reports!
Thanks to all of your hard work on creating those Issue Council bug reports we have managed to really get on top of the worst of the stability and performance issues on 2.0 PTU. To get right to the part of the update you want to hear, we are unlocking the next 100,000 accounts for PTU testing. If you are Citizen #220,000 or earlier, we encourage you to help us test Alpha 2.0 on the PTU!
As for the status of the live release: we’re not quite out of the woods yet, but we hope you’ve already noticed some dramatic improvements over the last couple of builds. The number of both server and client crashes has dropped down significantly and the internal QA team has managed to have regular extended play periods lasting several hours.
You have likely already heard of our significant blocker. The most recent builds have been having issues because of a slowdown bug. Like all the worst bugs, this one seemed to come out of nowhere! Unfortunately, it’s appearance interrupted our string of daily PTU updates as our bug smashers dug in to battle it out.
Additionally, there’s some balance work to do for the Constellation and Retaliator to get those ships tuned up and feeling right. Thank you all for the feedback about these ships in particular. Keep in mind this is the very first pass… we’re already hard at work figuring out how to improve the arms and armor to make sure they match up to their intended roles.
Finally, I encourage everyone to check out the Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 trailer embedded below, put together for last night’s Game Awards. It’s a quick look at some of what you’re going to be doing when the update goes live. Hold tight and brace for impact, we’re almost there!
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We’d like to start by wishing a happy Thanksgiving to Star Citizen backers everywhere. We’re thankful for all the support you’ve given us… and nowhere is that support more visible than the Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 PTU! We truly appreciate the incredible effort backers have put into working with our team to locate, recreate and ultimately annihilate the bugs blocking the public release. And in between, we’re very excited about how much fun everyone seems to be having (with a special shoutout to the emergent gameplay we’re seeing on streams and videos!) Thanks to your work, we’re releasing a new patch to the PTU today… and we’re adding another 50,000 Citizens to the test group! From here forward, testers will be added for Alpha 2.0 PTU by Citizen Number… so if you were one of our first backers, come join the fun and help us test!
Now here’s our first update on Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 Development since releasing to PTU! Server instability is still our archenemy of the week but we have it firmly locked in our cross-hairs! Reinforcements have arrived with 16,500 backers who now have access to the 2.0 build! Never before have so few been so helpful to so many. This feedback is crucial in helping us get the Live build ship-shape and stable for the rest of the community. We’ve even tried to bolster your testing efforts by putting work in to the server bots system to improve the quality of our crash tracking information.
The code team are tracking call stacks and reviewing the dumps, debugging and collating information from the Issue Council and QA. The release has been a huge success in terms of throwing up new issues and shedding even more light on any of those nasty “hard-to-repro” bugs that we never would have had the testing bandwidth to deal with internally. This is what Star Citizen Alpha and the PTU is all about.
Our Game Support Manager Will Leverett is in communication with the PTU players about how people can help and we will of course be increasing the number of eligible accounts as soon as possible. For those who already have access, we really appreciate you taking the time to write up solid bug reports.
Since 2.0 was released to PTU, the development team has been sharing videos from the community of all those amazing encounters that are already starting to flourish in this new gameplay environment. We’d like to share one favorite from “KingKongor” that really caught our eye, and have been included below.
The clip shows the player losing his ship at a Comms Array and then calling for assistance. Another player answers his request and very kindly arrives to pick them and take them to safety. But then out of nowhere, just before they were able to board the ship, a pirate comes flying in and blows the rescue ship to smithereens! You really couldn’t write it. Fantastic stuff!
So that’s your lot for this week! We’ll keep on pushing and pushing to get you all more stable builds as soon as humanly possible, and we’ll increase do our best to increase the backer numbers too when it’s the right time to do so. Please keep those bug reports coming and we’ll keep our eyes peeled for more entertaining game footage!
No bullet points this week, it’s just all hands on deck for more stability to get the build Live to the whole community.
