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What has happened this past week in Star Citizen Alpha 2.0. development I hear you cry?
Well we’ve still been tweaking, polishing, and refining any remaining pieces of content whilst the rest of team go to battle with the list of Blocker and Critical bugs so this week’s report will read a little more like a QA report! We are battening down the hatches and getting on with some good old fashioned bug smashing!
The 2.0 release stream is in lockdown now and the Star Citizen Team are doing everything in their power to get this build ship-shape for you guys. Each developer has to be extra careful in testing their work and getting it peer reviewed with risk assessment for approval by Production before it’s allowed in to our precious stream. This is welcome news to Production because we’ve encountered some really frustrating bugs recently, that on top of our more persistent issues we could really have done without. Huge new technological systems like Large World, EVA and Multicrew Ships taking a little longer than expected is no big surprise, in fact it’s more or less expected! But what you don’t want (or at least do your best to reduce) is delays on the logistical side of managing the build process.
One issue we had recently was with our exclusion system – Exludibur! – a system that we use to configure what is and is not in any given build (without an exclusion system, we’d be releasing hundreds of gigabytes of un-optimized, partially-completed game elements with each release!) So when some of the environmental geometry had not been listed for inclusion in the QA build from the 2.0 release stream, it was no surprise that when it got tested that it simply wasn’t there in the game! And what makes it worse is that when that happens, the code still tries to call the geometry that isn’t there, gets very upset, and crashes! We still managed to test our main Game Dev stream to progress with our work but it’s things like this that still take time in our Production and we need to focus to get it right.
Another issue we might have been able to avoid was to do with a new Main Menu that we’re making for you. As you may or may not know, we have internal versions of the build called “Profile” that can sometimes produce slightly different test results when compared to a “Release” version of the game. Release is the best for the most authentic testing conditions but we sometimes need the Profile build for some debug options or to get around issues such as a black screen hang that was happing in one of our Release builds earlier in the week. The black screen was due to the introduction of a new main menu screen that wasn’t hooked up in that mode and therefore unable to test. The Profile build however was able to bypass the issue, so we could continue our work and test the rest of the content in the game. Again, it’s just another consideration in the Production that we have to make sure is checked off to get it ready for release.
I’m sure you’re all wanting to hear a little more about the Main Menu now – right? So the call for the Main Menu was a decision made to improve your user experience by helping players get in to the game more quickly with the initial boot up and also when coming back out of any standalone gameplay such as a gamemode in the Arena Commander simulation. We are now allowing the player choose whatever they want to load with this new menu, and avoid having to wait for content that they’re not looking to access. You guys have been speaking up about this on the forums, so we’ve listened and are doing something about it! We hope you approve of it once it’s all implemented in 2.0 and I’m sure you’ll let us know if you don’t! Just please note that it’s a first iteration.
In other UI related news, we have been putting the finishing touches on the ship screens which you will see in one of this week’s update videos which shows you the all new and improved Avenger, Cutlass, and Constellation. These are again a first iteration with lots more work left to do (ie. Adding the wireframe ship to the Avenger) and the “System Unavailable” messages should give you an indication of cool things still to come with this multi-layered system for managing your beloved spaceships.
So that’s just about it for this week’s report. We really hope that we won’t need to write another, or many, of these reports because we are certainly “close” to the 2.0 release, it’s just really, really hard to predict just how close we are. It’s a tough fight in the 2.0 trenches but we have an incredibly talented and dedicated team that no amount of bugs can keep down for too long! So thank you for your patience, we will keep you posted but please know that it IS coming!
Now here are the high level items broken down for you by the team…
Gameplay and Engineering
Looking at a Quantum Travel bug where two ships can come out of travel inside each other
Improved engineering screen FoV for multicrew ships
Continued work to improve the EVA experience
Improving weapon movement for FPS combat
Fixed up an issue where dying in FPS combat left the weapon floating in the air
Performance optimisation
General bug fixing
UI
Added support for notification of REC awards
Lots of bug fixing & polish:
Multicrew ship screens
mobiGlas Mission Manager
mobiGlas Journal
Added respawn countdown
Quantum Travel HUD
Visual skinning of transport elevator console panel
Mission Manager live updating, when you have it open
•* More polish and bug fixing
Art
Final environmental polish and LODs
Final lighting changes to Crusader map
Final VFX polish on Ship damage, Crusader map and EMP
Finalizing LODs for Avenger
Optimisation for Retaliator
Animation
Further refining base character locomotion
Additional work on finalising stocked and pistol locomotion
Audio
Dialogue session has been completed so the mastering of these assets is now progressing
Working on improving the sound design for EVA
Continued improvements for ship fly-bys (see video update for more details)
General bug fixing
Blocking Issues
Probe for Quantum Travel marker isn’t working properly so the player can’t travel to a mission location
Missing space station geometry due to Excludibur (now resolved and verified fixed)
Missing geometry for Arc Corp elevator due to Excludibur
Server crash when spawning Multicrew ships
General server stability issues with 17+ players in-game; but vastly improved from just 2 players when playing two weeks ago!
Black screen hang on boot in Release (now resolved and verified fixed)
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Welcome back to our third weekly update on Star Citizen Alpha 2.0. development!
We’re getting just as excited as you guys are to get this release out so the team are pushing hard every single day to make that happen! The patience and understanding of game development in the Star Citizen Community is often astounding and refreshing to hear so we wanted to let you know that it really drives the team on to hear such words of encouragement. We are really not that far from delivering this huge amount of new content to you all but game development is a complex process that takes time to pull everything together and stabilize it to be ready for a good user experience. We totally understand any frustrations you may have in waiting for such a tantalizing release so we will always do our best to give you visibility on the progress of it, warts and all, so you’re not left in the dark and we’ll keep addressing the main priorities and look to release it the very moment that it’s good and ready!
We’ve described much of the content that’s been implemented already, so you should have a good idea of all the cool new features you’re going to be getting your hands on, we’ve got the ships and environment ready and we are very much in to the polish phase of the release with the addition of things like energy Recharge Stations to various satellites. The vast majority of the gameplay experience is there to play and we’re really locking things down in terms of avoiding any major new additions to the code base in order to stabilize the build and avoid the risk of knock-ons.
Performance improvements are a typical part of any video game release. Despite making things as optimal as possible along the way, there’s always a big push towards the back-end of the development cycle in order to bring everything in to acceptable frame rate levels… and we’re not quite there, yet! If we released it to you now, it really wouldn’t do any of the content justice because it needs to play nice and smoothly and be relatively crash-free. Some crashes are inevitable with introduction of new codebase systems coming online so essentially just bugs that we just need to churn through as fast as we can.
One of the most exciting things about this release is the story element. Arena Commander was our testbed for implementing the ship systems that you see today but with Crusader we will be opening it right up to whole new level of gameplay. For one, the Audio team have implemented some new computer system voices for things like the airlocks and the Comms Array terminals and the vending machines which really brings things to life, and yet we still have even more dialogue to implement that will really hit home those levels of immersion. In this scenario you’re picking up a job on your mobiGlas as a Space Technician and we leave you exploring the beautiful environment, investigating the backstory of events, taking on pirates, working with the UEE security teams and doing things in whichever way you wish! It’s a real sandbox of random scenarios with traders, UEE and pirates quantum jumping around and making you feel a part of something… and yet this is all just be the tip of the iceberg!
In terms of FPS-specific work, the team has put together a mixed armor set for use in 2.0 this week, complete with the light marine armor, RSI helmet, 2 medPens, helmet, EVA jets and an ArcLight laser pistol as the default loadout for all players adventuring on the Crusader map. There will also be P4-AR Ballistic Rifles available for pick-up on Kareah station. This will be the first taste of Star Marine in the 2.0.0 release, with more to come down the line.
Work continues on Star Marine proper as well, although the priority is getting Alpha 2.0 (which jumps ahead and introduces FPS gameplay to the persistent universe) ready for launch. To that end, we’re focusing on Star Marine-related tasks that will impact both planned releases, and we are broadening our weekly update to focus more on the task at hand. Expect to hear more about Star Marine proper after 2.0 is released, but know that much of the FPS work happening right now will apply to both releases.
Let’s get on with the high level breakdown of items from the various teams…
Gameplay and Engineering
Added energy Recharge Stations to various satellites
Added feedback for when a EZ Hab pod is locked to you
Restored rotating rings to Port Olisar
Finalised the Research Satellite method of mission giving
Mark-up for all Asteroids added using the new, more automated method
Moving EVA to an improved physical control model
Implementing ragdoll animation whilst in EVA
Improved ragdoll animation – see WIP video
1st pass implementation of breaking apart of the Retaliator (on destruction)
Will be more visually impressive and realistic
Performance improvements/optimisations
Network optimisations
General bug fixing
* Fixed a bug with health pens not working
Weapons not physicalize properly, they remain floating in space, upon death.\
Fixing bugs on weapon select/deselect/holstering.
Reviewing look poses for Pistol firing with the animation team.
Procedural weapon animation work is still in progress. Work on positioning, weapon sway, weapon cant, will go into next week. Recoil is feeling good.
Ammo boxes are broken, investigating. Energy recharge stations are working! Lasers; pew pew!
UI
Multi Crew screens polish
Mission manager UI polish
Quantum Travel UI polish
Screens for Crusader station
General reticule polish
Multi Crew screens polish
Making a first pass and simplified Main Menu, so players don’t have to load into the Hangar every time they start the game or finish a match.
Base implementation of a reticule for the EVA HUD.
Bug fixing
Art
Constellation flight ready
Retaliator flight ready
Cutlass Black flight ready
Updated to support the new damage tech.
Updated to support multi-crew functionality
Final layout polish for the space station interiors with bug fixing galore, profiling, optimising, testing
Final lighting polish for the space station interiors
Layout and signposting changes to the Cry Astro Fuel facility
Exterior damage effects from minor damage through to 100% damage explosions
Interior damage effects, including cockpits – triggered when receiving damage and “state” switching when ship health is low
General ship damage effects polish
General ship thruster effects polish
Crusader map ambient effects – including:
Airlock pressurisation/depressurisation
Derelict space station ambience
Giant asteroid field ambience
Repair drone effects polish
Ship landing dust effects polish
Quantum Travel effects polish
Missile effects polish
General effects optimisation
Animation
Refining base character locomotion
Finalising stocked and pistol locomotion
* Pistol animation set was reviewed, still needs starts/stop, select/deselect, lowered set-up in mannequin, prone look pose, and crouch look poses. These should be started, and hopefully finished next week.
Rifle animation set reviewed, ADS is currently broken, still needs lowered look pose, better weapon pickup anim, and prone look pose need to be exported and hooked up.
Rifle look poses for fire are fixed, but firing has a problem with the weapon moving in the hands, investigating now.
Audio
Another dialogue recording session for some additional lines and some re-records
Made improvements to the ship flyby sounds
Continued implementation music
Finalising audio for map locations
General bug fixing
Blocking Issues
Frame rate is very sluggish at times
We have a few crashes which are currently blocking the comms array gameplay
Unable to spawn Multicrew ships in release mode
EVA needs to be more responsive and much less buggy! Player can spin out of control and also suffer latency issues – hopefully these are fixed in next build with some recent animation code fixes
Walking on to a ship can cause it to have no flight functionality but works fine if you debug spawn straight in to the cockpit; probably related to a recent IFCS code change
Server Crashes when AI units fire weapons. This blocks other testing, of course.
Pistol ADS animations are blocked until we finalize Stocked (rifle) ADS system.
Character Sprint animations needs a review once the [weapon] lowered pose is finalized. This is a potential blocker.
EVA needs to support personal weapon usage, this will require code support as well as adjustments to the base poses.
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THE FUTURE OF FLIGHT
Since the initial release of Arena Commander, we’ve increased top speed, scaled down the availability of boost, and reduced the power of maneuvering thrusters. While these have all had drastic effects on the game, none have been a fundamental change in the way the game actually works – which goes to show how much stat balance can affect a system! However, behind the scenes, we have been working on some deeper changes to the flight model, and are nearing a point where some of that work can be put in front of players.
Flight Modes (aka IFCS 2.0)
The flashiest new feature is the additional flight modes: Precision, Space Combat Maneuvers (SCM), and Cruise. These are all IFCS profiles that focus ship behaviors toward the highly different goals of close tolerance adjustments, combat actions, and long distance flight respectively. Though you can only use one flight mode at a time, coupled/decoupled and the collection of flight assists can still be used to further customize handling.
Precision Mode
When you take off you’ll start out in Precision Mode. In Precision Mode, the maximum velocity is significantly reduced and the throttle and acceleration are rescaled to provide improved control when maneuvering in close proximity to other objects. This makes take off and landing much easier, but will also improve control around other objects such as asteroids, derelict craft or when approaching other live craft during In-Flight Refueling or Boarding maneuvers.
SCM Mode
Once you’ve cleared any nearby objects and have come up to speed you’ll want to switch into Space Combat Maneuvering mode. SCM is one of the biggest changes to the flight control system, but on the surface it closely mimics the current flight mechanics that you may already be used to in Arena Commander. The real power of SCM mode is that maximum velocity is a now dynamically calculated as a function of force and mass: F/m * T = SCM Max Velocity – this means anything that any changes to the acceleration of the ship (such as loadout changes, picking up cargo etc) will impact the maximum SCM speed. We’ve incorporated the SCM calculation in such a way that it is your ability to brake to 0 on any turning axis (x or z) that determines the top speed your ship is allowed to fly. This means that upgrading the ships maneuvering thrusters generally results in a higher max velocity being allowed by IFCS. Further, this speed is determined by the strongest turning axis of the ship, meaning the best drift control will be achieved by turning on the strong axis, rather than the weak axis. Each ship has a different configuration of strong and weak axes and its up to the pilot to learn them and fly to their strengths.
Afterburner
There is another exciting benefit to SCM: Afterburner. Where the current boost mechanic gives you better acceleration and drift control, Afterburner gives you more maximum velocity while maintaining the same relative control. Here’s how it works: In SCM mode the top speed is set according to your ability to accelerate to a given velocity in a set time. Since boost raises your acceleration your maximum speed also increases. Boost as it currently works is still sticking around, but now players will have the choice on how to spend their limited boost fuel: on max velocity to rapidly change distance, or better braking to improve handling.
Cruise Mode
For longer distance travel in the same local area Pilots now have the ability to utilize Cruise Mode. If the speed limit defined in SCM gives the pilot control at the expense of velocity, Cruise Mode gives the pilot velocity at the expense of control. And while the top speed is high, the available acceleration doesn’t change, meaning that reaching maximum Cruise velocity will take 15-20+ seconds, turning ability does not scale with velocity and coming to a stop can take much longer using the normal ship retro thrusters.
Since cruise velocities can easily reach 5x or more of the safely controllable velocities allowed by SCM, IFCS enforces controlled turning to ensure pilots do not get into uncontrollable slides. This means that the nose of the ship is locked to the velocity vector and maneuvers in Cruise mode become more about adjusting course than making turns. It goes without saying that Cruise is absolutely not intended to be used in combat, asteroid fields or high-traffic space lanes.
Of course, decoupled mode can always be used to rotate freely at cruise velocity. Savvy pilots will quickly learn to use decoupled mode and boost to brake with their mains as quickly as possible. Conversely, pilots will find that attempting to change course 90 degrees by using decoupled mode is an express ticket to sleepsville since the high sustained g-forces of such a maneuver lead to rapid black or red-out.
Quantum Leap
Beyond those flight modes will be Quantum Travel, the one place where all ships are limited to the same 0.2c max speed. Once the Quantum Drive is active, the ship will quickly ratchet up the velocity to the 0.2c limit – short jumps might never get going that fast – with the ship itself experiencing relatively little acceleration. At these speeds, tiny variations in angle will result in massively different flight paths, so this is where slower ships will have the chance to escape a faster ship accosting them. Of course, traveling at these incredible speeds is quite dangerous, so the ship computer will automatically pull you out of Quantum Travel if the possibility of collision is detected or the ship has any downed shields.
Flight Control Modules and Upgrades
One of the design goals that goes back to the dawn of the project is the concept that the flight control software should be physically represented as an item within the game world. But up until now the IFCS system has been completely behind the scenes and managed through (relatively) static ship definition XML files. Much work has been done over the last few months to prep the IFCS parameter blocks for migration into an avionics module that can be swapped out and upgraded. Each module is used with a specific ship and contains all of the settings and parameters that IFCS needs to know about the craft to make it fly within the established engineering spec. Behind the scenes this makes it vastly easier for designers to tune and balance ships and thruster upgrades and gives us more flexibility in giving unique characteristics to hull variant ships. But the most exciting part is that soon players will be able to upgrade their flight control software right along with their thruster hardware to build a ship that suits their style.
The biggest change to IFCS is the move to a 3rd order motion control system. Prior to this release, IFCS has used a feedback control system for spaceship motion control. The motion profile for this feedback control system (a PI controller) is an exponentially damped sinusoid. The graph in Fig. 1 shows both acceleration and velocity control as the velocity set-point changes from 0 to 100 m/s.
This is an iterative control system that makes no assumptions about the past or future state of a system, and merely acts to smooth out the error between the ship’s current state and its goal state. Because of this, it is well suited to our needs, where damage conditions and unexpected external forces can cause unpredictable motion.
To further complicate matters, because IFCS is limited by the actual thrust available from ship thrusters, the true in-game motion profile is capped. This profile is shown in Fig. 2, with the uncapped profile shown behind it for reference.
The graph in Fig. 2 is a fairly accurate depiction of the current velocity control for spaceships in Star Citizen, both for linear and rotational control. While there are many advantages to this motion profile, there are some significant downsides, including a) difficulty predicting the future state of a ship that is moving under this controller and b) an asymmetrical control response with an extended settling time. In particular, players have frequently noted that the extended settling time makes the ships in Star Citizen feel “sloppy”.
To address these issues, the new release of IFCS will begin using a bi-level control system. The first level, feed-forward control, will calculate the ideal motion of the ship, while the second level, feedback control, will provide error correction to keep the ship as close to the ideal motion as possible, even under damage conditions and unexpected external forces. So the current motion algorithm will still be part of the system, providing the same error tolerance, but it will no longer be the dominant motion profile (except under extreme system error).
The feed-forward control system will use ideal 3rd order motion, as the graph in Fig. 3 shows.
Unlike the feedback algorithm, this motion profile is completely predictable. At any moment, it is known how long it will take a ship to reach a new velocity or position from any set of initial conditions. Also, the acceleration ramp-up phase can be tuned so that ships have a natural, smooth motion, without the excessive settling behavior of the current control system.
In practice, this will result in a wide range of ship flight behaviors from highly responsive and jerky, like a high performance sports car, to less responsive but smooth control, like a luxury car.
The rate of change of acceleration is called “jerk,” and it is essentially the acceleration of your acceleration. An easy way to understand jerk is to think about how you drive a car. When decelerating your car to a stop if you apply constant and even pressure to the brake pedal your car will decelerate at a linear rate. But if you apply this same pressure to the pedal all the way to a stop the transition to 0 velocity is not smooth and feels abrupt. But if you progressively apply less pressure to the brake as you approach 0 velocity (or ‘feather’ the brake) you change the rate of the deceleration and the stop is much smoother and more comfortable. Feathering the brake is a low-jerk action, while suddenly depressing it is a high jerk action.
For reference, the graph in Fig. 4 shows the typical 2nd order motion (constant acceleration, linear velocity) used in many games.
While 2nd order motion is a much simpler control model, it provides a very stiff, mechanical ship movement. The 3rd order system will allow us to tune ships to be as stiff or as smooth as we need.
Balancing
Ship flight balancing is one of the most difficult and delicate tasks that we have on this project. The move to a 3rd order system and the addition of a dynamically determined velocity mode have necessitated a nearly complete from-the-ground-up re-balance of the ship handling characteristics. This means that each of the ships are likely going to feel quite different from what you’re used to in Arena Commander. Great care has been taken to ensure that each ship retains its own place relative to the other ships in the universe. We’re aware that any change of this magnitude will likely kick off lively and passionate debate about the old vs the new, but we’re confident that the changes will allow us to make the ships feel more real, and allow them to have more unique personality than has been previously possible and allow more precise control.
The switch to jerk also means that erratic actions for evasive maneuvers are nerfed naturally, since the system is now slightly slower to make contrary actions – dedicated inputs, like the kind used when attempting to pull out of a slide, are largely unaffected. Third order motion is also much more natural for the human brain to internalize, so control will be more intuitive, and overshoot will be less frequent.
With jerk available as a parameter, a new ‘stabilized flight’ behavior becomes available. Essentially. this means that by setting a low jerk value, an engine can be tuned to perform at a greater Load Rating relative to its size, allowing us to create ships – like the Hull or Aurora – capable of hauling plenty of cargo without also becoming the fastest ships in the universe when unladen. And, while all ships will be faster without cargo than they are fully loaded, we can set different ships to have different levels of performance loss when they take on cargo.
The first pass we release to the PTU is simply that: a first pass. It is intended to set the general tone of the direction for each ship, not the final destination. As always we will continue to playtest and tune, and will be watching your feedback to see where we may need to address rough edges or unintended consequences.
There are a few more neat little consequences of this change, but for now, let’s talk about thrust shunting.
Good Will Shunting
Thrust shunting is the process by which thrust is generated in the main engine and then pushed through the pipe system to the various nozzles (or ‘mavs’ as the community has dubbed them) where that force will actually be used. This means that the main engines will become far more important than we’ve seen so far in Arena Commander, and down the line, will mean we can have full engine rooms on our capital ships. Instead of having engines plastered all over the ship we now just have actuated nozzles, so if the main engine gets damaged then all the maneuvering thrusters go with it. When this happens, ships have internal gyros that can be used for emergency or ultra-low power maneuvers, but they are very weak and slow. The fantastic thing is how this opens up new opportunities for damaging ship flight behaviors.
A damaged thruster pipe would scale down the available thrust at the nozzle, and could even introduce unintended thrust at the point of damage.
The nozzles themselves have ratings for heat and power, limiting the total thrust available – a limit you may be able to exceed, though you do so at your own risk. The result is an equilibrium of flight behaviors that are enforced by the design of the ship and the state of the components, behaviors that a skilled pilot will be able to push to the absolute limit to ride the line between victory and catastrophe.
There are many ways that the actual state of a ship can deviate from the ideal state as requested by IFCS. Up to this point we’ve allowed the control system to have perfect control under ideal conditions, and this results in overly mechanical and often “dead” looking motion. With the new release, that will no longer be the case. There will always be some level of thruster and system error overlaid on flight control. This will manifest as minor turbulence in motion under optimal operational conditions, but will become more extreme because of thruster damage, overheating and various other factors.
The graph in Fig. 5 shows a sample ideal 3rd order velocity profile. IFCS would request thrust from the thruster system to achieve this motion.
However, because of thruster error, which can include a number of sources such as incorrect vector or thrust level, unstable vector or thrust level, etc., the actual motion of the ship can deviate from the ideal motion. The following graph shows an extreme example of random thruster error causing the velocity of the ship to deviate from the ideal velocity over the transition from 0 to 100 m/s. Because of errors in actual applied accelerations (all actions for a ship are ultimately applied as accelerations, never directly as positional or velocity corrections) over time, the final velocity achieved during a change in ship velocity can be significantly different from the intended velocity. IFCS requested the above velocity change and it got the one shown in Fig. 6.
This is where the original feedback system comes into play. It looks at the actual state of the ship compared to the intended state and generates additional corrective accelerations to keep the motion as close to the ideal as possible.
The example shown here in Fig. 7 is for velocity error and feedback correction, but a more obvious example in-game will be attitude control. IFCS has a reaction control system (RCS) that maintains the ship’s attitude as set by the pilot (the control frame). Because of thruster error, as well as other external factors, the actual attitude of the ship can deviate from the ideal attitude. The RCS uses the feedback control system to generate thrust and maintain the ship’s attitude at its intended state. In practice, thruster turbulence from imperfect thruster performance will generate a small amount of play in the nose of the ship, especially when firing thrusters at full capacity and when first settling in to a motionless state. But again, the goal is for this error level to be subtle except under extreme damage conditions. This is about the aesthetics of motion more than it is about flight behavior.
Ready to Fight
Ultimately, the experience of Star Citizen is the combination of all of its systems, so to really explain flight, we also need to talk about combat.
The goal of combat in Star Citizen is to provide frenetic, fast paced action while rewarding thoughtful tactics and planning. This means different things at different scales of ship – from the intense furballs of the single-seater dogfighters, to WWII style turning battles to bring full guns to bear in multi-crew, to outright wars of attrition and spacing on those giant capital ships – they each offer their own unique flavor of combat. However, the philosophy for all of them is largely the same: combat is most fun when juggling different levels of risk, reward, and commitment.
For most ships, the lowest common denominator of any input is rotation. Crew safety limits the really big ships from pulling aggressive flips, but for the smaller crafts, turning is much easier. Offensively, this empowers aim (again, with diminishing returns by scale), but defensively, skilled pilots will try to take unavoidable impacts where their shields and armor are strongest. Rotation inputs will also improve with the addition of an input stabilization mode, which clamps rotations to the lowest maximum rate available, removing a large amount of scalar error in the control frame. The ship properties remain unchanged by this, so maneuvers still realistically favor a particular axis according to their design, but the input itself is more predictable and intuitive.
Ships are generally built to favor main engines, although the strength ratios of this are very much a part of the personality of each vessel. This means drift, as we’ve seen already in recent patches, and that flight maneuvers require a bit of thinking ahead, even with use of boost. This again makes shooting easier, but taking damage is a big part of the experience of Star Citizen and is something we support at every level. The choice to include multiple components of each type allows for more meaningful capability degradation and for ships to remain operational at much greater levels of damage. After the fight, your hull will be scarred with reminders of your most recent adventure. Or, if things are looking dire, you’ll be able to repair ships in the field and triage incoming damage. It’ll probably be a good idea to take care of those failing coolant lines before they lead to an unchecked engine breach and a full power plant meltdown that blows up your ship (looking at you Connie).
With the ability to take more damage comes longer levels of commitment which also means increased management of things like fuel, heat, and g-forces. The more shortcuts that get taken, the more backed into a corner you will become. Captains will have to weigh the longer term risk of the short term reward if they want to emerge the victor.
Balance
Of course, all of these things ultimately rely on balance to support the systems, and balance is a long and deeply involved process. It’ll take some time to get this balance right, but the goal is to play into the strengths at each scale, and the gameplay opportunities that these afford. In the smallest ships, maneuverability is king, so the upper hand is earned by forcing your opponent to take more risks, overplay their hand, and become vulnerable to a killing blow. Rotation is easy in space, so you can be sure that any small ship you shoot at will be shooting back soon after. One of the reasons for this is simple physics, as the ships become more massive the thrust required to offer quick rotations scales drastically, and for reasons of control feedback and responsive handling, our ship’s rotations have smaller windows for error than translation does. Multi-crew ships can also afford larger periods of vulnerability, as the upcoming repair mechanics, shield manipulation, and pipe routing offers a ship under fire plenty of ways to improve the situation and swing the tide of battle.
As these ships get larger and larger, the gameplay pushes further into demanding tactical forethought, with positioning and the management of ship resources becoming increasing concerns during a fight. A key goal of this kind of combat is to keep success and failure from ever becoming too binary, or to allow the battle to be determined by ever-fewer, ever-smaller mistakes. At a fundamental level, Star Citizen is a game in which ship-to-ship combat should remain fun and fair even when a cargo ship’s ambushed by pirates, a capital ship’s taking on single-seaters, and the loss of property and life comes at a high price. You won’t always win, and when you do suffer a loss, we want it to feel like it mostly came down to a matter of skill. We want this to be skill based, but we also want to have a sense of progression in the PU. A Hornet F7C should be objectively a better ship than a Mustang Alpha, but the power differences should not be so extreme that the Mustang pilot will never beat a Hornet – it will just be a more challenging fight.
Star Citizen is a game about choices, so every time you leave the hangar you’ll have to decide which ship to fly, what equipment to install, who to have on as crew, what routes to take, even where and when to store cargo. Each ship has its personality, each weapon has its trade off – each path has its dangers. The goal is not to make all things to all people, but to create an ecosystem in which players can find the exact right mix for them. Some will prefer to monoboat, and in the narrow window of their specialty they will find success; others will prefer self-reliance, and will find a varied loadout to suit the varied obstacles that await. These choices affect everything, from the power draw to the heat burden, all the way down to how fast the ship flies, how much it drifts.
There’s no perfect ship – only the perfect ship for you.
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Two Jims
To tell the story of InterDimension Software is to tell the story of the ‘two Jims,’ level builder James Romanov and tech designer James Vandyke. They may have begun their game development careers in disparate ways, but once introduced, they became (and continue to be) an apparently unstoppable force for developing a string of massively successful releases, from the kid-friendly Admiral Cool to the highly realistic Star Marine.
Shy, quiet and difficult to approach, James Vandyke very much fits the classic stereotype of the spectrum game developer. Underneath his cold exterior, however, lies unquestionable brilliance: from his early childhood itwas apparent that he had a natural empathy with machines, and a level of understanding that allowed him to make them sing. Vandyke naturally gravitated towards game development not only because he was as a player himself, but because the game industry tended to push hardware and logical systems to their extremes. Fueled by a genuine desire to further technology on all levels, Vandyke skipped a formal education in favor of a job offer to develop his own game technologies through indie-publisher Perigree Press.
Oakhurst & Perigree
Seemingly Vandyke’s polar opposite, Romanov was an outgoing young game designer brimming with such confidence that he quickly inspired a cadre of fans eager to follow his career personally. He was inspired to begin building his own games at a young age, designing his own stylized versions of popular titles for release on the Spectrum. At age twenty, with a host of simple mobiGlas games under his belt, he took his first formal job at the industry powerhouse Oakhurst Online. His first project was an aborted port of 3400 AD, followed by six months making dungeons, quests and monsters for Henry Garrity’s ULTIMATE III. Unfortunately, he was clashing with his bosses over creative direction to such a degree that, shortly before the release of ULTIMATE III, when Perigree approached him with an offer to be their Lead Designer, he quickly accepted.
And with that, lightning struck. Vandyke and Romanov, the cardinal introvert and the shameless self-promoter, struck up an unlikely friendship that lead directly to their first co-authored game, Admiral Cool versus the Karate Dogs from Mars, released by Perigree under a ‘try before you buy’ license, that helped make the pair household names. Bright, colorful and fun, Admiral Cool’s kid-friendly outlook belied outstanding technical achievements under the hood. As he has done with all projects since, Vandyke viewed the project as a technical challenge: how could he recreate the experience found in arcade machines and dedicated gaming rigs on the common mobiGlas? Turning to an encyclopedic knowledge of assembly language and machine logic, he created a stunning interface unlike anything else available for wearable systems at the time.
Two additional Admiral Cool games followed, including a final title, Admiral Cool in Vegetable Panic, created solely to fulfill a publishing contract. Romanov built the levels foreach game, turning colorful blocks, cartoon dogs, hamburgers, Opi-Ola bottles and glittering candies into an immersive, fast-paced world.
Upon seeing a demo of Original’s ULTIMATE spinoff series, ULTIMATE: Downbelow, Vandyke sought an even greater technical challenge for their next project: replicate and then surpass the total immersion interface being developed by high-end publishers, but in a faster-paced, action-oriented world that better suited the design aesthetics of Romanov and his growing team. This time around, Romanov opted to forgo the kid-friendly graphics that defined Admiral Cool, and instead turned to the gritty details of history: an action title based on the internecine warfare of the Messer era. The result was named Tiger3D, and the response was immediate. Players everywhere hailed the impossibly realistic environments, the sheer speed of movement allowed by the engine … and countless others focused on what they saw as a tasteless appropriation of history. While the gaming industry is no stranger to unwarranted protests, there’s some truth to the claim that the team at Perigree intentionally hit a nerve. From levels covered in totalitarian banners to the final episode in which the player must battle a titan-suited parody of Ivar Messer, the game’s design seemed intended to offend more delicate sensibilities.
InterDimension
Despite the outrage, Tiger 3D was a hit and catapulted the pair to the next level. In 2941, Romanov and Vandyke quietly exited Perigree and set up their own shop, founded on the idea of building out innovative technology and flavoring it with great game design. InterDimension Software sought to be a different kind of game creator, with a small-scale ethos that appealed to hardcore players around the Empire. Their first title, announced well in advance via Romanov’s over-stuffed personal Comm-Link updates, was Star Marine. Building on the technology premiered in Tiger 3D, Star Marine was intended as the most ultra-realistic ground combat simulator ever attempted. Building around carefully constructed maps of a Gold Horizon station, Star Marine was crafted from Day One to immerse the player in the very heart of an epic life-or-death struggle.
After a series of unexpected and much publicized delays, Star Marine premiered recently to great acclaim. Based in the present-day and featuring incredibly realistic design, Star Marine has become the “it game” of the year, with the response ranging from the creation of massive communities of competitive players and other fanatics to headlines about companies bemoaning the productivity lost to employees playing it on extended lunch breaks. It seems that nearly everyone in the universe has become a Star Marine. Asked at their launch event why they thought their latest title would be successful, Romanov, speaking for the pair, responded simply, “because it’s pretty damn fun.”
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Greetings Citizens!
This last week has flown by! We’re pleased to present the second weekly update of what went down with both Star Citizen 2.0 and Star Marine.
The coolest news? SHIPS CAN NOW SPLIT IN TWO (or more!) Yes, the Tech Design and Code team have been working hard and getting this very exciting feature working in the engine and they’ve finally cracked it… so you will now be able to break ships up in to large chunks once you’ve dealt out some catastrophic damage! You can really go to town on your worst enemies and deliver irreparable damage to their ships, for instance, breaking up the Constellation in to four whole chunks. The system still needs more love to get it ready for release but in terms of the technical functionality we’ve definitely broken the back of it (excuse the pun!)
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Everyone has been polishing and bug fixing like crazy and we still have some content dropping in from various the departments including more fantastic sounding audio. Our dialogue specialist has been down at Pinewood Studios (of James Bond—and Privateer 2: The Darkening—fame) and SIDE UK to record more of the datalog audio pieces which are turning out to be a very fun piece of exploration gameplay in this release.
We’re still having a good tussle with the EVA system to get that feeling good and ready but at least we are getting more joy from the ship systems in the AI behaviours. These AI will account for those new encounters and scenarios that the player will now be faced with in Crusader. For example, the map construction is balanced so that if player strays too far from the security of the UEE zones they that might find that they run in to trouble, or they might just get lucky – who knows!? The beauty of it is that it’s all systemic-based gameplay where each encounter has its own unique potential.
What about the Star Marine-related portion of the release? With boots on the ground we’re seeing some noticeable improvements in the FPS reload animations, ADS and Stop-Start so we’re very pleased to that is all really taking shape, and not only are the characters feeling better, but the environments are too. The Environment team have been slogging away at various space stations in their final art stages, and the Covalex Shipping Hub has just had a full lighting pass so we’re sure it will really blow people away!
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Crusader as whole is feeling much more alive now with further iterations to the repair bots and the implementation of the background traffic simulation systems – this helps give a real buzz to the map with traders and UEE patrols zipping about all over the place! This is another of those first Star Citizen steps with this release, as the Universe starts to come alive piece-by-piece by building the systems that will organically produce the economies and communities for you to play in.
Lastly, there’s some vast improvements coming in with the in-ship UI screen revamp in order to factor in all of the new Multicrew gameplay. The UI the team are really excited with how it’s all coming together, and any of you techie-types will love getting your hands on the first implementation of the new engineering screen that allows greater control over your ships power and shield systems. In addition, the new screen focus functionality will allow you to quickly and easily turn your attention to individual screens situated around your station. These UI screens needed much careful consideration because they will be what underpins this core system feature for years to come, and will allow us to build up more and more functionality as the bigger and BIGGER ships come online!
Here’s a high level breakdown of action from the different departments…
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Gameplay and Engineering
Ships will more accurately arrive to the end of AI splines
Better handling of dynamic avoidance for ships that are following AI splines
Improve escape behaviours when a ship’s hull gets heavily damaged
Improvements for the missile usage of the ships
Ships will be more accurate on avoiding obstacles
Changed the relationship between character arms and the camera which improves ADS and shooting from hip
Fixed up problems with the player jumping
Cleaning up the pistol motion sets to be brought in line with the rifle
Improved the handling of rag-dolling
Quantum fuel now supported over a network game
Added a collision test before the start of quantum travel – informs you of objects between you and the intended destination
Support for discoverable quantum travel nav beacons
Improvements/polish to the repair drone functionality
Network optimisations
UI
Tweaks to Quantum Travel HUD
Circles around points of interest
Added Quantum Fuel consumption amount
Added “Out of range” message if you are trying to make a jump that you don’t have enough fuel for
Added Quantum Travel HUDs to most of the ships now
First Iteration of the Mission Manager has been submitted
5 Screens for the Crusader map
Basic implementation of the Engineering screens with Power, Shields, Overview, Minimised tabs submitted. (Requires testing)
Engineering Screen polish
Ship spawning implementation
Mission manager improvements
Listing completed missions
Art
Further iterations on the Cutlass, Retaliator and Constellation final steps of the pipeline.
Final improvements to the environment art and FX.
Animation
More iterations on environmental interactions, EVA, FPS movement and gunplay, Death and Hit Reactions, and “Fall and Play”.
Audio
Dialogue recording session for some additional lines and some re-records
Began work on improvements to the ship audio
Implementation of more music to improve the feel of the areas and ‘sell the scene’
Working on duress parameters to be applied to your ship under certain conditions
Audio design to go alongside this as well
Tweaking audio on FPS weapons and gadgets
Expanding the variety of footsteps heard on surfaces
Ongoing work to improve the atmospheric qualities of space stations
Blockers
Characters are missing interior sections of their helmets.
Ballistic weapons can cause a crash and we have various other stability issues to fix up.
The “Push and Pull” system seems to be conflicting with another control system because it’s currently catapulting the player in to deep spaaaaaaaaace!
Particles seem to stop rendering in some gravitational areas, but not all! Needs further investigation!
Looking Forward
Whew, what a week! As you can see, we’re making a great deal of progress on what promises to be Star Citizen’s most exciting release to date. With today’s live release of Star Citizen Alpha 1.3, the PTU release of Alpha 2.0 is now our next goal! We can’t wait to let you explore (and if we’re honest, break!) the Mini PTU. The entire team is working as hard as possible to get it ready for backer testing.
Please note that while our major focus this week was 2.0, next week’s update will include more details on Star Marine.
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Greetings Citizens,
Star Citizen Alpha 1.3 is now available on the live server! Alpha 1.3 represents our first ‘post merge’ patch, which means that a great deal of work has happened ‘under the hood’ combining several different development streams. The merge process conducted these past weeks has prepared the game for the next major update: the upcoming Alpha 2.0 “Mini Persistent Universe.” In addition to technical work, today’s patch includes updates to the flight model, a selection of new, larger guns for Voyager Direct and a variety of other changes. The patch is currently accessible via the Star Citizen Launcher and a complete list of release notes (including balance modifications, known issues and other changes) are available here.
This patch includes a large expansion to the ArcCorp’s Area 18. It adds the under-construction Galleria area, an overhaul of the social interface, new emotes and the addition of Greycat buggies around the zone that can be driven and crashed. We have also introduced some balance changes to both ship health and weapon damage, as well as a number of bug fixes. Finally, today’s patch also includes a significant update to the social module’s chat system. Want to learn how to socialize in the ‘Verse? We’ve put together a Chat FAQ available here for those interested.
We would also like to take a moment to thank the many backers who worked tirelessly to help the team locate and eliminate blockers on the PTU. The ability to issue more rapid PTU updates have been a goal for the project, and we’re happy to have been able to have launched six iterative test universe patches to get to this point! Thank you to our elite vanguard of volunteer testers who have made today’s release possible.
Star Citizen Alpha 1.3 adds a larger Size 4 Behring Combine Ballistic Cannon intended for use with the upcoming flyable Retaliator. Since the multicrew bomber is not available today and we know pilots would love some new toys to work towards, we’re making them available in the Voyager Direct site today along with a pair of specialized mounts that will let you attach them to either the Cutlass Black or the Hornet series of spacecraft. All three items are now available for rental with REC or purchase with UEC. A second gun, a size 2 Strife Mass Driver, is also available!
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ADVOCACY ARCHIVE INTRA-AGENCY MESSAGES
2945-10-19_06:41 SET
TO: SC Eva Reimold
CC: ASC Jerome Janis FROM: SAC Eleanor Lemieux
RE: GLAIVE ATTACK
SC Reimold —
Last night an incident occurred near Cestulus that requires your attention. An official report is in the works, but I wanted to loop you in immediately.
Yesterday at 22:49 SET Jeff Klesko frantically commed local authorities in Jata about an impending Vanduul attack. Needless to say, they were skeptical as they’ve been continuously receiving false reports of Vanduul ever since the attack in Vega. So, while local authorities investigated the claim, they instructed Klesko to send specific coordinates, keep his distance from any enemies and, most importantly, to not engage. Unfortunately, he failed to follow that last directive.
Turns out that the “Vanduul attack” reported by Klesko consisted of a single Glaive-class ship. Not only that, it was one of those limited Human reproductions done by Esperia. This one was registered to Victor King, a Citizen from Ferron. By the time authorities had confirmed King’s reg-tags and had given it clearance to land, it was too late. Klesko engaged the Glaive just before it entered atmo above Jata and destroyed it.
After the incident, Klesko commed authorities to tell them the situation was resolved and even inquired about his reward for killing a Vanduul in UEE space. The local authorities told Klesko to land, so they could discuss the details. Only after they got him on the ground and into the office did they reveal what really happened. Reports are that he did not take the news well.
I just finished interviewing Klesko and got very little out of him. He’s young and in shock over the entire thing. Kid came here thinking he was a hero only to find out otherwise. I’d wager it’s the first time he used his ship’s weapons outside of Arena Commander.
We’re operating under the assumption that Victor King was piloting the ship, but are still working to recover the body. I have contacted the office in Ferron for help tracking down his family.
Considering the sensitive nature of the situation, I wanted to consult you on how to proceed regarding potential charges. Don’t want to go too hard or too soft at the kid, so I’d appreciate your guidance. There’s a chance for public backlash at either turn.
Eleanor Lemieux Special Agent-in-Charge Advocacy – Davien System
2945-10-19_15:19 SET
TO: SAC Eleanor Lemieux
CC: ASC Jerome Janis FROM: SC Eva Reimold
RE: GLAIVE ATTACK
Eleanor,
Keep Klesko detained without charges until we have more details. See if he’ll authorize you to access his comm log so we can determine if he received the message to not engage. If he refuses then prepare a warrant.
I’ll make sure one of our agents in Ferron visits the King family ASAP, so we can confirm who was piloting the ship.
Let’s keep the circle tight on this for the time being. Only essential personnel until we figure out how we want to handle this.
Eva Reimold Section Chief – Davien System Office of the Advocacy – Earth
2945-10-19_15:47 SET
TO: Asst Dir David Golovkin FROM: SC Eva Reimold
RE: GLAIVE ATTACK
Hi David —
Last night an unfortunate incident occurred in Davien. A young, overly-patriotic pilot (Jeff Klesko) shot down a Human reproduction of a Glaive-class ship after mistaking it for an actual Vanduul. Luckily, my SAC was conscious of how this story might play in the public and has held off on filing charges until we’ve had a chance to think it through.
The Glaive was registered to a Victor King from Asura, but we still need to confirm who was piloting the ship. Do you have a trusted team member in Ferron who could pay a visit to the family?
I don’t want this to turn into a PR nightmare for us so I’ve attached all the relevant information. Please give it a read and pass along your general impressions. We can only hold Klesko so long before we have to bring charges.
Thanks. Eva Reimold Section Chief – Davien System Office of the Advocacy – Earth
2945-10-19_18:37 SET
TO: SC Eva Reimold FROM: Asst Dir David Golovkin
RE: GLAIVE ATTACK
Eva –
The King family has been notified of the incident. Victor King, the legal owner of the ship, was at their residence in Asura and not piloting the ship when it was shot down. According to the family, their son Jasper King (PersonalFile# OH8_31877_416) took the Glaive on a business trip to Jata. The family has no shortage of ships registered to them, but that one was his favorite. Attempts to persuade him to take another spacecraft were obviously unsuccessful.
My agents kept details to a minimum but the family requested constant updates about our investigation. Please keep me informed on further developments so we can relay them to the family. My review of their file revealed that they’re old mining money that has long been involved in politics. Problems could arise if they feel stonewalled. It might even drive them to make noise in the press. The information is going to get to them no matter what, so it’s better they hear it from us.
Regards, David Golovkin Assistant Director – Office of Public Affairs Office of the Advocacy – Earth
2945-10-19_20:05 SET
TO: Asst Dir David Golovkin FROM: SC Eva Reimold
RE: GLAIVE ATTACK
David -
Unfortunately, there’s little doubt as to what occurred. Now it’s just a matter of how to handle it.
Just for sake of argument, let’s say we decide to soft-pedal charges on Klesko. Maybe manslaughter to ensure there’s no chance he’ll serve time on QuarterDeck. The kid obviously made a horrible mistake, but given the circumstances it’s easy to see why he acted the way he did.
If we go that route, do you think the family might use their connections to put up a fight?
Eva Reimold Section Chief – Davien System Office of the Advocacy – Earth
2945-10-19_22:17 SET
TO: SC Eva Reimold FROM: Asst Dir David Golovkin
RE: GLAIVE ATTACK
Eva –
Wish I could say, but it’s hard to predict how a family will react to such a tragic event.
In my opinion, what Jasper did was dumb and insensitive, but not illegal. Short of the Imperator himself passing a decree to temporarily ground all Human-compatible Glaives, people have the right to fly them anywhere in the Empire. It’s something I personally find distasteful, but it’s still worthy of our protection.
As much as I understand why Klesko did what he did, I worry about the message we’d be sending to trigger-happy Citizens and civilians if he got off too easy. Shoot first and ask questions later is not a good position for us. Treating this case as such might be easier in the short term but could cause more problems down the road.
My personal thoughts aside, I will fully support whatever position you take on the matter.
David Golovkin Assistant Director – Office of Public Affairs Office of the Advocacy – Earth
2945-10-20_01:49 SET
To: Asst Dir David Golovkin FROM: SC Eva Reimold
RE: GLAIVE ATTACK
David -
As always, I appreciate your candor on the issue. I’d prefer if we could avoid having this unfortunate incident completely destroy a second young life. Time spent on QuarterDeck won’t make things better for either Klesko or for Jasper King’s memory.
With that in mind, I will instruct my SAC to file manslaughter charges against Klesko. If my decision comes back to haunt us, I’m prepared to take the full brunt of the blame. Just another one of the many perks of being SC.
Will give you the heads up before we officially file the charges. That way your agents can be the ones to relay the information to the King family and monitor their reactions.
Eva Reimold Section Chief – Davien System Office of the Advocacy – Earth
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Welcome to the first Star Citizen Alpha 2.0.0 Status update! We want you to know that we haven’t taken our foot off the pedal, and so we are expanding the weekly Star Marine update to include what the team is doing to prepare for the Alpha 2.0.0 launch.
It feels like June 2014 again when the whole company pushed together to get the very first “Arena Commander – Dogfighting Module v0.8” release out to the fans. Every department has been working flat out to get all of the exciting new content and gameplay in there, whilst making our systems robust enough to build a whole universe upon!
It’s a really exciting time for the project and as always we have been pushing the fidelity, improving the performance, fixing up bugs and iterating on new and existing gameplay features around the clock to make this a really enjoyable and solid release… and what we think will be our best yet!
As you will have seen from our CitizenCon demo, the Planet Crusader map is huge! We placed several new points of interest for you to explore around in your ship and on foot, introducing several basic missions and AI encounters for you to experience a variety of encounters in this beautiful star system. All of these encounters will have a random element to keep you guessing and should give players a taste of what Star Citizen is becoming with unique experiences every time you play, and layers of immersion such as one mission that asks the player to seek out Audio Datalogs from the space stations. It’s moments like this that will help build a story behind the environment and add a rich social history to our Universe.
Brace yourselves for some brand new gameplay elements! We’ve now got our basic implementation of the refuel, repair and restock systems in-game so pay attention to your Quantum Fuel Tank reserves and choose your Jump Points wisely to make sure you don’t get stranded out there! Then when you’re not busy hurtling around at 0.2c, or fighting pirates in asteroid fields, you can also experience the first taste of “rules and regulations” in the Universe with the introduction of our first “Green Zone” that enforces a non-combat area on all players. This is an important step towards building the bigger picture.
As I’m sure you’re all aware, the FPS team are working hard at getting the basic movement and gunplay feeling good so that we have a solid foundation to build on from, just like we did with our IFCS system for ships. The new additions of IFCS systems have been in test for the past few days so we’re balancing all of that out with Design and QA. Super Cruise, SCM (Space Combat Manoeuvring) and Precision Mode will soon be ready for you to hone your space flight skills even further; and we’ve even given EVA the “IFCS makeover” to harness all the hard work that went in to that system which will give us a much more natural and precise version of EVA manoeuvring.
Meanwhile, work on Star Marine proper continues. Some of the deeper features are taking a back seat this week we roll out the basic movement and gunplay that will be available to all players on the Crusader map. This allows us to focus our attention on making the time players are outside their ships a good experience. What’s not included in Star Citizen Alpha 2.0? Game systems such as the score screen and Star Marine lobby UI, as well as some gameplay engineering and design work that is needed for Headquarters game mode. Have no fear, though, for Star Marine will return and your appetite for first person combat will be whetted by the action on Bravo station in the Crusader map. We will continue developing features and gameplay modes that are ultimately for use within Star Citizen, and we will continue to use Arena Commander and the Star Marine modes as a test bed for them. For now, and into the future, the FPS experience will be an integral part of Star Citizen Alpha, and we can’t be more happy about that!
We hope you like the sound of what is to come in this huge release for Star Citizen and the team will keep you posted every week of how it’s all coming along. Thanks for your amazing support as ever, we’re confident that this will be a release for everyone to remember!
Here’s a high level breakdown of action from the different departments…
Gameplay and Engineering
Added extra missions in to the Asteroid Fields.
Added Research Stations as well as Storage Stations.
Green Zone system now works to prevent combat fire around the main base.
EVA and animation system improvements including “Fall and Play” to make death and hit reactions look super realistic.
Added Quantum Fuel Tank functionality so now the player’s fuel reserves deplete and the player will need to refuel at the stations.
Improvements to procedural FPS camera sway.
Improved AI to avoid obstacles in space.
Repair respawns turrets.
Zero-G out of airlocks.
Added a toggle for identification signal; meaning the ship emissions that make you appear on radar can be switched on and off.
Journal improvements.
Added notifications for player entering a Green Zone.
Improved network syncing for crew members of a multicrew ship when entering/exiting Quantum Travel.
Smoothed out the exit sequence from Quantum Travel.
Optimised the radar for landing areas.
Ship selector now takes ship size into account when assigning it to a landing pad.
Vehicle destruction and how we handle the interior physics upon destruction is in progress.
Putting P-capped animations onto the FPS character rig.
Discussion about character loadouts in regard to weapons and armour for the Crusader map.
UI
mobiGlas mission manager initial implementation has been completed.
Quantum Travel HUD additions.
Quantum fuel gauges.
Quantum travel point of interest marker improvements.
New airlock screens are now being implemented.
Branding for vending machines are also being implemented.
16:9 Engineering Screens art and implementation.
A new reticule for repair landing pads has been implemented.
Art
Repair drone VFX improvements.
Constellation, Cutlass and Retaliator final art, set up and balance.
Crusader map environment final art and optimizations.
Animation
Iterations and new assets for EVA, Death and Hit Reactions, and Fall and Play.
The full no weapon animation set is being finalized, work will continue into next week.
Lots of FPS basic movement and gunplay iterations and tweaks
Gun sway, weapon canting, and recoil procedural animations were tweaked by a strike team of animators, engineers, and designers this week, and we’re on track to finish this next week.
Fixed up pistol reload animation.
Continued work with IK look poses and aim poses
Submitted ragdoll improvements for testing.
Ship, prop and environmental interactions for the player.
Audio
Reviewed audio from the CitizenCon demo and identified areas to improve.
Began work on dialogue editing.
Working to improve ship audio as a whole by changing our in-house process.
Implementation of more music to improve the immersion and emotion in the map.
Investigations on how to best improve the breathing manager for ships and FPS combat for the sounds and the code behind it.
Tweaking audio on FPS weapons and gadgets, with a focus on pistol and ballistic assault rifle audio, and the medpen.
Tweaking to laser recharge ammo audio.
Expanding the variety of footsteps heard on surfaces.
Addition of audio for HUD notifications when picking up/downloading datapad information.
Improvements to the breathing manager.
Blocking Issues
Mainly the network and multiplayer issues are holding us back on a functionality side.
Then it’s sum of the work that’s needed to get it ready for release because we have lots of bug fixing and polish to do including performance improvements.
AI do not spawn into encounters, as their triggers aren’t playing correctly! Players can fly to the locations to trigger events but no AI will spawn in. Thankfully they trigger in Missions.
The interior physics grid for single seater ships has a bug meaning that you can’t walk around them during flight and will fall to the back of the ship. Fun, but impractical!
The No Weapon animation set is not done yet, and not ready to ship. Should be in better shape next week as the team in Austin continues work on it.
EVA flight is difficult so needs fine tuning to be able to handle the character better, engineers will look into this next week.
EVA look and aim poses need to be created and implemented for the use of weapons.
Pistol motion sets need integration, this will be done next week.
The prone motion set is now a problem, as we have changed the way we do standing and alerted aim poses. This will change how players aim while prone, whether they be prone forward, or rolled on to the back. Needs some R&D love next week.
Issues with some ship and environment terminal UI not working properly
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Q&A: Ark Starmap
You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers! At CitizenCon we kicked off the first iteration of the Ark Starmap, a joint effort between our writing team in Santa Monica, our web developers Turbulent, and our strategic partner Gamerizon. We’re very happy with this first release, and wanted to give these teams a chance to answer some of the questions you posted in our forums.
Ken Hwang from Turbulent
David Haddock, Cherie Heiberg, Adam Wieser, and Will Weissbaum from CIG Santa Monica.
So without further ado, the questions… and the answers…
Questions & Answers
Hey! Why does the map say Pluto is a planet?
Currently, Pluto is listed correctly as a Dwarf Planet if you click on the planet and open up the information disk. However, the way the Starmap database works right now, in order to have an object look like a planet it needs to be labeled as planet type. This is not ideal.
We are in the process of looking at revamping the classification system, so that a celestial object’s actual type will be displayed first (such as Terrestrial Planet, Gas Giant, Dwarf Planet, etc), and its subtype will be displayed second (such as Rocky, Ice, Smog, etc). Under this new system, Pluto would be a Dwarf Planet type with a subtype of Ice. We are also working on an updated classification system for stars by further separating out the stellar and spectral types. Once the classification system is revamped, it will be more precise in its ability to describe what kind of celestial body that you’re seeing (like Pluto being a Dwarf Planet).
We are also still populating the Starmap. If you check it today, you will see that Pluto is now in the company of its moon, Charon. We’ve also added an Observation Base to the Kellog system and two more planets to the Kallis system. Populating the map will continue because we have so much to share with you. Stay tuned for more additions!
Which ships can fit in which size jump points?
This is something the designers are still looking at the specifics of, and we hope to release more information when it’s available.
Can you explain how the Ark Starmap relates to the Game Universe Map and the Digital Starmap package items?
The Game Universe Map that some backers pledged for is a physical poster that will feature a 2D representation of the Ark Starmap. The Digital Starmap is a digital copy of this poster.
The ‘Map Room’ is also still in the works and will be an additional area added on to hangars that will allow players to interact with the information in the Starmap in unique ways.
Can the map have an easter egg that glitches the Earth info tab to read “Mostly Harmless” every 25th May (Towel Day)?
The web Starmap is integrated with the RSI website platform, so technically it is possible to “glitch” the Earth info tab. But we categorically deny the existence of any Easter egg in the current Starmap.
The information on the map is great, but what about more information? Wouldn’t more information be even greater? What about Galactic Guides and the Galactapedia?
More information would be great, and we are eager to provide it as you explore the systems and worlds of Star Citizen. To put things a little more into context, the short blurbs we have in currently might not look like much, but with the number of systems, worlds and celestial objects we have there is around 60 pages worth of text in the map already. Just like the large game, we hope to release more information in steady waves. Our next step will be to begin to connect the Starmap to more detailed Galactapedia articles as they become ready to post. The information will be more high level to start, but as the game gets closer we will continue to add more and more details and continue to flesh out the world.
As far as linking to the existing Galactic Guides and Observist articles, we debated it, but decided in the end to keep them separate. Lore-wise, the Ark is a scholarly institute whereas the Galactic Guides and Observist articles are more akin to tourist and traveler resources. It’s the difference between reading an encyclopedia and a guidebook or studying a map in an atlas or a map printed in a brochure you find in a hotel lobby. The Galactapedia will be connected to the Starmap while the other posts will link into other various resources.
On a more meta level, because we have a better understanding today of how we want systems to be designed then we did when we first started writing the Galactic Guides, a lot of them have little details here and there that are out of date. We didn’t want to link the Starmap directly to incorrect information. Our hope is to eventually update them, but that is a large task and will take some time. As a first step, we have already updated the Stanton Galactic Guide to match the most current design.
How do undiscovered systems factor into the Starmap? Does the Starmap automatically update even if a system isn’t reported?
The Starmap only shows known systems and jump points. There’s a lot out there to discover, and it wouldn’t be fun for anyone if we added that to the Starmap. To answer the second question, the system would need to be reported in order to be added to the Starmap. This way, if a pirate faction discovers a jump point, or if an enterprising merchant discovers a new, resource-rich system, they can keep their discoveries to themselves.
Is there any chance we will get access to the Starmap code and API? We’d love to peek behind the curtain to see how this all came together and maybe even make a few tweaks or create our own apps.
We love the enthusiasm over the Starmap and everyone’s interest in how it came together. Currently there are no plans to release the API or code, though it may be something we look at again farther down the road.
With that in mind, if you have any future suggestion on how to make the Starmap better and more user friendly, please let us know! While we probably won’t be able to get around to every suggested tweak, we want this map to be fun, informative, and essential to the game. Your continued feedback will be vital to this process.
How are the distances of routes calculated? It seems odd that a route with more jump points would be less AU than a route with fewer jumps.
The AU distance that you see when planning a route is a calculation of the distance between jumps that you will have to fly at regular or quantum speeds. Jump travel is not included in this as it cuts through space and does not add much distance to your journey. However, it does take considerable fuel to jump. Players will have to balance the fuel cost of jumping with the extra time and risk of flying through normal space.
Will we be using the Starmap to track missions and trade information in the game?
Our current thinking in-lore is that the Ark Starmap will not have live data. The Ark will release regular updates, but information needs to be vetted, confirmed and double checked by researchers before making it on to the official map. To keep track of more up to the minute information, that is where the mobiGlas’ skyLine and other apps will come into to play. SkyLine is where players would store their personal information on top of the map. This could be stuff like secret data, information from NPC sources, and mission locations. They would also be able to switch on additional layers with the latest data from the TDD about trade or the Advocacy about crimes that are happening, etc.
Will we see further adjustments to the interface controls in the Starmap?
We hope to keep refining in future iterations both the interface and the visuals. While there are no definite plans to share yet, we are looking into the possibility of adding things like WASD movement, separate sound effect and music toggles, and manual zoom controls.
To get the interface to where it is now, we had to consider a wide range of users and even the possibility that the Starmap might be someone’s first experience with Star Citizen. For example, when it came to the L/R button we decided that the left mouse button should perform the most natural action in each view. In 3D view, the natural inclination is to rotate the camera. Meanwhile, in 2D view, panning becomes the first instinct.
Are there any plans to integrate tablet and mobile support with the Starmap?
Yes, this is something we’re considering for a future release of the Starmap. We all agree that being able to explore the ’verse from the bathroom would be pretty great.
What is this sorcery?
Astromancy.
And with that we wrap up our first Q&A about the Starmap. Like all aspects of Star Citizen, this will continue to grow and develop as time goes on. We’re going to leave the Q&A Thread in the forums open for a bit to collect more questions and we look to do a second part to this Q&A in the coming weeks.
If there was ever a milestone that deserved a letter to the community it was this. When I first started on this adventure I would have never dreamed that we would ever this many people and this much support in building Star Citizen. It’s amazing to have a community and team that believe so fervently in what is being built… Say it loud: PC games are back, space combat games are back… we are making Star Citizen possible!
We’ve put a great deal of thought into what would be an appropriate update to celebrate this milestone. But wait! Before we continue, it seems there’s an urgent comm-link coming through…
Thank you, Admiral!
It goes without saying that it was the thrill of a lifetime to work with Gary Oldman and the rest of our amazing cast. I have certainly had a hard time keeping quiet about that work these past few months; everyone on the team has wanted to shout it from the rooftops. The quality of Squadron 42’s principal cast is another testament to the community: you have supported us with such passion and given us the room to create a universe that has attracted top talent, eager to explore the cutting edge of story and games… that’s not something that happens every day!
As I was saying before I was interrupted: one million Citizens! The stars of this game aren’t all Hollywood actors or big name game developers… they’re those you who are making the game possible in the first place. Our one millionth Citizen is Edenstar. Appropriately, he, like so many of you, were introduced to Star Citizen by a friend who was passionate about the game… in fact, he says he joined because he was worried he wasn’t going to see his friends anymore after the game launches! I’ve said many times that backers are our best marketing, and here’s some pretty solid proof! Edenstar, Pikes-zen, we’re going to go ahead and give you each a brand new Sabre to explore the ‘Verse with. Enjoy!
In honor of our newest Citizen (really, our thousands of new Citizens!) we would like to give something back to the entire community for all your incredible support. Starting today, we are eliminating ‘Alpha Access’ and the $5 module passes. Anyone who has pledged for a Star Citizen Package can now play today without worrying they won’t have access to some portion of the ‘Verse in the future. No Star Marine pass, no Alpha 2.0 pass… no additional payment needed for any module in the works, pre-release. Going forward, should we need to put out some sort of limited release it will be done through the PTU test server. All backers will have access to any live release, the moment it publishes.
In addition, I’d like to reward our earliest supporters who made it possible to get to this point. Everyone with an ‘alpha access’ package will be awarded 10,000 UEC; everyone who purchased an Arena Commander pass individually will be given 5,000 UEC (with the cap raising appropriately to allow this.) You also have my most sincere thanks: you were our vanguard, the battalion that fought the good fight from the beginning. Your impact on Star Citizen will never be forgotten, for without your early faith we couldn’t be where we are today. (Please note that this credit payout is going to take a big script, so it may take Turbulent a few days to work out the logistics!)
It goes without saying that I’m proud of the incredible community that has come together to support Star Citizen to this point, and I’m so excited to watch and take part as you grow, evolve and change as we approach the finish line. Whether you were an Early Backer, a Veteran Backer, someone who joined yesterday or even one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’… we are all Star Citizens today, equal and with the same thing owed to us: the Best Damn Space Simulator Ever.
Knowing that one million people (and growing!) are counting on us will only further fuel our desire to deliver. Every member of the Star Citizen team already knows that we work for the backers… and reaching one million is just another reminder why we are giving this project all of ourselves. Right now that’s getting Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 in shape to share with all of you in the near future, and we’re in the process of closing down Star Marine as well.
Until then, the team and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts in making this possible. Star Citizen lives by the support it receives from the community, and that support has been loud and clear over these past three years. As I look around at artists, designers and engineers prepping Constellations and Retaliators for their multi-crew launch, I can say with certainty: I will see you very soon… in the ‘Verse!
What a show! We hope you enjoyed the CitizenCon 2015 livestream. For our part, the team is thrilled to have been able to finally share some of the incredible work being done on Squadron 42 and other aspects of the game. We hope it lived up to your expectations, and we can’t wait to push the envelope even farther! But now, it’s time to find out how we did it! This month, we asked each studio to write their monthly report as through CitizenCon had already happened, so you can hear exactly what they worked on to make the event happen. (It’s also important to remember that this work wasn’t just for a demo; everything you saw today was part of larger game development milestones!) Read on for details.
Subject: Organizational and Studio changes
Recently, we’ve heard from backers who are worried over rumors that individual CIG studios are closing. This is not the case! In fact, Cloud Imperium Games is continuing to expand as we continue to find talented employees; we had twelve new developers start in September, alone! The root of this confusion seems to be the fact that the reorganization that began when Erin Roberts took over as head of global production is changing the specific requirements of each studio. In the spirit of open development, we are sharing the exact e-mail Chris Roberts sent to the team on the subject of restructuring two weeks ago.
From: Chris Roberts Sent: Friday, September 25, 2015 8:12 AM To: CIG GLOBAL STAFF Subject: Organizational and Studio changes
Hello everybody,
I wanted to update everyone on some organizational changes we are making to maximize our creative synergy and development abilities.
It’s no secret that having a distributed development structure presents challenges as much as it provides advantages. At the outset of Star Citizen I decided that I wanted to go where the talent was rather than try to make the talent come to where I was. Without this approach we wouldn’t have some of the most talented people in the industry working on star Citizen. There are people in Los Angeles, Austin, Manchester and Frankfurt that are only working on this game because we have offices in these locations. We truly have a WORLD CLASS team.
With every positive there is always a negative, and that negative is the communication challenges that present themselves when people all working together on the same project are separated by large distances and time zones.
At the top level of the company, especially on the development side we’ve been discussing how best to reduce these issues while keeping the positive.
We’ve begun to think about how we can focus development at our various studios so people working on a certain feature or discipline can be concentrated for maximum effectiveness. Audio in the UK is a great example – the sound design and audio implementation in Star Citizen is just amazing (especially for our stage of development) – and this is partly because Lee Banyard, our Audio Director and almost all our audio staff are concentrated in Manchester, allowing them to frequently interact and problem solve in a way you can only do when in the same location. This is why when talking to Zane Bien about the possibility of becoming the global UI Creative Director, part of the discussion was about him leaving the beach and sunshine of Santa Monica to be with David Gill and Karl Jones and the rest of the UI team in Manchester that we are building to handle the global UI needs of the project.
We’ve also been thinking about how to make sure the key creative leaders in the company spend more time together and most importantly allow me to spend quality time with my key development lieutenants as I was feeling spread way too thin creatively – especially when we were in six game development locations with Illfonic and BHVR. When it was just Austin I could spend a lot of time between Austin and LA but as we’ve expanded to more locations and added external development my ability to spend time on the ground at each location has been reduced.
After much deliberation we have decided on the following:
To increase creative and game direction synergy Tony Zurovec will be spending significant time in LA (but still be based in Austin) in order for me and him to work closer together in getting the Persistent Universe in the hands of players.
Sean Tracy will relocate to LA as the Global Content Tech Director, allowing him to have a bigger impact on the whole company and help the LA team.
We’ve also decided to further continue the streamlining of our development groups – We’ve made a decision to focus the US engineering into two teams –
The backend services which is headed by Jason Ely will remain in Austin and will continue to work closely with Live Ops, which will also remain in Austin.
The Space and Persistent Universe game play and systems will be concentrated in Los Angeles, where things like the new item system and vehicle / space systems are being developed. This makes sense as Austin is weak on engineering CryEngine technical knowledge whereas LA is strong, and to really have an effective gameplay team we need one fairly large unit that can interact with each other on a daily basis. Having Stephen Humphries out in LA working closely with Paul Reindell and Mark Abent has really cemented the upside of having the people all working on the same systems being in the same space.
The current PU Art and Animation team will also stay in Austin, as will the Austin ship artists. Mark Skelton will be based in Austin but will split time between Austin and LA as the US Art Director. I really welcome having Mark out in LA regularly as I think it will significantly help the team.
On the design side Pete MacKay will move from Austin to LA to be on the ground with John Pritchett and the rest of the ship balance team to work closely with tuning our ships and weapons. Rob Reininger will remain in Austin to support Cort and prototype Persistent Universe locations.
We will staff up a small QA staff in LA, potentially with some key folks from Austin in order to support the gameplay work and also be collocated with the balance team (which has always been an issue as the designers that balance the space combat and flight aren’t in the same place as the QA teams that give feedback on this). We will also look to increase QA in Frankfurt for core engine and tech testing. QA in Austin will focus on Live release support and testing.
We are going to split Dev Ops (build support, internal distribution of builds) from Live Ops (deployment to the cloud, distribution to the players, maintaining & monitoring the game servers). Dev Ops will move to Frankfurt to be next to the engine team and the group that knows the absolute most about the engine and how best to compile it.
On the Production side Jake will remain in Austin and run Austin Production, with Jason Hutchins and Mark Hong both moving out to LA to help bolster the LA production staff – Having Jason in LA will be a great help as he has lots of development experience and has experience in getting big complicated online games out the door
Global IT will remain in Austin.
John Erskine will continue to run our various online operations, digital publishing and IT from Austin but will also regularly spend time in LA in order to actively create opportunities for our senior executive staff to interact in person regularly (no matter how good Skype is, it’s still not that in person discussion about an idea around the coffee machine)
We are actively hiring in Manchester and Frankfurt to build up the ship, environment, prop and character teams and in all locations to bolster the engineering teams.
Finally we are trying to focus our remaining external development partners on content creation as opposed to engineering , which we want to bring in house as much as possible.
We will have more internal staff than we have now – they will just be distributed differently between our four studios in LA, Austin, Manchester and Frankfurt.
As with all reorganizations there will be some roles that will no longer exist in their current location – we are really trying to reduce the single man outpost syndrome – as well as concentrate feature teams in single locations. In the event relocation doesn’t make sense for the roles that are now redundant we are at the minimum giving the small number of people affected five weeks’ notice as well as two weeks’ severance to allow people to try to land on their feet. In some cases we are allowing for work until the end of the year to give even more runway. This is the not so great part of the reorganization as we will definitely be losing some hardworking and talented people and we haven’t come to this decision lightly but ultimately we felt we owed it to the backers and the game to make sure we were allocating our resources effectively. So for the people in this category I’m sorry and hope the big lead-time helps.
I know for some of you these are some big changes but we wouldn’t be doing them if we truly didn’t believe they would help us get the project out and work closer together as a team. Please feel free to talk to your Studio Director if you have any questions or concerns.
We have an amazing opportunity to build something special. There is nowhere else that we would be given the support, the funding to make the open universe game we are making. No publisher or VC would ever back a game this ambitious on a PC, and probably not even on a console. I see the potential with Global Entity Ids, Entity Streaming, Large World, Local Grid and the Zone System coming on line to really build something that has both incredible fidelity and massive scope. I don’t think our backers are expecting just how cool their first experience of a large world map and multi crew will be. I also don’t think they are prepared for just how amazing Squadron 42 will be and how it’s going to push the envelope for interactive storytelling and action. I’m looking forward to blowing them away in two weeks and then putting the content in their hands and continuing to add and improve until they have a game that no one can compete with.
We will make history with Star Citizen. People still talk about Wing Commander 25 years later. We can go one better with Star Citizen.
It won’t be an easy road. We’re very public and there will always be obstacles trying to block our path, whether they are normal problems that crop up in development or outside agitators that are threatened by a completely crowd funded project building a dream game they wished they had the talent or support to build. Just remember that this is all noise and at the end of the day the game will speak for itself. It always does and that is the best reply to anyone that doubts our ability to deliver something great.
Let’s blow them away at Citizen Con and get Star Citizen and Squadron 42 in people’s hands!
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September will be a month to remember. We finished so many major milestones we can’t wait to share with you below. We’ve been knocking things out left and right here in Santa Monica so check it out and let us know what you think!
Engineering
With a lot of action happening on the Santa Monica Engineering Team, we have been able to knock a few balls out of the ballpark.
The Engineering Team’s focus has been on improving the game’s stability. Lead Engineer Paul Reindell and Engineer Allen Chen have made various improvements to the servers, resource management, and Large World support. This work is directly improving performance.
AI Programmer Chad Zamzow has completed an AI module that allows players to fill empty seats in Multi-Crew ships with AI players during those long, lonely voyages into the blackness of space. Now we just need to teach them to fight! The visual effects of the Quantum Travel feature have had their finishing touches programmed by the team while Bugsmasher Mark Abent has been a titan in spearheading the refactoring of our Item System all while taking care of multiple Blocker and Critical issues that have been sent his way in preparation for the next release.
As part of the Engineering Team, UI guru Zane Bien has implemented a series of Flash callbacks which allow the different station screens to communicate with the engine. This and other completed milestones steer towards having players being able to take on various roles in a Multi-Crew ship by making sure each station has its own UI based on that player’s designated role.
Design
In the weeks following the massive amount of completed work for our Multi-Crew tech during the month of August, the Santa Monica Design Team has been capitalizing on the creative energies rippling through the office.
We completed designing the next step in the evolution of GOST that allows our designers greater flexibility while minimizing its resource footprint by using an “Entity Token” system. Senior Gameplay Programmer Steven Humphreys has been finalizing the system’s long-term goals. Many of those milestones having already been completed, the next are teed up for completion.
On the ship side, Designer Randy Vazquez and Senior Designer Kirk Tome have been working on the white-box designs of the Caterpillar, Xi’an Scout, and Drake Herald. Randy has finished writing design specs for how the Caterpillar’s various components will work together with emphasis on the new Salvaging system while also finishing the prototyping stage for these ships. The Drake Herald and Xi’an Scout just finished white box animation design with Kirk, where one of the biggest challenges was how to finesse the ergonomics of the alien Scout’s interior to be compatible with human animations – you’ll remember that a similar considerations were necessary for the human-flyable Scythe and Glaive as well.
If you frequent the chatroom on the website, then you will know our Designer Matt Sherman has been discussing his progress on the continuing development of the Ship Component systems, with several major milestones completed this month. These new systems have inspired discussion threads on our forums with regards to the Hacking mechanic and proposed further development on the self-destruct mechanism in ships.
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The LA art team hasn’t had any time to slow down since last month! This month we’ve been plugging away and focusing our efforts on completing some of our longer-term ship and character goals – with a special focus on Squadron 42’s needs for the character team, and Multi-crew for the ship team – as well as working in tandem with design to flesh out the art for some ships that will be bringing some exciting new mechanics to the Verse!
Our character art team has had their most exciting month yet in preparing for Squadron 42 and beyond. In September we completed our male and female base sculpts, as well as for several other special characters. It has been a long process of iteration to reach the level of fidelity we want, but we’re very happy to say we’re there! Long term clothing and armor variations depend so much on the base sculpts being available, so that means it’s now full steam ahead for those aspects of character customization. This is a huge accomplishment since it’s not only a ton of hard work – but also sets a baseline for the rest of our characters. Lots of effort has gone into making these compatible with motion capture and body scan data as well, and we’re just beginning to see our first completed characters coming through these final stages. We’ve also put some final polish time into the Vanduul and Xi’An to make them even more realistic and impressive.
We’ve also made significant progress with ship modeling. The first half of this month saw lots of work on some of our smaller in-progress ships – for example, the MISC Reliant completed its whitebox stage, and the Drake Herald greybox is wrapping up. Towards the end of the month we concentrated resources on the RSI Constellation to culminate in one final push. Less exciting but equally important is all the hard work we’ve continued to pump into building technical tools and improving process and architecture for our ship development pipeline, which is already making our life behind-the-scenes significantly more efficient.
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A lot of ship concept art has also been completed. Our focus for the month has been on wrapping up the Crucible and the Endeavor, which will introduce some revolutionary repair mechanics and exciting new science/and economic gameplay respectively. Both required more concept art work than your average ship… which has all been worth it to ensure that we’re bringing design’s visions to life in the best way possible. We also finished up the Vanguard variants, and have been making fantastic progress on both the Reliant variants as well as the luxury version of the P-52 Merlin also known as the P-72 Archimedes.
While we’ve primarily focused on new content, we’ve also fixed a variety of bugs. These include (but are of course not limited to!) some geometry and collision bugs across various ships, tightening up texture seams, and a whole slew of glass reflection bugs. The ‘highlight’ was a bug that occurred when we merged streams to AC 1.2 which made all of the textures on the Merlin disappear! We fixed that one right away.
Last but certainly not least is the work we’ve completed on components this month. Working hand-in-hand with the design department, we’ve blocked out all of the locations for components on all of our ships that are currently live. This was a massive undertaking, and we’re pleased to report that it went exceptionally well.
We’ve been making phenomenal progress, and the excitement isn’t over by a longshot. Stay tuned for next month’s report!
Writing
I refuse to accept that it’s the end of the month… dammit…
We’ve been on a heavy push on multiple fronts to get stuff ready for CitizenCon. To avoid spoiling any of the reveals, I’m going to speak in incredibly cryptic terms.
The entire writing team has been focused on one task in particular, meeting every day to brainstorm additional ideas about that, which has been an interesting and educational process. We’ve then been translating those discussions into lists of data as well as brief, evocative descriptions. The emphasis has been on ‘brief’ because often times it’s much more difficult to distill an idea down to a few sentences rather than having the luxury of writing for pages, more importantly, doing so can be a really valuable exercise to establish why that thing is different and unique. With this task, however, we have a character limit, so there’s a technical reason too.
Meanwhile, Will and I have been interfacing with the UK to provide dialogue lines and build some narrative scenes for two more things that are in heavy development.
All that in addition to the general workload of news updates, jump point articles and the general narrative and lore needs that come up in the day-to-day.
So, as you can tell, lots of things are happening. You’ll know it when you see it, because it’s going to be chock-full of the kind of lore you’ll really care about.
There you have it! Another productive month getting us closer to the larger vision. We have a great time working diligently to bring you the best game possible. Thank you for supporting this venture and working alongside us. Santa Monica out!
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September has been focused on many items including the recent launch of the Social Module, and the upcoming first expansion to that module. Many other parts of the game are coming together and receiving multiple daily builds from DevOps and regular testing from QA – reaping the benefits of improved processes we discussed in previous monthly reports. We’re looking forward to Citizen Con which is fast approaching and will include a number of big reveals!
Persistent Universe Team
Art
The PU Art Team has been working towards our Social Module v1 milestone, which is the second iteration of the Social Module v0 milestone we released back in August. Much of our efforts this month have gone into what we’re calling “ArcCorp Phase 2”. This new phase of Area18 adds a construction zone that splits off back behind Dumper’s Depot.
This construction zone doesn’t have any shops or anything yet (although there are some vacant shop exteriors that you can see in progress), but is meant to provide a venue for multiple facets of gameplay in the PU. Areas like this will seem innocent enough during the day, but at night there will be loads of illicit activities taking place here for NPC’s as well as Players to take part in. We hope this area will eventually showcase the dynamic nature of the PU, where you never know what will happen in any given area until you stick around long enough to find out.
Additional features of ArcCorp Phase 2 include a gigantic crane prop created by Patrick Thomas, a gathering area for people to breath in fresh oxygen being pumped up from underground (the air on ArcCorp isn’t exactly healthy, after all) courtesy of VFX artist Lee Amarakoon, and a wide open area to drive buggies around in. A hearty thanks goes to Cort Soest for leading the charge on getting this new amazingly detailed area optimized enough to run on everyone’s machines.
Our concept team is ever looking ahead, and this month spent their time fleshing out the look and feel of additional landing zones. Ted Beargeon has been focusing on defining the differences between the various Stanton landing zones and is now shifting focus to defining the MetaClassicism architectural style. Megan Cheever has begun concepts on the Frontier>Fashion Casual clothing line, which will primarily be seen on the upcoming Levski landing zone in the Nyx system. Lastly, Ken Fairclough has been working away on look/feel concepts for Crusader. This particular landing zone is Mark Skelton’s favorite so far, and we can’t wait to show it off to you.
On the Animation front, we’ve been busy developing all of the new emotes you guys are getting with Social Module v1. We originally set out to provide 25 new emotes, then decided we’d go the extra mile and provide 50, count ‘em FIFTY, new emotes instead. We hope you guys enjoy burping, whistling, waving, standing at attention, and doing the chicken dance in the new release, among many other expressions.
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This month’s goals for PU Design largely had to do with preparing Social Module v1 for release. There was a lot of back-and-forth going on between our designers and animators to get the emotes implemented and hooked up, for example. There was also much time spent on getting the PTV Greycat up and running so that it could not only drive around ArcCorp, but deal damage and explode as well. We expect players will have loads of fun with this feature!
Tony Zurovec spent much of his time this month drafting up the design document for the Endeavor. This posed a number of design challenges but ultimately when implemented in the game will be one our most intriguing ships to date.
This excerpt from the link above says it all:
“The extraordinary level of customization possible as a result of the Endeavor’s modular design will allow players the most comprehensive opportunity yet to construct a multi-purpose ship according to their own precise specifications. The ability to retroactively and cost effectively alter that design – by swapping out modules at a later date – will enable owners to quickly shift between different economic pursuits depending upon the most attractive risk/reward opportunity at a given moment or simply their whim, which is a dramatic departure versus other ships with a fixed purpose.”
Other aspects of PU design were focused on kicking off a couple of new environments. We signed off on the blueprint documents for both the Casaba Outlet clothing shop and the Million Mile High Club private lounge. These two environments are now in full production at Behaviour in preparation for our next milestone.
All in all our future is looking bright, with so many fascinating and engaging features in play. We’re excited for you guys to try out the Character Loadout Selector, the improved chat interface, all the additional emotes, and the PTV Greycat in Social Module v1! As great as these features are in the upcoming release, they are just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ve got in store in the coming months. So get pumped!
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September was heavy with feature development for Social Module iterative releases, support for FPS and Multicrew feature development, as well as working closely with QA, DevOps and Production on stabilizing our Game-Dev branch after integrating our huge Alpha 1.2.0 stream down into Game-Dev. This is all a push to work towards a more stream-lined workflow for all our future feature releases and bug patches. It’s been a labor of love with big pay-offs and we’re looking forward to the continued reaping of benefits from that branch integration.
Austin Engineering has been working closely with our friends at Behaviour on such systems as improved chat (including private chat channels) and putting a lot of under-the-hood work in place to support being able to have the game choose instances of ArcCorp where your contacts are hanging out. A ton of restructuring of universe services based on tests and experiment data has been underway as well, and the Network/Server Team has been syncing up closely with DevOps on the most efficient ways to get various systems and databases in place. Working with our friends at Wyrmbyte we also got in a lot of network optimizations for both player characters and NPCs to improve your experience, not only in ArcCorp but throughout our various modules and the PU as a whole. We have also made several improvements and bug fixes to our Generic Instance Manager (GIM) and lobby system.
Long term technical discussions have been going on between Austin Engineering, the UK team and Wyrmbyte, and planning has been ongoing for a lot of crucial network/server needs and concerns. We’re working to ensure that our near and long-term core network/server needs are scoped and scheduled in together with the appropriate feature development across all CIG, with the various dependencies and puzzle pieces in mind.
In short, we’ve been juggling near term Social Module feature development, support for other near-term modules (such as FPS and Multicrew), and long-term planning and work for various network/server core systems that will be needed for all our CIG studios and Star Citizen experience as a whole!
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For the month of September, QA has been focusing on the stabilization of the Game-Dev branch. QA will begin each day by comprehensively testing each module and verifying any potential fixes. At the end of each day QA will email updates broken down by module which detail the general health of the build listing the most critical issues present and any new issues found that day.
At the same time, QA is continually testing new content. On the Star Marine front, Tyler Witkin and Andrew Rexroth have been very busy testing the newly implemented character rig and ensuring that all animations play correctly and that the hand IK (How your hands hold the weapon) are accurate and working properly. Also a new HUD (Heads up display) and Helmet UI came online this month. Tyler and Rex have been heavily testing the new HUD/Helmet UI and providing feedback. The new Helmet UI is way more intuitive with lots of combat warning indicators(warns you about grenades/incoming fire/etc).
Social Module testing has been continuing as well. Some of which include a significant expansion to Area18, updated store fronts, a revamp of the chat system, additional emotes and a new outfit changer in the Hangar.
Robert Gaither and his UK counterpart Steven Brennon have been busy testing multi-crew ship functionality and our new massive largeworld map called Crusader. Crusader is part of a prototype of an actual system in our Persistent Universe. Crusader is proving to be quite impressive and will change the way we play dramatically.
Additionally much work has been done on our back-end services. Jeffrey Pease has been working very closely with our back-end engineers Tom Sawyer and Jason Ely to ensure each resolved issue is verified fixed and each issue submitted has all the required information to be effectively investigated.
We are very happy for the official release of the new Issue Council! The Issue Council can be accessed through the Community section of the RSI website and will help to streamline player generated bug reports. Other members of the community can then contribute and vote on each issue. The Issue Council has already proven very useful and will make reporting issues a much better experience.
Each module is coming together. The true vision of Star Citizen is beginning to take shape. We are very excited to witness and share with you this moment in history and very much look forward to seeing you in the Verse!
Game Support
Game Support has been busy in September and we’ve been nothing but excited with the successful rollout of the Issue Council. For the first time, players have been able to submit bugs with reproducible steps, have them reviewed and voted on by other players, then have CIG look at those verified reports and get them into the development pipeline.
We’re really looking forward to showing you the fruits of those results in our upcoming 1.3.0 Patch Notes, where we’ll highlight how your contributions are making the BDSSE even better.
We continue to work with DevOps and QA and we’re happy that the new Launcher is performing up to production levels today on all OS versions. Now that 2.4 is out the door, we continue to hammer away at the one-off issues that are affecting fringe systems.
One other note: Quite a few players have asked about our “playtester” group that we’ve talked about in our last monthly report. We’ve had to push that out of September and into late October since some of our timelines for testing changed, but be assured, we very much want to start this process up after CitizenCon.
And, Game Support is growing! We’ve just posted openings for a Game Support Staff position in Manchester, UK and we’ll be excited to provide more hours of support throughout the day between Europe and North America.
IT/Operations
Each month this year seems to be better than the last. The IT department has been working on several exciting projects this month to keep us very busy. Hassan and his team didn’t get much time to relax before starting all the preparations for CitizenCon which will be hosted in Manchester at Runway Visitor Park. We are all looking forward to this event as it may be one of the coolest venues we’ve setup so far.
Several members of the IT department got to work directly with DevOps on the build system improvements. Massive improvements in performance and efficiency were gained this month through our coordinated efforts. Doubling the number of development builds internally is great but this doubles the amount of data we’re delivering between the studios again. This used to be a bottleneck, but now we’re ready with the improvements already in place on our existing replication system, and we’re not stopping there. Mike “Sniper” Pickett is already testing prototypes of a new demand only system he has written which promises to further reduce our long distance build transfer times.
This month we also got a very special visit from our friends at Intel who brought us some new hardware to test. Everyone in IT has been impressed by the performance of the new 750 series PCI Express SSDs we’ve been testing. These drives are actually so much faster than standard SSDs that you can see it. Windows boot time on one of the machines was simply too fast to time. Of course Star Citizen runs great on these drives but they really shine on the dev boxes particularly for Artists and Engineers. We then we got to thinking about the build servers and the constant need for improved build times and faster iteration due to the size of our game. We asked Intel for help with this and they responded with a test server that is simply stunning. Our testing has only just begun but we’re already thinking of new ways we can utilize this technology to take us to the next level in efficiency and performance.
Dev Ops
This is our 1 year anniversary as a formal department here at Cloud Imperium Games! To celebrate this achievement we’d like to share some of the improvements we’re most proud of
When DevOps started one year ago, getting a game build created, patched, and uploaded took an average of 13 hours. Now that average is just 3.5 hours. A year ago it took developers on average 90mins to copy a build to their machine to begin work, now that takes just 24mins. A year ago it took a player on average 2hrs to download 25gigs with a 100mb connection. With the new launcher it now takes 14mins with the same connection. A year ago the team had to upload and build the live server infrastructure by hand, which was error prone and took on average 2.5 hours to finish. Now most of the deploy is automated and takes 45mins. You can see how critical these improvements are to preserving the efficiency of an average day at work when you have lots of developers, including testing and deployment! With the completion of the new BuildBot build server this month, we have had even more improvements roll out.
In all, the new build server took average build times from 4 hours down to 1.5 hours. We are now able to simultaneously run 3 builds at a time, where before we were able to only run 1. Due to these improvements, we can now run 48 builds a day, as opposed to only the 6 builds we were able to before. This huge accomplishment, which was completed in only 4 months of work, should drastically increase the productivity of the company.
As you can probably tell, September was all hands on deck to finalize this new build server and its corresponding build status page. We have recently decremented the old build server and cannibalized its delicious hardware to supplement our new system. In support of this project and its deadlines, all members of the DevOps and IT teams pitched in to help build, troubleshoot, and deploy the surrounding support infrastructure that is required for a modern build server. Data storage, build server hardware, server deploys, data replication to each studio, build distribution to developers, uploads to the CDN, and then testing each of the items listed, were all worked on this month to make sure we hit our deadlines and improved the company’s productivity. I personally want to thank every one of them for the incredible effort, creativity, and long hours that were put in to make this happen!
The team has also continued to release launcher patches that added functionality to track player behavior and create records of issues players experience for future investigation and fixing. These patches have also fixed some of the known bugs and added a new compatibility mode that fixed most of the people having trouble downloading torrents. There was also a pass done to improve the speed of the peer to peer traffic.
DevOps has also have been working with the Network Engineers to refine services, fix bugs, and analyze the issues we are currently seeing in the live environment. The team is continuing to refine the deployment process to QA servers, PTU, and Live with the goal of continuing to reduce deployment time, and complexity.
Next month we will begin to put more time improving our internal build copy tool and build status page. The v2.3 and v2.0 of each of these tools are scheduled to roll out in October and will hopefully continue to make work easier and faster for the company. October should continue the trend of improving productivity here at CIG!
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Greetings Citizens,
Let’s get right to it…
Art
One word – Growth! The team is really expanding, we’ve been adding extra desks here there and everywhere, making plans for how we can get our projected staffing levels squeezed in, we are two floors, who knows – maybe another soon!
Lots of concept work going into props needed for the Idris, additional style guide work, Idris Front turret, Freelancer interior revision, Idris mess hall and a new fighter ship from Aegis. We have hired two new internal concept artists and this will really help us proceed to define and clarify many areas of SC.
UI
Screens, screens, and more screens – Power, Shields, Global Overview, Missiles, Idris interior screens PLUS Gav has been working on the Idris hanger decals, Comms relay screens and the Airlock screens as well as updating FPS HUDs to fit in with the line work and a new ammo system.
Environments
This month the environment team in the UK has been hard at work sprinting through full production on the “baby PU” large world map. There will be multiple POI (Points of Interest, or things to see!) for you to explore within this large world sandbox so we are trying to make sure that each of them feels interesting and dynamic. There will be plenty of cool places to discover and rewards for the adventurous space traveller, but in the mean time we need to continue to polish, polish, polish to get something outstanding out to you guys; believe us, it’s time well-spent and you’d notice the difference if we didn’t. Additionally, we are working in delivering in art passes, as time goes by the areas will update and increase in fidelity and function – initially rooms will be quite basic working with the core set, then from there we’ll identify the functions of the rooms and really start to give personality to the space stations.
Ships
Ships are ripping along! There has been a lot of movement on the Idris interior and exterior, the Retaliator modules (now being constructed in-game) and the Avenger. We’re building both the single and double cockpit versions, along with living quarters and rear modules for the variants. The process of bringing the Vanguard into the game has started, with an aim to get it fighting in the game sooner than later. The Starfarer Captain’s room and airlock have been finished, and work is ongoing on the Cutlass damage system and cockpit fitting.
Props
The Prop team has been heavily focused on delivering assets for the CitizenCon deliverable. We’ve been working on some rather special hangar objects and rewards. Some ship specific props have been worked on and they should be coming to a ship near you soon. A fair chunk of bug fixing has been happening for FPS fixing up physic proxies and making sure you can shoot without clipping the edges of collision shapes and through gaps in the props. (That’s why “polish” is often essential and isn’t just cosmetic. It has a real impact on how functional versus how buggy these early builds may feel you as a player!)
A small amount of work has been invested in supporting new game modes where possible, making sure the other teams have what they need to flesh out their ideas. Finally we have been helping out with creating a new ship weapon and have started looking at the new ship component system.
VFX
What a busy month it’s been – no change there then! The VFX team have continued to “sanity check” existing effects since the major game-dev merge and 3.7 integration the previous month – which basically means checking through our particle libraries to make sure all our effects are still behaving as expected.
Due to the sheer volume of effects we have throughout Star Citizen, this has proven to be a time-consuming task, but worth it nonetheless; these kind of maintenance tasks (often referred to as the “non-sexy stuff”) also give us an opportunity to update any older effects that we feel can benefit from new features (such as greater control over soft particles, and finally a working camera distance offset) and better texture assets etc.
Continuing with the “non-sexy stuff” (someone’s gotta do it!) we recently encountered some issues where environmental effects were not showing up as expected. This meant we needed to check through every level/map in the game and fix up anything that was missing. This turned out to be less than straight-forward because there were several, unrelated reasons for this happening (i.e. it wasn’t a one-fix-for-all solution).
Aside from checking on our existing work, of course we’ve been busy creating new content! For example:
Following on from last month’s destruction pipeline improvements, we have been rolling out the latest exterior damage effects for several of our ships (and even a buggy) as well as implementing “Interior States” – formally referred to as GOST – effects for the Constellation, Retaliator and Cutlass to name but three. We’ve also begun ambient interior effects for Idris, which technically is a ship but feels like a level given its size! Can’t wait for you all to see how awesome this ship is looking by the way…
We have also begun effects work for several new map areas, including dust and debris for MASSIVE asteroid clusters and ambient effects for a satellite base. Aside from this, we also gave some love to the laser sniper rifle’s effects, and two new ship weapons also required a full set of effects.
All that’s left to say, is that we’re super excited to be attending CitizenCon in “sunny” Manchester and showing off our latest stuff – roll on October!
Engineering
We’ll that’s CitizenCon been and gone for another year and we hope you’re as excited as we are for Squadron 42! It being held in Manchester this year, underneath the iconic Concorde, made it extra special for us.
If you watched the event you would have seen the Morrow tour of the Idris. This gives you a sense of where we’re trying to go with making you feel like you’re not only part of a fully functioning ship, populated by believable characters and not just some robotic androids, but also making you feel like you’re part of a family where you can form relationships with the other crew members. This brings several technologies together, all working seamlessly with each other, from the conversation system, Subsumption, AI, animation, inner thought text, speech, lip sync, and many more. For example having the Morrow character walk and talk at the same time. Doesn’t sound or look hard does it? Except you wouldn’t expect a normal person to just walk at a set speed, looking straight ahead whilst chatting away. They’re also going to be spending some time looking towards your character, they’re going to be gesticulating, slowing down, stopping, speeding up, reacting to you if you drop back or even just walk off (this isn’t just a cutscene – you’re still in control of your character!). And none of this can just be one big pre-canned animation, as we don’t know where you the player are going to be or what you’re going to be doing. So this involves the AI doing its pathfinding but contextually depending on what they’re talking about and where the player is. We need to have the walk animation, but with some gestures fragments, blended with a look pose and maybe a soupçon of IK to make it all look natural. The use of Subsumption enables Morrow to have a sense of purpose, the conversation system adapts so that you can react to what he’s been saying using the inner thought text. And all this will change depending on their current mood. If you’ve messed a mission up and they’re angry characters can display very different body language than if you’ve aced it. Then apply that across all the characters on board the ship and we feel the interstitials in Squadron 42 will really bring the game to life. You may never want to leave!
The inner thought text is a new system we’ve been developing to allow the player to be able to make choices without it feeling like you’re just selecting some line from a 3 option menu. The idea is if you are looking in the direction of something you either can interact with it or make some choices by way of some text that will subtly appear allowing you to select what you want to do, or if you want just ignore it and carry on with your day without committing to any particular posture or action. It’s designed to be as unobtrusive as possible so as not to interrupt the flow of the game, but also give some better contextual sense of what you want to achieve. A good example is if you look at a chair a “sit down” message might float above it, which will be a definite improvement on our current “USE” prompt everywhere!
We’ve also been working hard on getting the large world map into your hands, which again you will have seen a small portion of at the event. We now see this a proving ground for integrating all the various systems we need to get working for Squadron 42 and Star Citizen, as it takes all parts of what we’re doing and brings them together in one big whole. One of the next big steps forward we’re working on is the level streaming. At the moment we can only have one level resident in memory at a time, so when you want to go from one area to another you have to unload the current level and then wait for the next level to load usually with a loading screen. We’re going replace all the level loading code with a new ZoneContainer system which consolidates everything within a level, and also the prefabs as well, into its own new structure. It also shows the power of the zone system our friends over in Frankfurt have been writing, which as you can tell by the name each container is its own zone as well. So almost everything becomes its own ZoneContainer, systems, planets, ships, space stations and so on. It allows us great flexibility as we will be able to now have levels within levels, or levels orbiting levels and, with the new seamless background loading of the ZoneContainers, a practically infinite playfield as well. Happy days!
Animation
The UK animation team has been busy getting all of the amazing performance capture scenes ready for the Morrow Tour demo on-board the UEE Idris Stanton, as well as filling out some of the background animations to bring the ship to life! We’re all really excited for everyone to finally know the ground-breaking Squadron 42 cast! The performance capture that Chris shot is fantastic and it’s now making its way in to the engine – we can really see it starting to take shape. We have also been working with the Squadron 42 level designers to figure out the best technical process to chop these animations up and get them game-ready and feeling natural in the most efficient way possible.
Our resident tech animator, Vin Chander, has been working hard on the facial tech so that we are able to deliver some top class facial animation for our outstanding Squadron 42 cast, and we’ve also been helping out with the FPS v0 requirements in order to get that out to the fans as soon as possible, which in turn helps drive the Squadron 42 schedule by sharing some of the same animations for ground combat.
Design
What a month! The excitement of CitizenCon has dominated all of the UK Design department’s minds in September and we have seen some great developments in the Large World system.
Following on from the GamesCom demo we have had lots of engineering updates allowing the Large World team to fully populate a huge area of space with lots of new and interesting points of interest. We have lots of different satellite stations, asteroid bases, communication relay stations, derelicts and ship graveyards dispersed throughout the large world map for you to find and explore, to name just a few. We are hopeful that all of this will soon be at your disposal and the Large World map will become a place that will finally begin to feel like the first step towards the “Star Citizen” vision.
You will have something that we can build on with regular updates, together with all your valuable feedback and with the design progression we already have planned I’m sure we can really set Star Citizen apart from anything seen before. For CitizenCon we wanted to give the player a taste of the universe that they can feel part of, explore and discover areas and points of interest. We wanted to get all the various systems a few rungs further up the development ladder as well, such as Quantum Drive, Landing, Multi-Crew, Local Physics, EVA, etc. The push for CitizenCon has really helped focus development on these and we have solid platforms to build on for a lot of core game systems.
Anyway…we hope that we managed to get something special in front of you at CitizenCon and we will continue to push as hard as ever with your continued brilliant support.
Graphics
This month, the graphics team have been exceptionally busy, as always we’ve been trying to make Star Citizen look as awe inspiring and as smooth as possible. We’ve been working on optimisation techniques, such as improving the shadow system to allow for efficient shadow rendering at large distances. Refining the level of detail (LOD) merging system which combines geometry at various LOD levels to significantly reduce draw calls. As well as improving the CryEngine’s LOD selection algorithm with a more intelligent system that takes into account poly density for all LOD levels; this ensures objects of various sizes and scales will switch LODs at appropriate distances. All of this is fundamental work towards enabling the game to handle such beautiful art work over such a massive gameplay space. It’s very important work – the lessons we learn here will inform everything we need to do to deliver the rest of the persistent universe over time.
We’ve also been working on the character hair shader to make it compatible with our lighting system and supporting the rollout of the wrinkle technology, which you’ll see in the CitizenCon Bishop’s Speech and The Morrow Tour.
As well, the damage system has been going through a large refactor to improve efficiency, robustness and functionality; it’s coming close to the end of the refactor now so our larger multi-crew ships where inter-changeable parts can take damage as well as the main body of the ship. As many people on the forums comment about multi-GPU support for Star Citizen I can openly state we make sure everything we do is multi-GPU friendly and the damage work is no different; we have put special work in to make sure it functions as desired in multi-GPU environments. The damage system is now ready for the next stage of development which is for the Repair mechanic.
QA
So another month over and another successful live performance from the UK QA team! We’re becoming seasoned pros with all this live stage demo stuff – next stop Hollywood, ey Chris?
In the build up to CitizenCon, the UK QA team had been working tirelessly to ensure what was demonstrated on stage was as ready as possible – daily reviews and constant iterations have led to what we hope you’ll all agree was a very polished showing.
We’re always doing our best to ensure that the latest features of Star Citizen reach the community as quickly as possible. QA’s role is never more pivotal than just before a large update to the game – and we’re really excited for the fans to see all of the new core tech that is coming together and the big announcements for Squadron 42!
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Hallo aus Frankfurt (Hello from Frankfurt),
The team here is in full stride and had a really productive month, as you’ll read below.
We continue to grow, bringing in 4 new people to the team this month alone.
Code
During September, we started working on planetary rendering and procedural generation – combined with other key systems being worked on previously (Large World, camera relative rendering, Zone system etc.) all these systems will combine together to reach our long term goal of seamlessly transitioning from space to a planet FPS ground level.
We researched and implemented a prototype for (earth like) planet atmosphere rendering, and the results are very promising.
We did an Initial full pass on fixing all static code analysis warnings and errors in the code base. This revealed several critical bugs in game logical, buffer overruns, etc. Moving forward we plan to have such checks be part of the prerequisites in our continuous integration and code submission process. This will reassure that builds are stable for the dev team and limit any extensive downtime.
Strong push on entirely revamping our build system for code to allow much for faster compilation as well as being able to locally build for non-native platforms (e.g. easily build the Linux server on Windows). We also pushed hard on our trybuild system into which continuous static code analysis check will be folded in. This system will prevent latest code in depot to break – that is, not compile or link – due to the influx of concurrent code changes on a daily basis. Goal is to mature our development process so people can work as uninterrupted as possible which can be an honest challenge as the team size grows. Growth can mean more productivity, but you have to invest work in a good development foundation. Otherwise it just makes traffic jams.
We did cherry pick several improvements from the 3.8 SDK updates such as the Character Tool which simplifies character creation and animation setup. Along with this we integrated initial support for 8 weight skinning (more finely accentuated animations especially on faces) and character attachment merging (to significantly reduce draw calls during shadow rendering). We plan to revamp these features to further improve the character animation and rendering pipeline.
In the animation and physics module we finalized the low-level functionality for procedural hit reactions, normal ragdolls, driven ragdolls and blending in and out of ragdolls. We started to clean up the interfaces and the implementation in Mannequin so that the game-code gets full control over all physical features. The functionality from SDK3.8.1 to create secondary animations on characters (simulation of capes, skirts, hair, etc…) was integrated and fully activated in the latest build. All functions and interfaces related to “auxiliary physics” were completely removed from the animation module. During The end of the month we started to modify the management of the physical setup for articulated entities, so that each “loadout” can have a unique physical setup.
We also continued to work with the UK team on finalizing the core zone system for multicrew release.
Cinematics
We worked heavily on finalizing the cinematic showing Bishop’s speech in the UEE Senate. This happens during an emergency session that happens after the Battle of Vega II (which kicks off Squadron 42)
This cinematic will run as its own little trailer at CitizenCon cinematic which is part of Squadron 42’s opening.
Bishop’s facial animation was a really good kick off test for the Squadron 42 facial animation pipeline. It is all running in real-time in the engine, including animated wrinkle and diffuse maps and lots of blend shapes.
The scene itself was captured at Imaginarium in May during our main story shoot where we shot all of Squadron 42’s story scenes.
What you see in the cinematic is pretty much an unedited performance by Gary Oldman. He was so good as Bishop that the whole crew went silent when he took the stage for his first rehearsal of the speech, seriously silent.
The environmental art for the Senate is really coming together nicely, only the giant statues flanking the podium holding the shield and sword are missing as we write this, but by the time you guys and girls read this, it should be all finished!
The UEE senate also features some cool mural artwork depicting mankind’s journey across 8 panels on the right wing of the senate rotunda and another 8 panels depicting mankind’s virtues. Artwork is heavily influenced by 1930s/40s Art Deco mixed with our Star Citizen tech. The Senate chamber should feel like it had been built in another time period before the events of Squadron 42 which is a nice touch.
We are also doing a little cast name reveal that will bookend the cinematic at CitizenCon, revealing Squadron 42’s principal cast.
Can’t wait until the fans see Admiral Bishop and the other amazing cast members for the first time!
We are also planning ahead for the next big sequence that will be tackled after the Senate speech is out…
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We currently have one cinematic artist in the Frankfurt office, this month his main focus was finishing off the senate scene for the credits cinematic.
He modeled the senate interior with everything included to a semifinal stage, got it to a point that it could be handed off and used for the cinematic. He’s now working on the final stage and putting in the last tweaks and details.
He also started to work on the Skydock (also part of the credits cinematic), both the textures and mesh was created. He tried to make a kitbash approach to the skydock, using existing pieces to create something totally new. It’s a concept that we’re going to take full advantage of while building out the persistent universe, and we’re very happy with the results we’ve seen so far!
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This month we focused on AI functionalities we’re using in a specific section of Squadron 42.
First of all we have integrate the CryEngine AISequence into our system.
Sequences are used to allow level designer to request an NPC to execute a specific activity as walking to a specific spot, reach a position and play an animation, converse with the player, look at a position or entity in the level, and so on. The importance of the sequence is that they allow designers to create a package of operations the character has to do. The package is considered as a whole, meaning we as programmers can make sure that something that is requested for gameplay reasons is going to happen no matter what, that it will have priority. In addition to that we can guarantee the level designers that if they want to abort a set of operations, all the actions following the interruption are not going to be executed.
We then extended the AISequences to support parallel actions. This is a key feature to allow the final results you have seen in the “Morrow Tour” section during the CitizenCon. We can drive an NPC to execute both primary actions (as walking, playing a full body animation, etc.) and secondary actions (as playing upper body animation, use dialogs, etc.) so that we can create a smooth experience between the AI systems as pathfinding and pathfollowing in addition to the Mocap animations related to the actor’s performances. Doing this also required some extension of the Mannequin system so that we can correctly override only specific scopes of a running animation (as an example imagine overriding the facial animation while the character moves).
We continued working on polishing the usage of the Usables as navigation links. We are now able to allow a character to smoothly transition from the locomotion movement to an animation controlled motion as a special vaulting, jumping, and so on.
We are also working in parallel on functionalities for PU and AC. Such as, this month we supported the PU emote system to correctly play looping animation in a multiplayer environment both for players and NPC.
In addition to all of that, the Frankfurt office has continued coordinating the work made by Moon Collider on the improvements of the DataForge/Behavior tree connection, and the improvements/new functionalities for Arena Commander and ships AI in general.
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Design
The design team has been focused on numerous things this month. Primarily we were busy refining the design direction for the game and providing feedback on key features for the FPS release making sure it gets completed in a state that everyone is happy with. At the same time we’re hard at work building out the roadmap of all the future content releases, detailing gameplay functionality we need, weapons, dependencies, etc.
The level designers have been working hard on finalizing the Gold Horizon map and finishing off all the specific details required for implementing a new game mode for the upcoming FPS release. At the same time they have started work on the new level & mission building pipeline and the upgraded prefab system that will allow us to create these missions far more efficiently for both Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe.
On the AI side we are setting up the archetypes, items, mechanics required for the Morrow tour that we will show at Citizen Con this year and setting up the base systems and workflows that will be used for all Squadron 42 and Persistent Universe NPC interactions.
Another focus for us this month has been taking a hard look at the list of career mechanics being developed and figure out how they work with future ships and even existing ones as the cargo, component, and travel systems become increasingly more defined. We need to reassure that the design for both ships and careers work hand and hand with one another. After the research we’ll have a much better understanding of which ship fits which career and what still needs to be worked on for those ships & careers to really shine.
FX
Over the past month we looked into improving some of the effects for the ship weapons. This will make the dog fighting feel more exciting and cinematic. The end result is to make it feel in par with large epic space battles you’ve seen in blockbuster movies. We’ve also been working on polishing up the FPS weapon effects so they are ready for the launch of the fps module. Everything from muzzle flashes to impact effects!
To the right, you can find a few shots of some of the new effects for the dog fighting.
Audio
This month we added the audio scrubbing feature to the Editor TrackView (something that has never been done in CryEngine before), which means that our cinematics team are able to work much more quickly and efficiently on the awesome sequences revealed at CitizenCon. It’s going to pay off over the long term, as there will definitely be more of them in the future!
Aside from this, there was lot of bugfixing and post-integration cleanup work to make sure the audio system code is clean and stable, providing the solid foundation for upcoming modules and features
We also hope you liked the audio in the explosions previz shown in Around the Verse! Audio makes a huge difference and good audio really helps to sell the effect. We’re really happy about the feedback and reception that the previz received and look forward to working with the designers and effects engineers to deliver that across all the ships you’ll have in the game.
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Citizen Con is around the corner and we’ve been working hard throughout September to be able to show you some amazing improvements at this event. Without further ado, here’s what the team has been working on.
Design
The BHVR design team has got its hands full. We’ve finished the Million Mile High Club whitebox and have created two new shops for planet Nyx: a personal weapon shop and the medical unit. We also designed a new character loadout selector, we cleaned-up the ArcCorp level after its initial release and we created and integrated on a bunch of new flair items. We fixed a tonne of integration bugs on ArcCorp and in hangars and a few other surprises we can’t reveal as we are writing this update. It’s a very exciting (and busy) time for us now that the Social Module has been released.
UI
For the last week of August through to mid-September we were in the UK working with our colleagues at Foundry 42. We spent a lot of time discussing UI unification; when several different people spend over two years working on a various UI systems with very short deadlines between each release, a few inconsistencies naturally develop, but they need to be smoothed out. Working across different time zones can also be quite challenging, so when you can get everyone in the same room together to talk about a UI feature, how it should work, what it should look like, it really makes a big difference.
We also discussed different ways of improving our UI pipeline, identified some troublesome features, worked on how to improve manufacturer style guides (the UI team doesn’t just create interfaces, we are also responsible for a large part of the branding in Star Citizen). We left the UK feeling like we had accomplished a lot of work, and solidified a great working relationship.
Once we got back to Montreal, we kept the momentum going: we planned out our next steps to move towards UI unification, we updated the chat interface, improved the default keybinding control images, created a loadout selector interface, and fixed a whole bunch of bugs.
There are a lot of plans in the works, so stay tuned. Much more to come
Art
The art team has been hard at work fully optimizing ArcCorp. Thanks to this optimisation, we will be able to get more players in the same instance. We’ve also built a new area in ArcCorp. It’s still under construction … literally, but this will show how vast and immersive the planetside locations will be.
Code
During the month of September, we’ve worked on adding UI Support for new Chat features such as private conversations as well as a general UI overhaul of the Chat Interface. We’ve also worked on a new useable item and new UI interface which will allow you to customize the player loadout in a more convenient way, rather than using the F6 Key to swap a couple of set outfits.
We’ve been working on providing more information to the player with regards to the locations s/he will travel to via the Transport Elevator Console available in the Hangar. Information such as how many of your contacts and what contacts are already at a certain locations will be provided. We’ve also improved the Control Customization menu by making sure that changes are more frequently saved. Additionally, we’ve started expanding the Contact List functionality UI so that will allow players to form a Party with their Friends.
We have also been helping out on Star Marine. First we’ve been working on the UI and functionality that allows a player to customize his loadout before a Match, making sure that the proper items are available depending on what items/item package he actually owns. We’ve also been providing engineering support for Scoreboards that appear throughout Star Marine matches.
Some of us were flown over to the Manchester CIG Studio this month. During that time, we’ve had the chance to improve the Toolset that allows us to create UI. The main goal was to allow engineers/designers to be more efficient.
In the next Patch, you’ll also be able to appreciate a lot of the optimizations and improvements we’ve made to the holo-framework over the last two months. You might have already noticed some of the new features and optimizations in the Large World Demo that was shown at Gamescom.
Last but not least, a lot of the team effort has been concentrated on stabilizing the build following the integration of changes from a release branch back in to the main game development branch. We’ve worked on making sure that all features we owned are once again up to par.
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This month was a great feature development month, with a lot of solid work on improvements, particularly on the ship front. It also saw us adding a new member to our team. Aline joins us from Pennsylvania where she’s just completed her PhD and we’re excited about the boost she brings to our R&D.
So what have we been up to?
We made quite a few improvements this month to Arena Commander and ship combat in general, such as adding a new missile sub-profile to the ship AI. Each ship AI agent is configured via a profile that can be customized by designers to make them behave differently, and to make this job easier, we have several sub-profiles defining different aspects of their behavior, such as their flying style or how they select targets. The new missile sub-profile allows designers to better customize how different ships will make use of their missiles, which will contribute to more variety in combat encounters. This mix-and-match flexibility will give us much more room for creativity and variation when it comes to rolling up varied behaviors in the game without having to limit ourselves to a small set of predefined personalities
We also did some rebalancing and tweaking of various ship behaviors to better support the greater variety of ships that enemy AIs are now able to pilot. With some of the newer ships being faster or more maneuverable than previous ones, we were finding that some of the behaviors weren’t performing as well and resulting in less enjoyable combat. This is always an ongoing process as we try to make behaviors take advantage of the capabilities of the different ships that AI can find themselves piloting.
Some interesting optimization work we did was allowing for obstacles to be defined for AI without requiring CryEngine entities to be created to associate with them. On some of our maps we have thousands of objects that ships need to avoid, and having to create full CryEngine entities to register each one as an obstacle can become expensive. Sometimes you still want this for other reasons, but with simple objects like rock fragments floating in space you can take advantage of registering it as a much more lightweight and simple object. So this will allow for performance improvements and creating larger and more complicated levels.
One really exciting task that we’ve just started on and will talk about a lot more next month is death spirals. This is the addition of cool death behaviors by ships to make defeating enemies feel even more satisfying. Once you’ve damaged an enemy ship so much that it’s going to be destroyed, we want to look at some different ways of making it fly out of control and possibly explode. This makes for great readability since it lets you see that the enemy is no longer a threat, and it allows you to savor the victory of a tough battle a little longer. There are several different approaches that we’re experimenting with to see what works well and what doesn’t, so keep an eye out for the results in next month’s report!
On the character behavior side of things, we’ve been making some improvements to how our behavior trees handle switching characters between performing different high level tasks. The Kythera architecture now supports a couple of different behavior paradigms, but the one we used for ships was based on the idea that when you tell an AI to do a new task, he will switch to a different behavior tree to do it. However, in character AI, smooth, carefully choreographed transitions are vital for high-quality results, and so it can be helpful to keep them running a single larger behavior tree and have them switch between different parts of that tree to perform different tasks. So we’ve added various bits of infrastructure that allow a tree to register itself as handling multiple tasks, while also making it easy to add handling of those task switches in the tree.
Finally, we added a few new features to the Kythera Inspector web debugging tool, particularly in order to allow better debugging of those big behavior trees I mentioned above. With smaller trees you can usually see the whole thing within your browser window without a problem, but with these really large trees you need to pan around a lot, and the existing scroll bars just didn’t cut it. So we added in a panning feature where you can just hold down your left mouse button and drag the tree around to see the part that you’re interested in. We also added in some persistence features so that if you’re looking at the behavior tree of a particular AI and you want to hop out of the game and make changes to the tree, when you hop back into game the Inspector will remember the AI that you were looking at and keep it selected for you, which streamlines behavior iteration and debugging. Whether or not that sounds exciting to you, the tool should help the content creators do their work more easily. The result: more content for you!
That will do it for this month. We currently have several cool ship related features that we’re working on (in addition to the death spirals mentioned above), but you’ll have to wait until next month to find out more!
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Greetings from Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month:
Community Hub
Last month, we launched the Community Hub and were overwhelmed by the quality and variety of your submissions. Keep it up! For those of you who haven’t checked it out yet, the Community Hub is your home for user-generated content (Citizen Spotlight), interesting links around the ‘Verse (Deep Space Radar), Livestreams and Podcasts. Staff picks will be displayed on the landing page, but you can click on “View All” to see all the contributions. Enjoy!
Issue Council
We released the Issue Council in the middle of the month, and we’ve already received over 500 bug reports. By using this tool, the community can contribute, evaluate and prioritize bug reports. Members can confirm bug reports, and up-vote or down-vote them. Once a bug report has been triaged and prioritized by the community, CIG can select which reports become “Acknowledged.” Acknowledged bug reports are automatically entered into CIG’s internal bug tracking software, so that they can be assigned to their developers. By involving the community from the very beginning, we save CIG developers a lot of time evaluating reports and identifying which ones are duplicates or invalid. The more you use the Issue Council, the more time (and money) that is saved!
Ship Upgrades
We continued to work on the revamped Ship Upgrade system, whereby you can upgrade one ship for another. The new user interface will make it a lot easier for you to choose from a list of eligible ships. You will be able to access this feature from your Hangar or from the Pledge Store.
Referral Program
Want to invite your friends to play Star Citizen? Now’s the best time to start recruiting new players and to take advantage of our Referral Program. Each member has a unique Referral Code which they can share with their contacts. If your friend signs up for an account on the website, they will automatically receive 5,000 UEC. And if they buy a Starter Package, you will earn 1 Recruitment Point. The more Recruitment Points you earn, the more rewards you will receive. To view all the possible rewards, click on the “Referral Program” tab in your RSI account page.
Squadron 42 Landing Page
To prepare for the CitizenCon announcement, we built a landing page to showcase the upcoming Squadron 42 single-player campaign. As we are given more information about the game, we will be adding more content to this page, and expanding the section to include the background story and other information about the game. Stay tuned!
Starmap
We have been pulling out all the stops to have the Starmap ready for presentation at CitizenCon. On the visual side, we added a preliminary set of textures for the different Planet types, configured different looking stars for every Star System, re-skinned the long-range scanners, tweaked the animation of the routes, and completed the user interface. We also added an intro loading screen and WebGL detection screen.
On the development side, we completed the routing algorithm (choosing the best routes between two Systems) and search tool. We’ve also worked closely with the CIG writers to validate all the data in our Starmap.
We’ve been working with the CIG audio department to add new sound effects to the Starmap, including original background music. You will have the option to toggle off the sound, but we believe you’ll want to keep it on.
By the time you read this, the Starmap demo will be available for your viewing pleasure. We hope you will love it!
Ship Happens
This was an exciting month for ship launches! We saw the unveiling of the Vanguard variants, the Harbinger and the Sentinel, fulfilling bomber and e-warfare roles respectively. We also introduced Battlefield Upgrade Kits, to be able to change the role of your Vanguard, bringing a whole new level of choice and variety to the already awesome ships. Not only was there the Vanguard sale in September, but also, right now the Endeavor science vessel was made available for the first time. The Endeavor was another exciting launch as it introduced the community to the idea of science as a role in the universe. Continuing with the theme of choice and variety, the Endeavor is being sold in packages with different science pods, or separately so you can mix and match pods to suit your needs for your next mission. Check it out while it’s still available (which is only a few more hours!)
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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. While no one will deny the Hornet’s place as the UEE Navy’s brawler, the Sabre offers an elegant and nimble alternative to handle an ever-evolving combat landscape. Designed to be a rapid responder, the Sabre is more than capable of establishing battlefield dominance for any number of combat scenarios.
Engineers looked equally to the past and the future to build the Sabre . Incorporating Aegis’ battle-tested power distribution systems into their dependable ship-hull construction while developing cutting-edge flight and system technology, the Sabre is truly a next generation fighter that represents the new Aegis.
Aegis Dynamics has designed the Sabre in response to a United Empire of Earth Navy’s request for proposal for a next-generation fighter capable of outmatching the Vanduul STINGER-class heavy fighter in speed and turning. While the Navy has not yet accepted the the Sabre bid, Aegis has opted to make a run of production prototypes available to licensed civilian operators.
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Ship Details
The Aegis Sabre is a new starfighter designed explicitly to premiere at CitizenCon 2015! The Sabre will be available from October 10, 2015 through October 19 as a concept sale. The Sabre has been designed to make use of systems already in place in Arena Commander, to allow it to come online faster than a ship that requires new game mechanics.
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LENGTH
26m
BEAM
24m (Folded) 30m (Deployed)
HEIGHT
5m (Gear down) 3.8m (Gear up)
NULL-CARGO MASS
18’000 Kg
CARGO CAPACITY
None
MAIN THRUSTERS
2xTR3
MANEUVERING THRUSTERS
8xSize 2
RETRO THRUSTERS
2xTR3
BODY WEAPONS
2xS3 Fixed Laser Repeaters
WINGS WEAPONS
2xS2 Gimbaled Laser Cannons
SHIELDS
4xLight
POWER PLANTS
3xLight
All specifications are subject to change for game balancing.
About the Sale
This ship is being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar or to fight in Arena Commander. The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add a poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game 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 October 19, 2015.
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. 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.
Limited sale
Military Ships Sale
In addition to the Aegis Sabre, we are bringing back a variety of military spacecraft in honor of CitizenCon’s Squadron 42 theme! These ships are being offered with three year insurance in honor of our third year of development. All will be available through October 19, and are listed below. Whether you’re looking to intercept bombers in a Gladius or to support your fleet with a Starfarer Gemini, this is your chance to pick up some advanced weapons!
Additionally, a ‘Fleet Pack’ featuring all of the ships in the sale plus the Idris-P corvette will be available for 48 hours starting with the CitizenCon livestream. You can find further details on the ship pages linked below.
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WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
At the dawn of the 29th century, a new center of knowledge and understanding was constructed: the ARK. Not bound to any one place, species or government, the Ark was established under a simple principle: to provide a neutral repository for all galactic knowledge.
A pet project of Imperator Marshall Leon, the desire was to usher in a new era of cooperation between species after hundreds of years of hostilities. Imperator Leon believed that the simplest path to peace was empathy and sought to unite the greatest minds of not only Humanity, but also of the Xi’An, Banu, Tevarian and even Vanduul* to endeavor towards this noble goal.
There were many hurdles along the way. The Senate refused funding when they learned the project was going to be run privately. Some vocal opponents were worried that the data shared would be used against Humanity. The invitation to the Vanduul incited calls for Imperator Leon’s removal from office. Yet despite all that, the Ark was completed, and as we approach the institution’s sesquicentennial anniversary, it is hard to deny the positive impact this incredible resource has had on civilization. To this day it continues to strive to present a holistic viewpoint of history; collecting as much knowledge as they can, from as many sources as they can.
Currently residing in the Tayac System, the Ark and its team of dedicated archivists and researchers curate this information for the Galactapedia and the Starmap. Invaluable tools that allow all beings to better understand the universe and find their way through it.
*The Vanduul, to date, have not participated in the Ark program.
EXPLORE STRANGE NEW WORLDS
The Starmap is a public resource that aims to provide a complete user-friendly overview of the galaxy, showing that we are all just a small part of something much larger and at the same time, that even a distant world can be only a few jumps away. And, as the universe is not a static place, neither is the Starmap. As our knowledge continues to grow, the Starmap grows with it. Compiled by the Ark with the latest data from the Imperial Cartography Center, private infobanks, individual surveyors and university astronomical studies, the Starmap attempts to provide an unbiased look at the galaxy. Though some information has come from the Ark’s other member species, it has been limited in scope due to Xi’An diplomatic complications and difficulties inherent with Banu recordkeeping.
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Data Sources
In addition to tracking celestial objects and jump point routing information, the Starmap incorporates demographic information from several trusted sources:
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POPULATION – NID 2944 Population Assessment Report
Generated by the UEE Naval Intelligence Division every year, this report is intended to serve as a reference for Naval High Command, policymakers, senators, and planetary leaders. Point-In-Time population estimates are derived utilizing data from UEE Census Bureau, UEE Department of Development, detailed orbital scans, and Naval on-site teams.
ECONOMY – J&P Score
The Jappa & Penner Economic Health Score has been an Empire standard for close to three centuries in evaluating the financial status of regions. Named for the firm who derived the ranking system, J&P Scores take into account a myriad of factors such as trade, growth, debt, capital, etc. to assign letter grades ranging from F for an area with little potential, to AAA to designate a hub of extraordinary economic value.
THREAT – TSAS
The Advocacy compiles crime statistics and casualty reports to create Travel Safety Advisory System (TSAS) to inform the public how dangerous they expect travel in certain sectors can be with Threat Levels ranking from ‘minimal danger’ to ‘extreme danger.’
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As excited as you probably are to get your hands on the Starmap, we are probably more excited to be able to share it with you. The culmination of months of debate, research and brainstorming between Design, Lore, and the Web Dev teams, it has been nothing short of epic to build a universe. With dozens of pages of lore written, countless spreadsheets shared, an exorbitant amount of wikipedia articles pour overed, hours of patient astrophysicist explanations, endless web code tested and re-tested, jump points nudged, stars tweaked and belts tightened, our heads, like the planets on the map, are spinning.
And we’re not even done yet…
Even as of this morning we were making adjustments trying to get things just so. And we don’t expect the updates to the Starmap to stop anytime soon. Consider this to be your Starmap Alpha.
For this initial pass, our focus was on the feel of the Star Citizen ’verse. We wanted to make sure that the systems you can visit (or sneak your way into) are not only interesting, but encourage you to want to go there and explore. But this is still a project very much in development. Those of you who have been following the game closely might notice some differences between what is presented in the map and what we had described earlier in places like the Galactic Guide. The Starmap represents the most up to date and correct information we have. If something disagrees, trust in the Starmap.
On that note, please bear with us as the map will change. The designers are still creating new gameplay, and we’re going to gain useful information on how to make systems the most fun they can be. We are continuing to work with astrophysicists and astronomers to take all our crazy sci-fi ideas and refine them to make them more scientifically accurate and as immersive as possible. To top it all off, we are continuing to plan for the Galactapedia release which will tie directly into the Starmap and provide you with even more information.
Of course, there is one huge major thing missing from the Starmap: all of your feedback!
ACCESSING THE WEB STARMAP
You can access the web starmap NOW via the RSI menu or clicking the ARK logo below:
BUILDING THE ’VERSE
by Benoit Beauséjour, Turbulent
Community vote
What a ride. Several months ago the community voted for our next project to take on. The starmap won ; by a long shot. Wide spread panic, tears and terror spread through the Turbulent office. It was the largest and most ambitious project on the table, required major coordination with CIG and was deeply rooted with the game. We were afraid not because we were worried of our abilities but because this is a such an important project inside the Star Citizen universe. We wanted to wow you guys and build the best damn web star map we could to really showcase the depth of the work the amazing CIG Writers team is doing. We wanted to make a map that would feel like it’s in the game….but in your browser.
Taking it on
Our first order of business was to get involved in the universe design process with Tony’s team @ CIG and start prototyping the User Experience. One of our core design goals was to build something on the web that could be ported and used inside the game space. This influenced the design of the different UI controls that power your experience in order to account for potential use with game controllers and the like.
We knew we needed to prototype and we knew we needed help to get there. We enlisted our next door neighbour, Gamerizon (Hi Martin, Robert and Louis!) to help us get off the ground and build our first round of the map prototype in Unity.
Our first prototype of the map, was demoed at the 2014 Christmas livestream. This prototype allowed us to test many interactions and design our base UI that would become what you will see online today.
Technology choices
We had made this choice beforehand but we confirmed it in our next step. WebGL was the way to go in order to bring a fast and efficient rendering pipeline in the browser. This standard browser API exposes the graphics card layers to the Javascript runtime of your application. This way, using a talented shader artist like Martin at Gamerizon, we were able to build nice holographic representation of stars, black hole and other phenomenons.
We needed an engine and we opted for Three.JS. It’s lightweight and fairly well supported and we used it before with the Holo Viewer. The map also uses several bleeding edge technology on the front-end side, the UI makes use of SVG animations, is built using a combination of languages and tools including Typescript, ES6, webpack, gulp, nodejs and more!
Moving from a stack like Unity to web-based GL API is a big step ; but one that proved worth it in it’s simplicity and performance.
Modelling an API
We knew from day one that we needed to be able to manage this universe. We set out to build a data model to represent the universe ; its stars and systems, planets and wormholes. Complete with an management interface and importers from CryEngine, this backend empowers designers to create planets, move stars and systems, collapse jump points and tunnels.
On top of this management interface and data model we constructed a solid REST-style API to allow the map client in your browser to load data sequentially, based on zoom and position, about the systems you visit. This API also has support for the search, persistent bookmarks and route searching algorithms.
Audio
If we wanted to reach our goal of building the ultimate browser map ; we need a soundscape and sound FX. There was no way we were going to try to do this ourselves and so we got major support from F42 audio. Matteo Cerquone built an amazing sound effect setup for the Starmap. Lee Banyard and Matthew Webster coordinated to get us a track from Pedro Camacho which once again blew us away.
The talent with the audio group never ceases to amaze me and I thank them for their support in the ARK Starmap!
The future
Major expansions plans for the map are in the works! Addition of real-time data coming from the game simulator, more models to represent other elements and phenomenons in space as well as possibly support for orbital mechanics. With the advent of other 3D browser standards like WebVR, maybe integration with virtual reality devices ?
The final list is still in the works ; but you can be sure we plan on expanding it and using this map to allow you to interact with the game universe even when you are not connected with the game client.
The result
We hope the result pleases the community. This project was very special to us because it is so close to the heart of Star Citizen.
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Jason Hutchins here for the weekly Star Marine update.
It has been all hands on deck in all studios working towards all of systems and features of Star Citizen and the on foot first person experience is a no exception. Here’s the good news: I GOT TO SHOOT A SPACEMAN IN THE FACE! Earlier this week the build was stable enough to do some internal playtests. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you too much about what we were testing this week without ruining what we have in store for you at CitizenCon… so tune in tomorrow to see what we’ve been working on!
I did, however, work with the dedicated QA testers in Austin, and our very talented new video editor, Justin Chambers, from the Santa Monica studio to make you this teaser video. Those shots were literally taken this morning and we put them together this afternoon. Thanks to Pedro for another superb music track to work with. Next week, I’ll share some of the behind the scenes footage that went into making the final trailer you see today.
Of course we also did work to push the FPS development forward, building up to what will be a public release as soon as we can. Thanks for tuning in, see you at CitizenCon 2015!
Added alternate fire modes (semi, burst, auto fire) to ATT-4
Continued investigating issues with grenades and gadgets
Updated P4AR shells helper to align better
Stripped down keyframed recoil animations from the P4-AR and made new animation files.
Reload animation event timing tweaks for the P4-AR
Working on procedural weapon sway/recoil animations for the P4-AR
Fixed a bug with the weapon not following when moving the camera up/down
Then connected these settings to the weapon data.
Crouch and crouch+ADS Procedural animation setup
Fixed an issue where guns would float in the air with the owner died. They fall to the floor now. They were leaving their attachments behind, fixed that bug, too.
Fixed some bad diagonal sprint strafe blends.
Finished first pass on cover lean system. Will need proper animation assets for the next pass.
Stated support for weapon changing, need animation assets to be created/implemented.
Next up, low cover ADS cover support.
UI
Worked on Quantum Travel HUD (spoilers!)
Working on a the Mission manager display for an upcoming release.
Helped the audio team with hooks for the FPS visor HUD
Technical Art
This week we did a huge cleanup of environmental textures that were much larger than they needed to be. This saved almost 1.7 GB in allocated texture memory. As you can imagine, that was a big performance improvement.
Animation
The team in the UK is making excellent progress on base locomotion as well as procedural weapon animations. You’ll see what I mean in the video.
Smoothing start transitions for the first person view
Submitted fixed Stocked motion set prone transitions
Cleaning up the Stocked walk start transitions
Revived the Weapon Pose for Procedural animation clips
Looked into an animation conversion issue
Removed all ADS and iron transitions – they looked bad
Added WeaponSway and WeaponPose to Stocked transitions
Adjusting look poses to correct aim point in ADS
Found an issue with another bone that wasn’t being exported by one of our internal tools.
Sniper rifle crosshair adjustments.
Started working on to/from prone animation transitions
Continued polishing first person movement on stocked weapon set.
Shotgun fire animation tweaks.
Audio
Working on breathing manager
Made another pass on the bullet cracks
Done a pass on EVA thruster audio
Debugging and fixing environment and props in Gold Horizon
Making another pass at ADS audio
Debugging audio for grenade cooking, burst fire, and destroyable props
Blocking Issues
I’m going to start providing a list of the issues that we feel we must fix before we open the tests to backers.
Pistol animations need to be implemented and cleaned up, once we finish the stocked weapon set.
All Armor Types – Taking damage while swapping weapons causes character to lose weapons.
Stocked Weapons clip into the characters face while prone.
Damaging breakable objects causes random objects to move.
Using the Hologram causes a crash.
When pistol is selected user is unable to throw grenades or use gadgets.
All Armor Classes – Characters are missing line art/interior helmet geo/Hud elements.
P4-AR Ballistic Rifle – Rear sight and part of gun vanish when user goes into ADS
ATT-4 Energy Rifle – Rear sight and part of gun vanish when user goes into ADS. (JH edit: I think this one was fixed today – was broken yesterday, though.)
Devastator-12 Energy Shotgun – Rear sight and part of gun vanish when user goes into ADS.
Throwing a grenade can cause a crash.
All loadouts – Sometimes you are unable to shoot your weapon until you cycle through all of the fire modes (press V).
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This month’s Subscriber Flair is the 350r ship model! This realistic ship model from Takuetsu Starships, the most trusted name in ship models, is the ninth in a collection of Star Citizen’s ships. Display your 350r with pride, and then collect other models to complete the display. This month subscribers will also receive a special piece of event flair!
In honor of Citizen Con 2015, all active subscribers will also receive a special subscriber variant of the Citizen Con 2945 trophy. Additionally, all Citizen Con attendees will receive a Citizen Con 2945 trophy and digital poster on their accounts which will be attributed later today. We’ll also have the poster and trophy available for sale tomorrow in the store for those unable to attend the event!
Please note that the model, trophies and poster will not appear in your hangar just yet, they will be included in the next patch release. If you’re an active subscriber, the model and event flair will be attributed to your account today. If you subscribe over the weekend, the 350r model will be attributed to your account on Tuesday October 18th! More information about subscriptions can be found here.
UPDATE: The attached demand letter is our formal response to specific, slanderous allegations made in the recent The Escapist article on Star Citizen. Normally, we would keep this behind closed doors, but we felt it was imperative to put our statement on record and indicate how disgusted we are with The Escapist’s irresponsible actions. Corporate at Defy Media asked us to delay publication of this letter while investigating, but we feel strongly that the record needs to be set straight without further delay.
We know that most Citizens are not interested in this drama, and as such we are updating the original notice rather than publishing additional Comm-Link articles. Future updates will occur here rather than in additional sections of the RSI site.
Response to The Escapist
Greetings Citizens,
I have, to date, attempted to stay above the internet drama currently surrounding Derek Smart and his claims about Star Citizen. My feeling has been that it is most important to speak with actions instead of words, and to date I feel that we have done that with the multi crew demo, the launch of the social module and everything else you see here in this space on a daily basis. However, with the publication of today’s article (I can only call it a hit piece) on The Escapist, I believe it is necessary to address the issue directly. In the interests of openness, I am making available right now my correspondence with The Escapist’s managing editor. What follows is his original e-mail to our Director of Communications, David Swofford, and my response, sent to them three hours before their deadline and not included in the piece.
I have to say that I’m incredibly disappointed in all of this. This sort of drama is not what I, or you, signed up for with Star Citizen. Thanks to your support, the project has become bigger than I ever thought possible and there’s no question that opens us up to criticism from anyone looking to make a name for themselves. I know that every company goes through such things, especially with regards to unhappy former employees. It is unfortunate that our open nature makes us a bigger target, and going forward we will do the best we can to refute such baseless accusations. But most importantly, stay tuned to see the actual work we’re doing, which should put any questions to rest.
I will update this piece with a direct response to the article later in the day, but I wanted to go ahead and show you what they left out; hopefully it will calm some nerves now.
Chris Roberts
- Chris Roberts
My Response
From: Chris Roberts Sent: 01 October 2015 14:10 To: John Keefer Cc: David Swofford Subject: Upcoming Star Citizen article
John,
I was quite shocked to see the email that David Swofford forwarded to me filled with a bunch of conjecture, falsehoods and opinions of disgruntled ex-employees enflamed by Derek Smart’s personal quest to destroy Star Citizen.
I know you say that “none of these come from Derek” but we both know that’s not true. You are quoting the exact same things in your email he has spewed in his blogs and twitter for months. If you want me to give you links to the exact same claims (which are patently UNTRUE) I can but we both know it’s coming from him and the few people he’s rounded up. We are a company of 261 employees spread across two continents and four development studios. With a company our size there will definitely be a few unhappy ex-employees – the same would be true of any large organization – we have built up quickly and not everyone is a superstar or fits in with the culture. We have parted ways with a few people over the past couple of years, not all of them amicable, and it is alarming to feel like there is a one sided piece that will be filled with complaints of people who aren’t part of the project for a reason. As long as I’ve made games, especially on large projects this has always been the case and it shouldn’t be news.
So why is it for you guys? Do you really want to give a platform to Derek Smart? This is the same person who wrote a letter to Origin and me after Wing Commander was out claiming that we were infringing on his game and we had to cease publishing it or he would sue us. We told him we never heard of him and good luck with that. He never sued. His game was, of course, the now infamous Battlecruiser 3000AD that would take many more years to come out (I think I shipped four Wing Commanders before his game came out).
Derek has a long history of finding some “big” thing to joust at just to keep himself in people’s consciousness rather than let his games do the talking. We’re not the first project where he has made it his mission to attack. Personally I think it would be much better to use that energy on his own game rather than take this path. He’s managed to rouse up enough attention that sites like yours are reporting his bile like it’s fact. You can’t pretend that the article that you published the other day was anything but a mouth piece for him. It completely repeated his narrative hook, line and sinker and mentioned plenty of out of context material in an attempt to harm the project and my reputation. I just don’t get it. The only person who is famous for being a blowhard, bully, an awful game developer and human being is Derek Smart. Just look up his history over the years. Or see how he treats people who dare to write a bug up on his current “game.” Why aren’t you doing a piece on the state of Line of Defense? Everything he accuses us of doing, he actually does himself! He’s the king of self-projection!
I’m pretty disturbed by your approach to this piece as well as the last piece Escapist published online. Why the rush to publish with or without our comments by noon today? What’s so urgent that you can’t take a little time to actually approach this like responsible journalists and do proper fact checking, get both sides of the story and only publish verifiable claims that have proof? Otherwise you’re just engaging in the same kind of campaign of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that Derek Smart has been actively pursuing every day since he realized that he could get attention by attacking Star Citizen (as he certainly wasn’t getting any for his own game).
I’m also pretty concerned that your reporter on this is compromised and pursuing her own agenda. For someone who is a self-acclaimed Gamer Gate supporter, which last I checked was about ethics in video game journalism, she’s not been behaving or going about her business like an ethical reporter. Lizzy Finnegan appears in this tweet from Bandit@istheguy:
This is directed at a self-avowed feminist. Meantime, Bandit@istheguy is the very same person who started attacking Star Citizen on the day before your reporter wrote her article, tweeting about two people we parted ways with, then following up by retweeting the Escapist article and people who mentioned it…and then finally ending up by doxing myself, my wife and one of my daughters with this sequence of tweets.
“Bandit” is an anonymous account that was created on August 11th of this year and is almost exclusively used to aggressively attack and harass folks seen as enemies to Gamer Gate – the usual targets are all there, as are the usual proponents being retweeted. It’s notable that this account was interacting with and supporting Derek Smart when he was complaining about being blocked and reported as a harasser by two huge GG targets; Randi Harper and Briana Wu, which was another Derek Smart self-announced drama (he loves to play the victim, which he did when we refunded him publically sharing his refund email, claiming we were trying to silence him. We weren’t – we strongly believe in free speech and allow many dissenting opinions on our forums as long as they stay within standards of decency. You don’t keep someone as part of your community who is demanding you run the development differently or else he’ll sue you, especially someone who is plainly using the opportunity to attack Star Citizen for self-promotion).
Derek tweeted @1:15pm on September 24th about us letting go of staff in LA, less than an hour after we had completed the exit interviews of the two employees we were terminating (considering he’s in Florida and we’re in LA it’s not hard to connect the dots on where he got his information from). At 4:01pm “Bandit” starts mentioning people being let go.
If you look at the Twitter history of Liz and “Bandit” they frequently retweet each other’s tweets and generally reinforce each other’s views / opinions. I don’t know Liz’s personal life (nor do I care to) but based on the picture of her in “Bandit’s” tweet it is not a stretch to assume there is either a close relationship between Liz and “Bandit” or they are potentially one and the same. Which kind of calls into question these statements she made on Twitter:
Also retweeted by “Bandit” (as evidenced above).
This would explain her approach to the article, which was to pretty much take everything that Derek Smart claimed and report it without allowing us any opportunity to properly respond. Liz’s first email to David Swofford was at 744pm on the 24th, after which “Bandit,” riding into battle for his/her new friend, and Liz directly referenced Derek Smart’s claims. I didn’t see this until Friday afternoon (David works out of our Austin office, I was in our LA office) after David had a brief and rather irritated exchange with Liz (attached). I replied to him with some comments and concerns expecting David to have the opportunity to go back to Liz to further discuss some points she was bringing up that were clearly just singing out of the Derek Smart hymn book and much to my dismay and disappointment the article had already been published.
Which brings me back to my original point on all this. Why the rush to publish an article without allowing a proper round of fact and source checking? It completely feels like an agenda is being pursued. This is not the journalism that I remember from the Escapist of old. It’s click bait journalism of the lowest standard. It’s pretty ironic that it’s exactly the kind of journalism that Game Gate stands against. I’m also pretty bemused how suddenly Star Citizen and I have become the subject of attacks by a few people who associate themselves with Gamer Gate. I’m a gamer. I am making a game that gamers have overwhelmingly said they want made, to the tune of almost $90M and rising! I believe in ethics in journalism. I also believe in being inclusive to all and not being abusive to people in person or online. I don’t support either side because I believe it’s too polarizing but I believe we can do better, as gamers, as journalists and as human beings.
So why? It can’t be because we don’t buy banner ads and thusly are an easy click bait target for sensationalist pieces. I have to believe that your reporter is telling you she is onto something and you are taking her at face value and not questioning her motives or ethics.
Derek Smart is very adept at doing what he has been doing; spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. He always grabs one nugget of a fact and uses that to sell a whole lot of lies and disinformation. He tweets about Star Citizen EVERY DAY. Not once but multiple times. If you read his Twitter stream it comes across as the crusade of a crazy man. He continually blogs about us. He constantly agitates…encouraging people to ask for refunds, report us to the FTC, the FBI and/or their local attorney general. He calls me a liar, a fraud, incompetent and many other names. He has slandered my family members and business partners. He has publically doxed me, sharing the address of my home in LA, pictures of my wife and five year old daughter. He constantly attacks Sandi Gardiner, accusing her of having no qualifications, or experience, that she had other people do her work for her and only has the Marketing position because she is my wife. That is incredibly ironic considering we are the most crowd funded project in history, that she wrote the marketing plan, and single handedly executed it when we were a tiny team – even today she’s the only dedicated marketing person at the company, for a game that has raised almost $90M for its development solely through viral marketing, word of mouth and PR. If you were going to criticize Star Citizen you certainly can fault us for taking longer than everyone wants, which would fall on the development side of the company but not marketing! The icing on the cake is that she has five degrees and speaks five languages, which I am willing to bet makes her a lot more qualified than Derek Smart is!
You have to ask yourself why? What does he have to gain? He didn’t like how I was running Star Citizen? Fine, he has his money back. He has no active claim in the game, nor would I ever want someone like him to be part of our community. I have never met Derek Smart, nor do I ever care to. I have never done anything personally to him. Yet he has continued to wage a FUD campaign on Star Citizen, the company making it and its community since July. He actively tries to destroy the hard work that I and everyone else making the game have put in to this project. He wants to tear down something that close to one million people have put their hopes and dreams into. Is it ego? A sense of self-importance? The fact that he’s getting attention again after being in the wilderness? It’s probably not a coincidence that he’s actively courted the Gamer Gate crowd, while professing to remain neutral since he started attacking Star Citizen. It’s also probably not a coincidence that he’s been using the buzz words “accountability” and “ethics” when attacking us as he knows in today’s internet world, where almost no one actually does the research to find the real facts that hyperbole sticks and people love to tweet an instant response to an attention grabbling statement on Twitter.
Derek Smart publishes blogs where he talks about lawsuits and how’s he going to take us down. He’s going so far as to publically share a letter with some pretty silly requests from his supposed lawyer (he seems unable to sign these letters), regardless of the fact we haven’t received the letter. In his latest blog he linked to a letter from his “lawyer” that was dated September 14th. We only received it yesterday, on September 30th! And it was post marked September 22nd! If you know anything about real legal discourse you would know that it stays behind closed doors. You don’t publish this kind of communication as it will prejudice any possible case. What he is doing is just a publicity ploy to get headlines from journalists who don’t know any better and to worry Star Citizen backers into thinking he’s going to legally give us troubles. And this is exactly his FUD plan – scare enough people, tell enough lies, round up the occasional angry ex-employee to help pour fuel on the fire to give him some semblance of credibility. We are not afraid of Derek Smart. We have nothing to hide and are very confident in our ability to defend ourselves against anything he may try to bring. But my bet is he won’t – he’s full of hyperbole. He claims he’s made over $200M in royalties from his games as recently as a week ago (I don’t think I have to go into why this is a complete lie). He also says frequently that he’s worth over $100M, or that he has two PhDs, or that back in July he was taking out a full page ad in The New York Times to expose us. He says a lot of things to get attention and for some reason people don’t call him on it. You may say, “Well don’t shoot the messenger,” but when the messenger is delivering his own message, then I think it’s perfectly fair to question that persons motives and credibility.
And you know what? If he was a decent person he would state his opinion and then sit back and see if it actually plays out, which at that point perhaps he would be vindicated. Instead he is actively trying to make his prophesy come true, using whatever dirty tricks he can muster. Why?
So he’s trying to put 261 people out of a job and destroy the dreams of almost a million people? For a personal vendetta? To gain some notoriety? Because he’s jealous that people love my games and ridicule his?
I’m just a passionate game developer making the game of my dreams. I am lucky enough to be supported by a huge community of gamers that has contributed a large amount of money to make a game that no publisher would dream of making. We have a very large team, most of which share my passion and dream. Yes, there will always be people who don’t fit in with the work and dedication that the dream demands and some of them will be resentful when they part ways, but I am in this to make something that will stand the test of time, much like Wing Commander has. When reaching for the stars there are bound to be a few bumps and delays on the road. You’ve covered games for a long time. You know that games, especially big complicated ones always have hiccups and are frequently subject to unforeseen delays. We aren’t even at the three year mark of full development (we didn’t open up the first development office in Austin with 15 people until February 2013). Projects of half our scope frequently take four to five years.
We are a very public project and rely on the goodwill of gamers to exist. Having a negative article that includes the views or comments of a small number of disgruntled ex-employees with their own opinions on whether things were run well or not, especially when they will be shielded behind anonymity, could give people an impression of the project and company that is 100% false, especially if we are not part of the story. This would be far more damaging to us than a normal developer or publisher. I know that this kind of material is great for clicks but you also have to remember that we are talking about the jobs of 261 people and numerous contractors. Every time a game studio shuts down every outlet and commenter is quick to lament the state of the game industry. Every time a big public company pushes out a game quickly to make the holiday season everyone laments about lack of ambition and taking the audience for granted. Here you have a 100% gamer funded project on the PC, a platform that almost every publisher ignored or pushed crappy console ports to and you have a game in a genre that everyone said was dead to a level that no publisher would dare to – and you want to harm it? Shouldn’t the press be cheering on these kinds of games? The gamers spoke. They wanted something as big and ambitious as Star Citizen. I will deliver it – I have never in my life worked this hard – including when I was 20 and making Wing Commander. There is a huge group of very talented game developers who all share this vision, who are all working as hard as possible to deliver a game that will make all the backers happy. So I implore you to think twice about going for something that while it may be fun to see Rome burn…isn’t in the best interests of the game, the employees of CIG or the 987,217 members of our community. You may say that if it isn’t true what is the harm but we both know in today’s world that’s not how it works, the truth will be lost behind the click bait headlines and the damage will be done.
In an effort to be complete and also answer the talking points you sent David here are my responses;
-Employees have indicated that Star Citizen and all of the promised stretch goals, “even with competent management,” could not be made for $90 million.
CR: How do you or they know this? Which employees said this and what makes them qualified to make that judgement? I know it’s what Derek Smart loves to say but he couldn’t make a good game with $200m so I don’t think his opinion matters. Outside of that, no employee beyond me and a few other key people who are leading Star Citizen would have the appropriate information and overview to make any judgement about the cost of the total project. Secondly, the company uses additional sources of funding such as tax incentives, marketing and product partnerships, but we do not discuss these issues in public for obvious reasons. We always keep a healthy cash reserve and operate our business prudently based on the incoming revenue. It should tell you something that we are actually increasing our global headcount not decreasing it despite the inaccurate rumours perpetuated by Derek Smart.
-Concerns expressed over the planning of the project prior to launching the Kickstarter, namely related to Roberts’ extended absence from the video game industry.
CR: What concerns expressed prior to launching the Kickstarter? The small, tight team that put together the KS campaign and worked on the technical demo are all very much still at CIG and none of these people had any doubt. And judging from the record breaking campaign which is the biggest crowd funded project (not just game) in history I would say that there’s a large amount of people that also didn’t have these concerns. So may I ask where did these concerns come from?
-In 2012, a Kickstarter FAQ indicated that the high cost of stretch goals was in order to ensure a 2014 delivery date.
CR: Is this the FAQ line you’re talking about?
The purpose of the higher stretch goals is to ensure that the game-as-described is finished in the two year time period. We intend to build the game that Chris Roberts described at GDC Online regardless, but without additional funding we are going to have to do it one piece at a time, starting with Squadron 42, rather than as a single larger production. With more funding we can include more ships, systems, unique locations, animations and cinematic sequences.
You will notice that this is saying that we would only be able to deliver Squadron 42, not the bigger game without additional funding. If you refer to the stretch goals you will notice that the base goal was enhanced community content (delivered), alpha dogfighting module (delivered) and Squadron 42 (in progress). That was the base game as described. The full persistent universe and all the extra features like FPS boarding, multiple star systems to visit, extra ships and so on are all stretch goals. As is true with most projects when the scope changes so do the timelines, you can’t build a castle in the same time you would a wood shed no matter how much money or how many people you have. To try to make some kind of narrative about how we promised the game in two years no matter how big the scope grew is false. Could we have shipped a small scale 30 mission game in the old Wing Commander format in two years? Yes, but that’s not the game the community wants or the game we’re building. What we are delivering now, just on the Squadron 42 side is more akin to a huge AAA game that would retail for $60 by itself. The value for money that people are getting for a $40 pledge is pretty crazy.
-Allegations of a “toxic” work environment, including ignored Human Resources complaints against Sandi Gardiner (including accusations of discriminatory hiring processes, vulgarity and personal insults during both public disagreements and email exchanges).
CR: All personnel and HR matters are obviously completely private and we can’t comment on this as a matter of principle. As always, there are two sides to each story.
-Accusations of the mismanagement of money, including: using crowdfunding money to pay for couple’s Pacific Palisades mansion, using crowdfunding money to pay for personal vehicles, using crowdfunding money to pay for personal vacations, using company resources and employees to create videos for films and auditions (Sandi Gardiner).
CR: No crowdfunding monies are used for any private purposes – these allegations are completely false and defamatory. This is pure innuendo for nefarious purposes and I guarantee that anyone making this claim will be unable to show any proof of it as it simply hasn’t happened. Ever since Wing Commander came out I’ve been lucky enough to be financially independent, driven nice cars and lived in nice houses. That’s due to money earned through royalties, the sale of Origin to Electronic Arts, Digital Anvil to Microsoft and prudent investing. So why are people making a deal about me having these things now? I also find the continued attack on Sandi fairly alarming. Why is she being singled out? Because she’s my wife? A woman? Yes, she’s also an actress and there’s nothing wrong with her also engaging in one of her passions after hours or outside of work. We let employees play games of D&D in our conference room in the evenings or weekends. I don’t see attacks from Derek Smart about how this is a waste of company resources (and it is not his to comment on or judge anyhow).
-Accusations of entering into a joint venture partnership with Turbulent, and using crowdfunding money in order to assist with the continued creation of the crowdfunding platform that was used on the RSI website to market to other companies.
CR: The opposite is true. CIG benefited from pre-existing software that Turbulent had developed. Our JV with them allowed us access to cheaper rates and bound an important part of Star Citizen closer to CIG, which are both beneficial to CIG and the backers. Per our agreement Turbulent is of course free to offer their technology to other customers.
-Accusations of “irresponsible spending” of money, including the use of “big name” Hollywood actors for voice-overs for the commercials, the hiring of inexperienced “movie people” to work on certain aspects for large fees with minimal to no experience.
CR: Where does this come from? Has anyone given you examples of “big name” actors or numbers? It’s completely incorrect – we paid appropriate rates for normal VO work for the commercials. Now for Squadron 42 we do have a really great cast, which we will announce in a week from Saturday, but that was one of our stretch goals so it would be a bit rich to accuse us of mismanagement there!
“Squadron 42 will feature celebrity voice-acting including at least one favorite from Wing Commander”
-Accusations that the majority of the crowdfunding money has been used, with minimal progress made. Sources state they “feel like they were making commercials, not a game.”
CR: Anybody even with minimal knowledge about game development can assess the significant progress by looking at the released modules and the detailed monthly reports from each development studio. We have a massive team, working flat out to build something special for everybody. We feel like we’ve made huge strides and have completed a good portion of the underlying technology that will enable us to make Star Citizen the game that your sources say can’t be made. I don’t know how someone could say with a straight face that they felt “they were making commercials, not a game.” In fact we haven’t had a ship commercial since last year! As an aside the commercials were used as a fun milestone to make sure everyone got the ship to final game quality, and it focused the artists on finishing the work for public consumption, which in turn helps with getting more final assets in the game sooner. It was also a great way to build the lore of the universe of Star Citizen up, which is a universe we intend to continue to expand for many years to come.
-People feel the company is understaffed for what is being asked of them
CR: In every project I’ve done and others I’ve witnessed it’s a very common tendency for people to want more staff to help finish the job. It’s always that way until the game is finally done. Under Erin’s leadership at head of Global Production we’ve re-organized to make things more efficient (which is really what started this flap in the first place) and we are in a hiring mode (which you can see by our open positions) which shows that we are working to address these concerns. We have ten confirmed new hires that will start this month alone and offers out to several more candidates.
-Employees are concerned that Roberts is not listening to the advice of people who have worked in the industry during his absence, and that they will have to waste time and resources attempting something impossible just to prove it would not work.
CR: I have a very strong vision for Star Citizen, which is why I believe we have been backed to the level we have. I have no doubt what we can achieve. Now that most of the base technology is in place we will be able to get with the Large World and MultiCrew milestone a game experience that will allow you to seamlessly go from foot, to boarding a fully realized spaceship with your friends, take off, fly thousands or millions of km in space, exit your ship in EVA and explore derelict space stations or wrecks, engage in FPS combat, return to your ship, engage in space combat and return to your home base to share the tales of your adventures with your other friends. All with no leading screens, all at AAA first person fidelity that you can’t even get on a next gen console. This is the core of the Squadron 42 and Star Citizen experience that we will continue to iterate on and add content to, but even the first release will be more “game” than most commercially released space games. In terms of not listening to the advice of people that have worked in the industry that is not true. I have a very strong executive management and design team with huge experience in AAA titles that all contribute to the decision making of the company. I listen to everyone – from our top level all the way through to our QA testers and community giving feedback on gameplay and features. I care and want to build the best game possible. Now that doesn’t mean I agree with everyone’s opinions and feedback as a project director I owe it to the community to stay true to my vision and pick the things that I think will make the game better which can occasionally lead to people feeling disgruntled, which I suspect is the root of this “concern”.
-Allegations indicating that there are not currently any complete character builds for the game.
CR: Where are you getting this from? Have you guys really looked at what you can do right now in the game? You’ve been able to walk around your hangar since August of 2013. I’m pretty sure that was a complete character walking around rather than a mass hallucination. We have multiple characters in the game and are working on a lot more (of which some will be seen at Citizen Con).
-Statements made that the Austin office will be closing, as is understood by employees.
CR: This is completely false. We’ve actually made public statements to this fact. All Austin employees have been advised of a fairly minimal restructuring where some roles have been moved to LA or Europe for overall team efficiency. The majority of our Texas employees will remain in the Austin studio (indefinitely, by the way). As I’ve mentioned previously we are actually increasing our worldwide headcount in order to complete the game as effectively as possible. I would hope that the backers want us to be constantly trying to increase efficiency and making the hard choices that will benefit the game.
-Accusations that Star Citizen became more about crowdfunding than about making a game
CR: It’s about making a great game. Crowd funding is just a tool that allows us to do it with freedom that you would not normally have with a traditional publisher. So no it’s always about the game.
-Employees feel as though they are “part of a con”
CR: This is the statement that really makes my blood boil. If any current employee feels this way they should not be working on Star Citizen or at CIG! I suspect these are the words of a few bitter ex-employees trying to stir trouble but I consider it a privilege and an honor to have so many people support myself and the team in making the game of all our dreams. I have nothing but gratitude to our backers for their support and patience and nothing but respect for the CIG team giving their all to make this game. Anyone who doesn’t feel this is welcome to the door, and as you must now realize there have been a few people who haven’t shared the same passion or love and now resent being called out for it.
Ok, there you go.
I would like to point out that ever since I got your email from David I have been working on this response. I worked on this until 5am last night, and a couple more hours this morning in the UK, where I am currently am in preparation for CitizenCon in a week from Saturday. Conservatively it’s taken me about eight hours to write. This is time I could have spent working on the game instead of dealing with a Derek Smart instigated drama. And this is really what annoys me – that his silly rantings occasionally gain traction and pull me away from the very thing I prefer to do and the very thing everyone wants me to do and the very thing Derek Smart accuses me of not doing – FINISHING THE GAME! By constantly tweeting, writing blogs and soliciting journalists in the background to report his “findings” he’s waging guerrilla warfare on my time, the time of other key executives, and the peace of mind of our employees and backers.
I would ask you to think hard about this in the context of what you guys have been considering running with. What do you hope to achieve by running with an article like this? What good do you hope will come out of it? Are you looking to cast assertions on our chance of success? What’s the point of unfounded conjecture and innuendo from biased parties? People say we will not deliver the game we’ve promised. So? Shouldn’t you just let us get on with it? If it falls apart they will be vindicated, if not we will be. I don’t know any other project that gets the level of scrutiny that we get in the development phase. Every day I have to deal with thousands of arm chair CEOs and developers mostly because we are the most open game development project in history. I have no problem with our community having its opinion on various facets of our development but when our openness is used against us by a small number of outside agitators harbouring ill will against us, it becomes incredibly frustrating and detrimental to my ability to deliver the game as promised.
If you guys are willing to do a proper piece then I’m happy to engage. You’re invited to visit all of our four studios, meet the developers making the game and see how we’re building one of the most ambitious PC games first hand. I’ll put my 261, their passion and energy against the complaints of a few disgruntled ex-employees any day. We have backers visit the offices all the time, they all come away with the same impression – that the entire team is dedicated to making the best game possible – if you took the time to research this you will find that it is a common comment and that the “noise” that has been generated is really from a very small number of people and some quite bitter ex-employees.
-Chris
Original Letter
From: John Keefer Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2015 12:44 PM To: David Swofford Cc: Josh Vanderwall; Lizzy F Subject: Upcoming Star Citizen article
Hey David,
After our chat and the initial story ran, we had a bunch of former employees and current employees step up to talk to us about Star Citizen and what is happening with the game. The allegations and concerns are numerous (see below), which gives us a sense of urgency to get this story out there ASAP, ideally first thing tomorrow morning. Note that NONE of these come from Derek but are all internal or formerly internal folks who came to us or agreed to speak with us. We are giving you and Chris a chance to respond before the story goes live. We are willing to wait a very short while to ensure these get answered if possible, but this story will run tomorrow at noon at the absolute latest.
Bullet points from the story:
-Employees have indicated that Star Citizen and all of the promised stretch goals, “even with competent management,” could not be made for $90 million.
-Concerns expressed over the planning of the project prior to launching the Kickstarter, namely related to Roberts’ extended absence from the video game industry.
-In 2012, a Kickstarter FAQ indicated that the high cost of stretch goals was in order to ensure a 2014 delivery date.
-Allegations of a “toxic” work environment, including ignored Human Resources complaints against Sandi Gardiner (including accusations of discriminatory hiring processes, vulgarity and personal insults during both public disagreements and email exchanges).
-Accusations of the mismanagement of money, including: using crowdfunding money to pay for couple’s Pacific Palisades mansion, using crowdfunding money to pay for personal vehicles, using crowdfunding money to pay for personal vacations, using company resources and employees to create videos for films and auditions (Sandi Gardiner).
-Accusations of entering into a joint venture partnership with Turbulent, and using crowdfunding money in order to assist with the continued creation of the crowdfunding platform that was used on the RSI website to market to other companies.
-Accusations of “irresponsible spending” of money, including the use of “big name” Hollywood actors for voice-overs for the commercials, the hiring of inexperienced “movie people” to work on certain aspects for large fees with minimal to no experience.
-Accusations that the majority of the crowdfunding money has been used, with minimal progress made. Sources state they “feel like they were making commercials, not a game.”
-People feel the company is understaffed for what is being asked of them
-Employees are concerned that Roberts is not listening to the advice of people who have worked in the industry during his absence, and that they will have to waste time and resources attempting something impossible just to prove it would not work.
-Allegations indicating that there are not currently any complete character builds for the game.
-Statements made that the Austin office will be closing, as is understood by employees.
-Accusations that Star Citizen became more about crowdfunding than about making a game
-Employees feel as though they are “part of a con”
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Greetings Citizens,
I wish I had a more exciting update for you! The past two weeks have been about fixing crashes, blockers and addressing issues with server stability. The biggest news this week is that Austin QA was able to play a Free Play practice match on a release build while connecting to internal servers! That’s a good indicator of progress, but there’s still work to be done.
What kind of issues are we talking about? Let me talk about one example of a complicated issue that we feel we need to resolve before the initial release. That is: something is causing weapon aim not to return to the center of the screen where it needs to go. There’s some type of lag that is keeping the aim offset from the center. We have been working on solutions involving modelling, animation, programming and scripting in order to address this and the team feels confident we’re close… it’s looking better than it had, and we hope to show you a ‘before and after’ video next week.
Issues like this are the reason we aren’t ready to release a playable build just yet. We are so eager to get Star Marine in your hands, but it doesn’t help us with development if we ship with issues we know we can solve… especially issues that prevent you from having fun. We want your feedback, but we want it to be valuable balance feedback rather than have you run into the same issues we’re seeing.
I’ve read the reactions to the “Thumb Wars” on the forums and I’m glad you liked my little joke. While we may not do Thumb Wars via thumb-stick any time soon, we will be using the system to add other actions into the game: motions to settle bets or make decisions. That’s coin flips, dice rolls and other RNGs… even an animated Ro-Sham-Bo emote setup (rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock, if you prefer.) After all, in the full game you’ll need to resolve your conflicts in ways beyond just shooting virtual people in the face!
Below you will find the weekly list of changes, updates, fixes and issues. We’re getting very close to release; those that remember the early days of Arena Commander will remember how frustrating it was that last minute blockers continued to pop up… and the same is true here. It’s part of the process, for sure, but a part we’ll be happy to be done with very soon.
Gameplay & Engineering
Continued investigating / working on weapon issues.
Continued tweaks to the Arrowhead sniper rifle.
Fixed weapon animations not playing
Committed a first pass of the decibel based visor Radar system
Fixed crash with decibel based visor Radar system
Working on sniper overcharge vFX display system as per feedback from game director.
Currently tracking down animation issues with weapons/IK
Looking into crashes caused by API changes the network spawning of gadgets
Updated left hand IK bone rotations on all stocked weapons to fix broken wrists
Updated medium character item attachpoints to be better aligned
Looking at various cover/ladder/MedPen bugs
Fixed ladder footstep SFX triggering incorrectly now
Fixed crash relating to Area Denial asset
Fixed missing crosshairs on some weapons
Trialed xml position/rotation offsets on weapons now code is in, but ran into some issues.
Unified recharge rate for energy weapons
same speed of recharge for all of them but some take longer due to larger mags
Looking at bugs moving slightly out of cover
Investigating additional audio hook ups to the breathing manager, to hook into stamina and player injury states
Tech artists removed old shoulder flashlight that mysteriously reappeared after the 1.2.0 merge, and hooked up new illumination devices that are helmet mounted. This will be a good thing when you are investigating that asteroid you landed on, walking the ArcCorp dark alleys, or clearing that dark corner on the abandoned Gold Horizon station. The lights on GH are flaky and easily broken!
UI
Fixing bugs related to HUD visor widgets and internal helmet Geo
Changed the size and color of the FPS indicators
Reviewed the new line work on the light helmets for both Marine and Outlaw
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Almost ready to roll out weapon manufacturer style guides. Artists will use this to unify our concept art so we can start cranking out additional concepts and then get more weapons and gadgets into full production.
Did a large weapons texture clean-up last week. This will help reduce used texture memory in the Star Marine and Persistent Universe or Arena Commander maps that have any personal weapons in them.
Fixed P4-AR iron sight alignment issues in the art asset.
Investigated issues with personal shield gadget collision issues.
Continued work on new Area of Denial gadget.
Included is a shot of the WIP on the high poly model that we received last night, which is much smaller than the old briefcase sized gadget.
Attached is also a picture of my feedback, which needs to be approved by Todd and Tobi early next week. Todd is on a much needed holiday today, and by the time I sent my feedback for Tobias to review he’d already gone for the night. Ah, the challenges of distributed development…
Animation
Working on weapon fire animations, to address feedback and changes regarding procedural code and the new rig. This work will continue into next week.
Re-targeting of some animations as needed when bugs are found by tech design and engineering.
Created missing stocked crouch forward and backward turn animations
Fixed prone roll popping bugs.
Working on 1st person movement for stocked weapon locomotion set.
Helped fix the Fixed P4-AR iron sight alignment issues in the art asset.
To give a little more detail on this, we are using the P4AR Ballistic rifle as our gold standard once we have animations, IK issues, camera positions, and designer set up all working we will use that as our basis for the way other stocked weapons are set up, as well as the basis for pistol type weapons, and in a future Star Citizen or Star Marine module release, heavy weapons.
Investigate issues with throwing grenades. This work will continue into next week.
Audio
Player hit feedback is now submitted
Looking into the UI/Radar feedback
Hooking up sounds to the energy recharge stations
Tested grenade cooking audio
Fixed up some material SFX
Downed sound is tested and checked in, need to review in game.
In closing, it’s been another week of solid progress. We get closer and closer to putting this into your hands. I hope to have a video for you next week detailing one of the major blockers that’s kept Star Marine out of your hands thus far, including the solution we’re in the process of implementing even as I write this.
What a month! It’s hard to believe that August saw both our live Gamescom multicrew demo AND the release of the social module… and a heck of a lot of work in-between! From building new starships to designing new landing zones to teaching the Vanduul to fly, we’ve been doing a little bit of everything, and it’s finally adding up to things you can see live! You can read on to find out what our teams around the world worked on in August below.
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Hi everyone! In August, the team had their heads down creating functionality and content for the upcoming MultiCrew release of which we showed an early iteration of at Gamescom. We’ve had a great time working on implementing several major elements of Star Citizen and are looking forward to finishing more. Like always, we love sharing with everyone what we’ve been working on so check it out and let us know if you have any questions.
Engineering
What a month! We started off delivering some major systems you saw debut at GamesCom and are ending with full game implementation, high priority bug fixing, and major code clean up and more. We can’t believe another month has gone by in the blink of an eye so here’s what we knocked out during that blink.
We’ve been hard at work on the Pilot AI module and to support that module, we’ve needed to do some work on the item system. Our resident UI pro, Zane Bien, has been working to finish up the massive amount of UI for some of our bigger ships while working hand in hand with all the UI stakeholders to close down the base UI systems used all over Star Citizen.
Now that we’re merging everything back up in to our main stream we’ve had a lot of integration and stability issues to address. We’re really happy to get everything back in to one stream (we’ve been working in multiple streams for several months). We did find a memory leak issue that we knocked out quickly (memory leak issues are a leading cause of many slowdowns and crashes in software of any kind, so catching these things is really important). We also worked to clean up a lot of the large world core types to get ready for the future elements in the game. We are digging further in to the physicalized damage for our ships to get that done as soon as possible.
We worked with our global team on some Quantum Travel tasks and are really proud of what we we’re going to be able to accomplish for the multi-crew release. Since we’re finishing elements of the game and supporting the live content we always have normal bug fixing to complete. Some examples are head rotation for EVA as well as camera snapping and bounding box bugs which we had to address. We had a strange Constellation firing bug that we had to iron out as well as a control transfer bug. Also, a visor position bug, HUD bugs, EVA gas giant bug, flare bugs, character helmet bugs and many more that we tracked down and squashed!
Toward the end of the month we started tying down shadow and area light fixes with forward tiled shading, cleaned up leaking decal render nodes on level unload, finished up initial implementation of multilayer material work and integrated them into the correct stream. We added thread-safe loading interfaces for textures, materials and character models as well as set up the testbed for async (asynchronous) batch loading. We also figured out the workflow of bullet pierceability, prototyped upcoming flight control modes, and chased down IFCS (Inertial Flight Control System, one of the major features that makes our game a leading-edge ‘sim’) bugs and issues for release versions. Having said all that, we’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us so stay tuned for next month.
Design
We’ve has such a successful month! Not only did we complete some major milestones for multi-crew but are making leaps and bounds toward improved Arena Commander all while working alongside our global partners on their respective aspects of the game. The highest priority is finishing up the last minute items for the multi-crew release for you to enjoy!
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To dig in deeper, we’re working tirelessly to get the Drake Herald flyable to iron out everything we need to do to make sure it’s balanced and fits well within the game. We also worked hard on general balance for our 1.2.0 patch and future patches as well by listening to your feedback and evaluating what’s needed for improvement. Now, we’re clearly laying out the ranks and hierarchy for multi-crew stations to provide what’s needed for proper controls to encourage healthy teamwork within our multi-crew ships. We’ve also been designing more physically based damage alongside engineering to get that system online as soon as possible.
GOST rear door and state groups were worked on extensively to improve this system. We also fixed a lot of bugs such as the missile rack bug, flying into space, and Gladius weapon bugs as well as a Constellation character bugs. We also fixed the Glaive hangar bug and we did Glaive blade Mannequin clean up. The Retaliator power plant transition was really fun to work on and we’re glad we finished it. We also setup the Cutlass Blue interior doors chrparams and the Constellation destruction was fun to work on because it had a lot of technical challenges. Another system we’re working hard on improving and preparing for the long term is our component implementation through prototyping and retro-fitting ships. We also did worked hard on Glaive flight balance through-out the month for the release of the ship and beyond.
It’s going to be a great upcoming month and can’t wait to show you everything we’re doing.
Art
Another month down, and what a busy month it was. We worked hard on all the art needed for the Multi-crew release, Squadron 42 and FPS characters, as well as concepts for the next great ships.
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To dig into the nitty gritty, some of the tasks we worked on in concept included the Male UEE Marine concepts, the Vanguard variants, Marine armor concepts, and the Shubin exterior Miner. For characters, we modeled several helmets such as those used by UEEN Deck Crews. We completed art for Star Marine such as helmet interior line work, the Marine Helmet, and the Light Marine Helmet. We also fixed some of the female textures, the human skin shader, and an issue with multi-light visibility, the eye shader, and finished some loadout screen renders to get ready for Star Marine. On the rigging side, we fixed the base male character model weight simulation issues, and player skin exposure issues for not only Star Marine, but the Social Module as well.
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On the ship side, we modeled the white box and the grey box of the Drake Herald to get them to a flyable state as soon as possible. We also completed the Constellation LODs (Level of Detail), the Cutlass Blue LODs, added Scythe burn marks, Retaliator damage, and addressed Merlin bugs, Freelancer z-fighting bug, Cutlass Blue texture bug, Merlin thruster bug, Retaliator shield hookup, mesh and proxy, Constellation shield fitting bug, and general art bugs as they arose. We worked on the Vanduul Glaive materials vertex colors, Aurora clipping bug, ship shield meshes, Constellation grey box lighting pass and began working on the white box for the Reliant by our own Elwin Bachiller.
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Also, we’ve working hand in hand with design to finish standardizing our components for all ships within the game, through proper pipeline documentation, component orthographic images, component placement, and cleaning up the overall component files. We’ve been working hard and excited about what next month holds.
Writing
Coming off the rush of production, it’s been a much calmer month than the last few. Our collective sights have shifted more to the PU while the data from Squadron 42 gets crunched to be implemented into the game. That isn’t saying that there hasn’t been S42 work, we have been helping the Editorial department by compiling first passes of the NPC Character wildlines (essentially going through the raw footage and editing out pauses and any line flubs) to present them to Chris for review.
Otherwise, we’ve been pushing forward on Star Systems, organizing the current star systems and preparing them to be vetted by scientific consultants while delving into the remaining un-lored systems to sketch out their character and how they fit in the universe. This information is important, not just for the Galactapedia, but also for reference by the developers who will be building the actual large-scale game environments for the persistent universe. This kind of data is also one of the many things we do to add deeper simulation elements to the game, instead of just doing things by fiat. While science fiction can of course contain unexplained or strange artifacts and circumstances that add elements of mystery and wonder to your exploration of the universe, we want the rest of it to make enough conventional sense for you to fully immerse yourself in a setting conducive to suspension of disbelief.
Next, we’ve been talking with Matthew Sherman, Elwin and Mark Skelton to further consolidate the list of corporations that manufacture the individual ship components. Part of these discussions involve art and design determining the standardized size/shape of each component (what elements do all power plants have, for example). The ultimate goal is to establish a brand identity (indicating the quality or type of product the company makes), so that not only can the artists can develop a consistent form language for the parts (what is the company’s visual trademark/stamp of the standardized component), but also so that the designers can begin to assign how the company’s design philosophy affects the individual part. In short you will not only be able to look at an individual part and potentially be able to identify who manufactures it, but you can also intuitively gauge how a particular company makes their products, and what the strengths, weaknesses and quirks of their construction does to that particular component’s performance characteristics to help inform your purchasing decision.
Probably the coolest thing we’ve been working on is REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED.
It’s really exciting.
That about does it for Santa Monica. We had another fun and busy month here at the studio as we work every day to close down the tasks necessary to bring Arena Commander 2.0 to your computers. As always, we appreciate you taking the time to read through our list of work and if you want to know more please don’t hesitate to ask! Thank you again for everything and remember, we always value your feedback.
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What a month! The team in Austin has been working non-stop to support a variety of efforts for around the company, most dear to our hearts being the release of Social Module to the PTU and then to Public release in the same month! The team is so excited to be able to share this module with you, and so exhausted from all the work that has taken place in the leadup to this release. We’ve got big plans to release new features on a regular schedule and to continue to expand this module over time. Here are some detailed updates from the team leaders in Austin.
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The Art Team this month spent much of its time helping to ship Social Module v0 out with the release of Alpha 1.2.0. The PU Environment Team spent most of the month supporting BHVR in creating the awesome ArcCorp landing zone environment. Patrick Thomas, Lead Environment Artist, helped Mark Skelton review and provide feedback on a daily basis to get ArcCorp looking as polished as it could be. Lee Amarakoon did multiple VFX passes on ArcCorp to get it looking nice and grimy with steam effects, atmospherics, animating graphics on screens and monitors, and he even had a hand in getting our ships ready for use in the traffic patterns in the skies above Area18. Lee also created the fire effect in the incinerator you can see in one of the back alleys of Area18. Emre Switzer completely revamped the lighting in the environment, so that the courtyard was more impressive, the alleyways were properly dingy, and all the shops each had their own flavor. Cort Soest, Global Environment Tech Lead, spent much of his time this month monitoring the optimization of the assets used in creating the environment, so you can thank him for helping to get the environment to run smoothly on your computer! We also had a new addition to the PU Environment Team this month. Ali Seffouri, Environment Tech Artist, joins us from EA Tiburon in Orlando and has been helping out with creating some much needed tools to support the art team in making more amazing environments.
The PU Concept Team has been working hard to flesh out some of the look and feel of more upcoming planetside locations. Ted Beargeon has been doing work on making style guides for Crusader and MicroTech so that each landing zone has its own unique aesthetic. (For those of you who might not remember offhand, ArcCorp, Crusader, and MicroTech are all located in the Stanton system, so being able to travel between these planets and see all of these locations in the same solar system even if you don’t have a jump drive on your ship is something we’re all really looking forward to.) Ken Fairclough has then been taking these style guides and drilling down into the nitty gritty of what makes each location stand out. Megan Cheever continues to expand the wardrobe of our game. We now have one of our clothing line’s aesthetic pretty well-defined, the Terra-influenced Fashion Casual line. We’ve also been in discussions with BHVR and supporting them on streamlining and improving the chat interface.
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Our Animation Team this month has been helping in several areas. For Social Module, Vanessa Landeros has been implementing all of the emotes you see in game. We’ve got more coming down the pipe so look forward to those soon! On the ship side of things, we’ve been doing a lot of bug fixing to get rid of some of our animation debt, so to speak, so that ship interactions don’t appear to be distractingly broken in our next release. We’ve also wrapped up establishing templates for ship enter/exit animations so that our modelers have something to follow for future work. This will reduce our animation footprint for future ships. We’ve also been updating our ship cockpit animations to match the brand new templates. Lastly, our Animation Lead Bryan Brewer has been working alongside our Rigger to test and implement new custom skeletons to match some of the proportions of our actors we had on set at the mocap shoot at Imaginarium. We’ve come up with an efficient way to create new skeletons quickly and efficiently, and it has been working pretty well so far.
Last but not least, our character artist Billy Lord has been doing some R&D on creating some new hairstyles for our characters. Pretty soon we’ll be able to see these in game, which in turn will allow our characters to have a little more variety in the cranial region. I know everyone is looking forward to finally seeing some flowing locks in game!
Design
All this month has been spent supporting the effort to get Social Module out the door and into your hands! Time and effort were spent on several aspects of Social Module, including setting up NPC’s in ArcCorp (activity around the landing pad outside Customs and Jobwell), hooking up emotes to play in game (all through DataForge), and setting up ship traffic in the sky above Area18 (I dare you to find a pattern!). In the coming weeks we will be spending more time fleshing out ArcCorp even more, including setting up the buying/selling functionality of our shops and NPC daily routines.
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Looking toward the future, designer Pete Mackay has been spending some time on setting up the “Periodic Table of Elements” for Star Citizen. This will be the first step in defining our commodities and recipes. This will also help to establish what elements can be found while mining asteroids, how rare and valuable certain commodities are, and laying the groundwork for how trading will work in the PU.
Lastly, Tony Zurovec has been spending time this month thinking over the top-down layouts of upcoming Planetside locations. Specifically, the Orison landing on Crusader and the New Babbage landing zone on MicroTech. Area18 went through a number of revisions over the past few months to get the first release just right, and we learned a lot that will help make the initial layouts of these landing zones much easier to accomplish. We’ve also recruited a few designers in the UK to help out with an additional landing zone design, the Lorville landing zone on Hurston, so we will be overseeing that as well in the coming months. Before you know it our designers will have their hands full breathing life into not only the locations above, but also Levski landing zone in the Nyx system.
Engineering
The Engineering Team was excited to play a big role in shipping our first iteration of the Social Module in August! They helped ship and support a couple of pushes to the PTU and have been providing continuing support behind the scenes on improvements for the live release since it went out in late August. The Server Team in particular is continuing to work on backend code that will be pushed out to continue to improve the experience of this first Social Module release.
Working on the Social Module was a great team effort…a lot of eager blood, sweat and tears went into putting this module together. Engineering worked very closely with our DevOps and QA teams daily here in Austin for many weeks, which led to improvements in our communications and workflow as well as in increase in team bonding. Together, and with support for various other disciplines, they were able to run a few very successful large cross-studio playtests in prep for the release. We’ve had our top guys analyzing both network and client profiles of playtests and identifying areas where we need to make improvements. This process included adding new analytical tools to further diagnose everything going on under the hood.
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A lot of other work, not specific only to this Social Module release, progressed throughout the month of August as well. Improvements have been being made to the network optimizations for our characters, as we will be working towards adding more and more players and NPCs to game modes and maps as we go forward. As always, work continues on our various backend services and memory issues, including the juggling of new feature work with various bugs that get raised on our live game or by QA. In Austin we’re also continuing to share our engineering expertise for other features being developed outside of Austin, including support for the Frankfurt and UK studios.
A group of engineers continues to work closely with out design team to build out Subsumption Tools, which will allow our designers to create AI behavior for our NPCs. Yes…NPCs in ArcCorp will be coming, and the team is excited to be making progress on reaching that goal! The team has been chugging away at creating new Subsumption Tool functionality as well as implementing new types of behaviors and tasks that can be assigned toNPCs. Nevertheless, other tools have not been suffering from lack of attention and we continue to make improvements and fix bugs for such tools as the Sandbox Editor, Dataforge and the Asset Validation Tool.
Other engineers…our unsung heroes…have been focused on crucial super-behind-the-scenes laborious work in getting our various development streams integrated with each other. With feature work for various releases such as our recent Gamescom demo, Social Module and upcoming FPS release, as well as the integration of an updated version of CryEngine, our experts have been working to keep the correct content in the correct stream at the correct times to coincide with our release schedule, all the while working to ensure that the streams diverge only as much as is absolutely needed to support our stream workflow. While it takes attention and effort to split off different projects into different development streams and merge back together later, this process enables parallelization of work assignments and frees us to deliver content at a pace that is more satisfying to backers who are interested in sampling our work in progress. Without the effort being put into separate streams, there would be far fewer releases and a much longer wait between patches of any kind, because all of the features – as well as all of their bugs – would be tied together.
Live Operations
QA
QA met the month of August in a full swing crunch for the content we were debuting at Gamescom. Our focus was squarely set on the multi crew functionality. Each day QA would play through the demo in which we were prepping to show off our new features multiple times verifying fixes and reporting new issues. The day would conclude with a play through with the developers in LA. We found this very valuable as the developers’ in depth understanding of their systems helped to identify additional issues. We were incredibly happy with how well received the team’s efforts were at the Gamescom presentation. It was a hard crunch but in the end it was all worth it to see the overwhelming positive feedback from everyone. This has energized us to work even harder to get Social Module, Multi-Crew and Star Marine out to everyone as soon as possible.
After Gamescom, our focus shifted to testing the ArcCorp/Area18 Social module in preparation for its release to the Public Test Universe and eventually the live environment. Our Social Module Specialist Todd Raffray has been very effective in ensuring each feature is properly tested. Because of this, we were able to identify a hand full of critical issues that were promptly fixed. In addition to these we have found and fixed multiple issues related to our back-end Generic Instance Manager but will be standing by to identify and address any new issues that arise from a large influx of curious citizens eager to explore Area18.
Tyler Witkin and Andrew Rexroth have been comprehensively testing Star Marine, a process which included an analysis of the cover system, how projectiles interact with the environment, as well as weapon zeroing improvements. Tyler has also helped to provide videos and screenshots of Star Marine and Social Module which have been used on the website, the latest issue of Jump Point and shared through social media.
The focus on Multicrew testing was a boon for our overall development but did result in some things being pushed aside temporarily. One of which is our automated testing development. However we are now in a position to significantly move forward on this particular front. Melissa Estrada is our resident engine specialist and has been working to train others in her in depth knowledge of proper testing of the Cryengine Sandbox Editor. She has done an amazing job training our other QA team in Manchester. She is now free to work full time on our automation framework to get it running as soon as possible.
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This month we welcome our newest addition to the QA team, Marissa Meissner! Marissa is filling the role of QA Information Specialist. The QA Information Specialist is tasked with ensuring all of our documentation is recorded and maintained as well as compiling our release patch notes. She is also the liaison to Customer Service, ensuring they are kept up to date on the latest issues affecting the game. She immediately hit the ground running and is already doing a great job in this very important position.
Thanks to Marissa’s efforts, Jeffrey Pease is now free to focus on the DevOps side of QA. He has become very knowledgeable in how our back-end services function and how to effectively monitor them. As soon as an issue is encountered, Jeffrey will log the issue and notify our engineers with all the needed information. He is also documenting these efforts which is laying the foundation for an eventual Network Operations Center.
For the month of September QA will be heavily focusing on Arena Commander 2.0 testing including, among many other things, multi-crew functionality and significantly larger areas.
Game Support
Game Support was all in for a big month in the history of Star Citizen. We first ran a public playtest to profile some of the larger Arena Commander issues of the day, worked on 1.1.6 and a brand new launcher, then pulled some double duty by creating the Gamescom multicrew demo videos, then moved straight into testing and preparing for the launch of Star Citizen 1.2, aka Social Module.
Our playtest was important because it again demonstrated the helpfulness of our backers, particularly those with a more technical or design-based aptitude. With that in mind, we’re still very keen to create our special “test group” which will assist in the nitty gritty details of playtesting changes to the Star Citizen service. This isn’t very glamorous duty; quite the opposite. But we need to test things such as network improvements, client optimizations, launcher updates, game balance changes, etc… anything that needs to hit a scaled test group or needs feedback before we roll it out.
We’re going to be announcing this in conjunction with the Issue Council this month, our brand new bug reporting system. We’ll be moving away from ticket and forum based bug reports into this official bug reporting system so that you can see and weigh in on the popularity of development issues with Star Citizen (we’re still in Alpha, after all!). This helps us as a development studio in understanding what’s important to the community.
We pulled a little side duty in helping create the Gamescom Multicrew demo videos as well (with a little help from Alex in DevOps). We hope that you enjoyed them as much as we did creating them!
We also worked with DevOps in releasing Launcher 2.0. As with any new product release, it’s not without faults, and the release unfortunately coincided with an unusually high adoption rate of Windows 10 (where most of our issues lie). But we’re seeing drastically improved download speeds and success rates, and we’ll continue working with DevOps to make this a completely seamless experience.
But our crown jewel for everyone at Cloud Imperium Games this month was rolling out the Social Module. What a great moment for backers, for the CIG team, for everyone involved! Game Support was heavily involved by organizing the testing groups for each phase of the rollout, as well as communicating with players along the way. We had to admit that seeing players run through the elevator for the first time was one of the coolest moments ever.
For September, we’ve got some cleanup to do. So much of our time was taken on other tasks that we’ve got a bit of a ticket backlog to work through, though we will be making the transition of bug reports into Issue Council. Once caught up, we’ll refocus our efforts towards getting Arena Commander 2.0 tested and out the door.
IT/Operations
GamesCom was incredible! Thanks to all the community members who volunteered to help us and it was especially great seeing everyone at the E-werk event and on the show floor. This month the IT department put a primary focus on preparing for the amazing content we wanted to show at GamesCom and the new build systems.
GamesCom work began early in the month with Paul joining Hassan & Kyle in our UK office to help with setup, testing, and tuning of 24 demo machines which would be used in Cologne. On site, Paul and Hassan met with some of our super supportive backers and many others during the week-long event. While this was going on, the development team keeps on working. IT continued to work closely with DevOps on the new build system and optimizing performance of other key systems supporting the delivery of assets throughout the company. At some points working around the clock we managed to keep up with everything even though a good portion of our team was deployed to Germany.
It seems like we’re always reporting on performance improvements or the need for more speed. And it seems as if the more performance we find the more this incredible project requires of us. This month we were especially hard on our network infrastructure. We moved more builds and aggregate data across the wires than we’ve moved in the last three months combined. There’s just more of everything; more publishes to PTU and live service, more patches, more builds in general and more builds to replicate to each studio, more testing, more automation, just more and it’s exciting to see all this progress. By the time GamesCom got started we had pushed well beyond the capabilities of our core network infrastructure and it became noticeable to the company. Considering everything else going on, we couldn’t risk taking anything down and waiting for parts was out of the question as well. Mike “Sniper” Pickett quickly identified the hardest hit areas in our network and designed an overhaul of both our virtual and physical environments in the Texas office which increased our capacity and redundancy (in delivery terms, that’s a good thing – it means that some glitches that would otherwise crash your session have backup behind them and so you wouldn’t experience an interruption in service) by a factor of 2x without the need for additional hardware. This substantial upgrade was also done without downtime which is just how we like it.
August was a super exciting month and we can’t wait for what comes next. We’re preparing for Citizencon already and looking forward to meeting more of the community there.
Dev Ops
This month the DevOps team has been focusing on getting the new build system online and used by QA and developers. In addition we started work on the enormous amount of Automation testing that the company needs as a force multiplier, continuing to improve the Launcher, and rolled out a patch and several hotfixes to the live environment. We also lent a hand in supporting the roll out of all the GamesCom demo builds and helping create a Multicrew teaser video.
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As part of the new build server roll out we have built a webpage visualizer to give developers an easy way to view and kick off builds. In addition work has been continuing on automatic integration/merge code to help us manage the changes between our many development branches. This ensures that builds have all the most up to date, compatible, changes in the builds we roll out to the public.
Work has continued on improving the game launcher; handling more error cases, improving the logging, adding analytic stats reporting, and of course attempting to eke out more speed for downloads. Expect another launcher patch iteration soon with more improvements.
For GamesCom the team split up into shifts to work with the IT team 24hrs a day for the week of the convention making sure builds and digital media being created were handed off to our support staff on the ground at GameCom. Though we ended the week quite exhausted, I think everyone was happy to see the fruits of the company’s labor in front of the backers. Plus we drank a bunch on that Friday to relax and enjoy the show.
The team has also been working quite closely with the server team looking at the performance of our Game Servers, General Instance Manager, and other Universe Services. This has led to creating and rolling out 12 hotfixes to improve crashes, memory leaks, deadlocks and performance over the last few weeks. In addition, work on setting up the game database has begun in earnest, and a couple of engineers from the DevOps team have already begun writing code for the interface layer to the eventual Persistence Server.
Finally, we began our four month automation project. This project will encompass work from the DevOps team in Germany as well as in Austin, and will cover the four major areas of automation; Perforce Tools, Game Client, Game Server, and Build Server. While we are still at the very beginning of this effort, the road map we have outlined promises to help QA reduce monotonous repetitive testing, ensure that checkins into the branches will not crash the build before they go in, enable engineers to see server load and performance without the need to organize massive playtests, and will fire off an array of build checks at the end of the build creation process. Obviously, the gritty part is getting all the coding done and then bug free!
Looking Ahead
As with every month here at CIG we’re working each and every day to bring you the next iterations of the Social Module and push onward towards the Persistent Universe proper. Select developers across the project are working on bug fixing for a subsequent patch to 1.2.0, but the majority of us have shifted focus to working towards the release of Social Module v1. Social Module v0 saw the release of features like Multiplayer functionality on our first planetside landing zone (ArcCorp’s Area18), the Chat System, and Emotes. Now that we’ve got some core backend technology as a foundation, we can start to build upon it to make the BDSSE!
Some features that are in active development at this present moment include improving the chat interface and functionality (hooray for private channels!), adding at LEAST 25 more emotes to choose from (now with audio!), updating the shop facades to make them absolutely unmistakable from across the Area18 courtyard, and something to do with…buggies??
We know you guys are looking forward to seeing the next landing zone, Levski in the Nyx system, and we are too! Levski is in Final Art stages and now we are looking at scheduling in time for optimization using some new tech called the Compound Render Node. This will significantly increase performance across all environments and will allow them to run smooth as butter while traipsing around these amazing locales.
It’s always scary to put something that you’ve worked so hard on out in the hands of people to render their judgment. We were hoping that you guys would like what we delivered, and the positive feedback has been overwhelming. Thank you for all of your support, we can’t wait to knock off your socks once again in the near future!
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Greetings Citizens,
As always, plenty of work happened in Manchester this month! Members of the team here were thrilled to meet thousands of Citizens live at Gamescom, and we’re excited about introducing you to the entire team at Citizencon in October! Meanwhile, here’s the department-by-department review of what we did in August…
Engineering
Another busy month has passed in the F42 coding department, with the start of the month seeing both the release of 1.1.6 and the Gamescom live demo we’ve been hammering away at our keyboards to help fix up some of the core large-world and multi-crew ship features that went on show, as well as the usual bug smashing! The features included work on the Quantum-drive mechanic which has been amazing to see in action as it not only looks cool but allows us to actually traverse the new large 64bit worlds we’ve created in a reasonable time. A highlight Q-Drive bug that got fixed along the way was your ship losing control at distances a long way from the origin, it turns out this was due to Cry Engine’s default ocean water level of z = -1000000 being now easily within reach, which would subsequently flood your engine!
Work has also been done towards various game modules. The FPS visor now includes new hit and grenade proximity warning markers and has had polish on its health display and ammo counter. There’s been fixes on med-packs, doors and ladders; nice touches for example include the ability to change speed on a ladder and new animations for holstering your weapon as you mount them to smooth and speed up transitions on to them. While a lot of FPS work happens at other studios, Foundry 42 does take some of that development onto its own plate, particularly for things that are integral to the Squadron 42 experience that we hope to deliver. Squadron 42 has seen work started on the Sidling (wall shuffling) mechanic as well as further work on looting, save game and security networks, plus the conversation system has started hooking in audio data that was previously recorded on the live shoot. Ships-wise we’ve started looking at a new ship-scanning feature that allows you to scan a targeted ship and over number of seconds it will gather information about each of the ship’s components (weapons, shields, cargo, engines, etc) and then allow you to cycle through that info.
More time is now being allocated towards cleaning up pre-existing in-game systems, we now have a “Clean-up Friday” that sees us look at tasks such as moving our in-game item .xmls into our new DataForge tool .xml format, which makes them easier to edit and validate going forwards. It also covers refactoring of systems such as the input backend, which thanks to this can now support an unlimited number of connected joysticks, all with separate keybindings. It also sees the cleaning up of stale code that we no longer use and the fixing of non-game breaking errors and warnings in our logs, this improves the overall state of the game as well as our overall visibility on what is wrong under the hood, thus speeding up our workflow for future releases.
Animation
The team has continued working on some of the AI systemic cover animations now that we’re fully moved over to the v7 rig. As well as that we have synced up with our Frankfurt team on the first batch of performance capture animations and started making progress getting them synced up with the audio tracks and engine ready. Our resident tech animator has been making good progress in getting facial animation in to game and we’re really looking forward to completing some vignettes and seeing it all come together for the first time. The new few weeks we’ll be busy supporting the teams’ needs for Citizencon.
Graphics
“This month the graphics team have mainly been focussed on character shaders, the first of which is a new shader we’ve developed for clothing, armour, items and weapons. Rather than uniquely baking individual textures for every asset, this shader uses a pool of generic textures for base materials such as steel/leather/denim, and combines these in the shader to determine the properties of the surface. This allows us to support quickly change the properties of an object without having to modify the underlying textures, which is a huge benefit for customising and items in the PU. It also allows us to support dynamic changes such as dirt or damage building up over time, or allowing the art director to tweak the look of say a specific metals from one manufacturer without having to find all the items created by that manufacturer. This shader has taken some time to develop but we’re expecting it to open many possibilities in the PU in the coming months.
The other character shaders we’ve been working on relate to human skin. We’ve extended CryEngine’s skin-wrinkle technology which is used to show wrinkles and creases in the skin on certain facial poses, and we now support four times as many wrinkle-poses as before. We’ve also added support for blood-flow maps, which capture unique colour variations on the skin on certain facial poses caused by changing blood-flow and the stretching and compression of the skin. These extensions resulting in a significant improvement in the quality and believability of our characters facial animations.
The rest of the graphics team have been investigating improvements to shadow system and continuing work on the damage system for multi-crew ships.”
Art
It’s been another whirl wind this month, starting with the glorious Gamescom demo, the team worked super hard to bring everything for the unveiling and are now pushing on with advancing the play space and areas of interest.
We have been tasked with concepting a new ship, all very exciting and Gavin Rothery is doing a Sterling job of bringing it to life (can’t say more!) Overall concept work has been focusing on picking up a lot of pieces, working out areas that have slipped through the net, redefining areas as the Design dept makes updates and lending support to cinematics in Frankfurt.
Environments
The environment team has been busy with the map for the Arena Commander 2.0 release for CitizenCon. We have three main stations with interiors whiteboxed out now, along with one planet, three moons, three smaller satellites and a set of small asteroids. We have also been taking a new Low Tech Alpha set up to greybox that will allow us to build our station interiors more sensibly and to a grander scale than originally planned. The last POI to go in will be Asteroid Gainey and its sister set of large asteroids which are currently being prototyped.
All these points of interest have gone into the new map.
Next we’ll be continuing refinement on the large world map, getting lighting, mood and atmosphere locked down for each of the three stations, along with extensive testing on the physical limits we can push for Asteroid Gainey and the large asteroids.
VFX
This month was dominated by CG tasks covering GOST, Quantum drive implementation and ship destruction. With the integration of 3.7 into game-dev we got lots of new features and lots of new bugs which have all been documented and prioritized. Adam joined the VFX team and has been tackling the Blade thrusters and weapon effects, as well as learning our tools.
A big push has gone into cleaning up all the old assets and bugs that affect the whole game with some very good progress made. Work has also begun on implementing the ship damage effects into multicrew ships using the full systemic damage system as well as getting the destruction pipeline nicely streamlined.
Props
The new pipeline has been locked down and is now being rolled out to all new props created, improving the legacy props is still in the planning phase.
After the Gamescom work was complete focus was shifted onto the upcoming CitizenCon event. The CitizenCon work covers a wide variety of props, high tech, low tech and also a lot of universal props both for environments and ships.
This work will help to prove out the new pipeline works across the board but will also help test our new production workflow that should improve communication between the different teams and ultimately mean we see more props with audio, animation and VFX seeing their way into game.
Ships
A large amount of work went into getting the Retaliator ready for the Gamescom demo, getting GOST states ready and fixing all the new issues that came to light as the systems were implemented. We have had a slight reprioritisation and the vehicle team has temporarily grown (some artists have moved from Environments) and now we are tackling a hefty bunch of work (more in next months report). The Starfarer is happily motoring along, the guys are now working on the key areas (the archetypes) that make up the ship, once we have the textures and materials for this MISC ship defined we’ll be able to roll out a lot more assets faster and also use them for the updates on the Freelancer. Some extra work has gone into the Mining Bot, it’s looking in good shape but it will be on hold for the foreseeable future until we have engineering resources to work out a four legged walker – as you can imagine, we have a lot of other areas that are higher priority but this is one ‘ship’ I’m really looking forward to see in the universe.
Idris – c’mon –what about the Idris, I hear you say – well, for those that have bought one, you can’t be disappointed with what your money is buying, this ship will be epic – it is complex, believe me, even with all the art and tech experience we have it’s still a highly challenging asset (level) but it will help define medium size craft and how they are ultimately put together.
UI
The AEGIS themed UI work took a big chunk of time, working out all the new systems needed for Multicrew and the demo, this work is ongoing, now we have a style we’ll be able to start making more and more elements to be used around the ship.
FPS UI has been worked up, slight nip and tuck – tweaking placement and the look of Health, ammo and prompt systems along with additional work to the Conversation system, Use and looting systems – it’s all coming together!
Audio
Our big push early this month was to ensure that the Gamescom demo and related material was done to the required standard. Sadly some technical issues with the live stream meant that certain peaks (literally!) didn’t quite come across as intended, but thankfully these didn’t carry over to the offline rendering of the same material so it won’t have affected most people. As well as the sound design team’s work, we also had some excellent music from Pedro Macedo Camacho in there which never fails to please.
Quickly following on from Gamescom we had a hugely productive session recording weapons sound effects, with an emphasis on interior/environmental reflections, which will benefit Squadron 42 (as well as the general FPS aspect of Star Citizen) greatly. We hope to release a dev-diary/work-in-progress video focusing on the process behind this, Stefan’s put a great video together showing what went down. Special mention to our very own Sian Crewe who also was a huge help on this session.
Talking of Squadron 42, we had a shoot to support in terms of dialogue, Phil and Bob both went down to cover that on the same day as the gun recording by sheer coincidence.
The release of 1.1.5 and subsequent releases have crystallised our requirements for coping with the sheer scale of our game, our audio coders have been ironing out some bugs before moving onto what we’re terming ‘Large World Audio’. We want to ensure we have a high detail level at a local level for players, which we don’t sacrifice for the scale and scope of the grander universe. All very modular systems-led stuff, and we’re hoping that’ll continue to improve performance within Wwise and CryEngine so that we can keep on emphasising audio detail and quality.
Otherwise we’ve been working hard on the audio for the Social Module, other FPS work, and preparing for CitizenCon. We’ve also refining how we handle audio for ships as we sincerely want to take that up a notch compared to what we’ve done already.
As always, thanks for listening and please feel free to ask any audio related questions on the Ask A Developer section of the forums!
QA
So August for UK QA was all about the whirlwind of activity that was Gamescom and the recovery process that followed its culmination.
Liam Guest, Glenn Kneale, Ben Parr and myself were lucky enough to be involved in the event and the livestream for the multicrew demo. A stressful and of course deeply satisfying experience! A big thanks to all in the community that helped us make it through the 4 days in one piece, although Red1 could have done with a towel on stage…
Meanwhile, back at base camp, Geoff Coffin, Steven Brennon and the rest of the team were holding things together superbly – Geoff earning himself MVP and the most esoterically German medal (with cows and milkmen) that I could find in Cologne. The UK QA team spent a lot of time meticulously practicing the demo – giving those of us in Germany all the pointers required to pull of the presentation – if only we’d read them!
After the event, we were able to ease up on some of the long shifts we had been doing in the build-up and get back to a semi-normal routine. That included getting stuck into supporting the ATX studio on the development of the ArcCorp social module, something which, as you can imagine, turned into something of an all-hands-on-deck sort of affair.
Roll on September – in which we’ll have two new starters in the department – much needed for testing the upcoming release of sc_alpha_2.0!”
Design
Gamescom came and went, but there is still plenty left to do that we are working frantically on to get the “Large World” demo into your hands. The designers are populating and optimizing the system (can’t really say level anymore as it is so big). We are tidying up the gameplay and working flat out to get as much functionality into the multi-crew systems as possible. We have new FPS environments that are being worked on with a view to getting them into the next major release if possible.
As I mentioned in last month’s report all the various systems that had designs that were light or out of date are still being revamped and we are making good progress on things like radar, scanning, ship signatures, the conversation system and repair.
There is also a huge push on getting as many ships as possible hangar ready by Christmas and that has meant we have had a lot of meeting and sanity checks on some of the older ships that are very much due some love. I hope when you get your hands on them that you will agree they have been worth the wait. Thanks again for the awesome support, we couldn’t do this without you!
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It’s been a busy month for the office as usual. Most of the team helped out with the Gamescom presentation to some extent. It’s really cool to see different components start coming together within the same game space, and the reactions and excitement of the fans and community helps drive us.
We’ve had a steady stream of candidates come through for our open positions, and the Frankfurt team is slowly growing to help out with various areas of Squadron 42.
We did our first segment for Around the Verse last week, we look forward shooting something each week to give everyone more insight into what we’re doing here. Below is a breakdown from the leads or directors of each department on the main things they tackled over the last month.
Engineering
During August, Frankfurt engineering has mostly been dealing with several Gamescom and post-Gamescom engine related items. As most of subsystems are moving over to the Zone system, there have been several medium and long term items being discussed, tackled and reviewed such as streaming, loading times, memory usage etc. The learnings from Gamescom with regards to large world map and multicrew are being applied to the new Large World maps that, as expected, are going to be larger and larger… other items are being worked on for Citizen Con and for the upcoming releases.
We continued with removal of legacy engine code (mostly renderer) in preparation for major engine and render refactor (long term task) to better utilize modern APIs and multi core systems. We fixed several client side (rendering) issues for arena commander. While we previously looked into memory efficiency on content side, this month we looked into client and server side memory performance of the SC code base. As a result several leaks were fixed that caused stability issues and crashes. This process is ongoing and we hope to further improve stability and optimize memory performance. There’s work items already scheduled / in progress which tie into this goal.
On the animation and physics side we developed a new method to drive ragdolls with animation data. The goal was to get accurate and fast pose matching between animation and permanently driven ragdolls. Along the way, we improved the blending in and out of ragdolls, created a new ragdoll setup with correct mass distribution of human body parts and improved the tools to setup springs and joint-limits for natural body poses. To speed up the turnaround time when building ragdolls, the whole setup of the physical parameters was moved from Maya into an XML-file.
AI
August has been a month busy with some of the low level work needed for Subsumption and the simulation of the persistent universe.
Francesco has traveled to Austin to work directly next to the Social Module team. Main focus has been the optimization of the NPC movement and the synchronization of the playing of the animations across the multiplayer infrastructure.
On the first point we have worked with Wyrmbyte to analyse the current network usage during the movement of a character, and we laid out a plan to test a first optimization for NPCs characters: compared to normal players, we can assume that the AI controlled entities are much more predictable and will require a smaller amount of data sent to correctly move into the world.
Regarding the animation synchronization, all our characters use Mannequin to organize the animation database and select the proper animation to play. This month we made a first version of an animation component that gets informed when animations are queued on the server so that the clients can also correctly queue the same Mannequin fragment, wait for the selection of the random option to happen on the server and then start the same animation with the same starting time of the server. Our implementation also takes care of state replication, so that clients that will join the game mid-way through the animation playing will also have the correct visual representation of what’s happening on the server. This implementation allows us to make full usage of Mannequin without making big changes on the current game code and that’s a big win!
And not to forget to mention, all the animation functionalities are shared between AI and player characters!
We have also started collecting requirements for the re-design of the spawning mechanics, we want to have a centralized system that can be customizable and that can take care of the all the needs of Squadron 42, which then can also be used for Arena Commander and Social Module.
We have progressed further into using the Usables system as navigation links, that will allow us to place links in the world (manually or procedurally) with specific properties to mark-up specific locations of the world where the NPCs can move using specified animations and causing specific gameplay interactions (for example an NPC needs to press the elevator button before entering it).
Last but not least we have just started to fully integrate the navigation mesh and the characters’ paths into the Zone System and we are continuing refactoring the code into more portable/combinable components (for example we isolated the functionalities for controlling the NPC aiming and looking into two separated components that can be controlled independently).
In addition to all of that, the Frankfurt office has continued coordinating the work made by Moon Collider on the improvements of the DataForge/Behavior tree connection, the new functionalities like the personal log, the task system refactoring, the improvements of the ships behavior and the ships movement.
Build System
Working on code validation, automation and tools to make dev’s life easier. Also this month we’ve been visited by Jeremy and Joseph from ATX, both part of the Dev-Ops team. Needless to say we have plenty of meeting where many things were discussed and are going to be worked on. Without going into details, build reliability, the ongoing switching towards a new build framework, paks and patch creation were discussed. Lot of work ahead.
Design Department
One of the big things at the beginning of this month for us was finishing up the setup of the interior of the Retaliator for the GamesCom demo. It was a bit of a mad rush but the final result was well worth it and the feedback and appreciation we received from you guys at the live show, Twitch and YouTube channels was amazing and humbling at the same time.
Once we finished with the Retaliator demo we sat down and tried to figure out what needs to be documented and replicated in order for all the other ship setups to go smoothly in the future. And believe me, there’s a lot of things we did not initially know as this is the first ship to unite so many of the systems we want to have in Star Citizen.
Our level design department, while still continuing to build two of the Squadron 42 levels, they are also working hard on bringing a new multiplayer game mode to life for the FPS module. The guys are working together with the programmers from Illfonic to get this ready in time for the FPS release.
On another, a bit more less exciting note, both the level and system design departments have been working on improving our recruiting pipeline and candidate testing to ensure we get the best of the available talent pool.
The work on AI and AI-building tools continues and it looks like as soon as the new character rig goes in with the new cover animation set we’ll be able to quickly adjust our behaviours to start making use of all these goodies. Right now we’re running our new AI behaviours in more of an experimental/debug mode in which we can test and prototype their thinking and their logic without being able to see much of the fruits of our labour in actual game but once the rig and the assets are in, everything should just fall into place.
Hacking and electronic warfare are also systems that were given a lot of attention this month but more details will come on that once we feel they are solid enough to show to you guys.
At the same time we are supporting our tech department with their work on prototyping planetary procedural generation. Sadly, we were informed by them that if we give away any details about this before it’s properly ready to show, we will be skinned alive. We take our programmers’ threats very seriously around here!
Cinematics
In August we were busy on multiple different fronts regarding the cinematic side of things.
Additional p-cap shoot
Our main shoot for performance capture for S42 ended beginning of July, but we went back to Imaginarium Studios in London for 2 days to wrap up capture on some crucial story elements we hadn’t shot during the main shoot due to actor availability. Can’t wait to reveal our cast to the fans out there! It was nice to be back in the volume, reunited with the crew that worked with during the months earlier in the year.
Environment Art
We were also continuing work on several cinematic environments, namely a construction dock for a capital ship that will be featured in S42’s story, a UEE Navy hospital facility and a UEE administrative building.
Our initial prototype environment for the Vanduul Kingship bridge interior was cleaned and lifted up a few notches. Still not final by any means but progress!
A smaller part of S42’s opening will actually be shown at CitizenCon in October so we are also working hard on the environment for this scene which will also be perfect to show the progress we have made in facial animation quality.
Facial Animation
We recently got the first full performance of body+face of one of our main actors working in sync in engine. Saying we are quite happy with the level of facial fidelity we can now achieve would be a tremendous understatement. Can’t wait to show it to the community at CitizenCon. Coming from earlier tests like the Constellation Commercial last year there has been a dramatic push in quality for what we will be able to show on our characters faces. Exciting!
Cinematics
High end character performance is just one part of SC’s cinematic equation though, the other big chunk will be space dogfight/cap ship battle scenes. For those we are currently planning some more tools like a spline corridor so we can film our ships fully articulated but also in a 100% repeatable and reliable way. For that our IFCS needs to be taking a backseat as we will have to be able to override ship functions to make sure that a cinematic will not break if e.g. a ship’s in-engine thruster power gets adjusted later on during development.
We also found some smaller issues related to certain cinematic tools/cameras coming from the recent move to the LargeWorldSystem but overall the move has been quite smooth. Quite a thing to see world coordinates in the millions of kilometres range in-engine, compared to just 4-8 kilometres before.
Audio
This month there was a lot of tool and pipeline work. Updated the audio asset build tools, which should improve the sound designers’ iteration times and lower the load we put on the P4 (that’s Perforce, our codebase version control system) servers, made lots of small fixes and tweaks post-3.7 integration in game-dev to get the new tools and systems to work properly with the CIG audio setup, tweaked the standard Sandbox audio tools to improve their performance when handling the large number of audio assets already accumulated by our project. Also finally started the work on moving the audio system to using listener-relative audio rendering required for the proper Large World support.
FX
This past month we have been working on the quantum drive effect for the ships. This required a fair amount of R&D before we achieved the look that was desired. We also had to work closely with the graphics programmers to create the custom shaders and backend systems required to bring it all together.
The final effect combines elements from VFX, code and audio in order to bring the quantum drive to life!
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As you will be able to read below, all my team put in double effort this month to bring you the first iteration of the Social Module. We were hyped by how the demo was received at Gamescom and this gave us the energy to push our limits so that the Social Module would hit your computers before the end of August. Working with Austin to deliver it on time was a phenomenal effort. We are really glad you can enjoy it now and we are looking forward to give you major improvement over the next couple of weeks.
UI
This month the UI team has been working hard on various features for the first release of the Social Module: The chat UI has undergone a lot of changes, for both design and art. The contact list got a couple of art upgrades, AR mode got some love, and we have been doing a lot of bug fixing.
We also flew out to meet up with our friends at Foundry 42 as well as some folks from L.A. for a UI summit. Together we have started to get a clearer overall view of all the different types of interfaces in the game, and are working to unify and improve upon the interaction design as well as the graphic design across all modules.
Design
A big month on the design side, with the coming release of Social Module V0 before the end of the month. Lots of bugs to fix and small improvements here and there to make sure your visit to ArcCorp goes without a hitch. We can’t wait for you to explore every shops and back alleys with your friends.
We are also hard at work on the Million Mile High Club, more details about it are coming soon.
Finally, we have delivered the August Subscriber Flair in your hangar: the Takuetsu Starfarer ship model.
Art
On the Environment side, we have been working on putting Area 18 together for the PU release. Mainly optimization and bug fixing.
We’ve also started polishing one of the building sets to include the new specs that will make the maps run faster and look better.
On the flair side, we’ve completed all the trophies for Gamescom and CitizenCon and as usual preparing next month flair.
Programming
August has been a very productive month here at Behaviour. We focused a lot of our efforts in the Social Module Demo that was shown at Gamescom on August 7th 2015 and then continued to polish the experience for the Live Release of the Social Module. We’ve done a lot of polish to the new In-Game Chat UI, and made it so the transition between talking on the chat and playing the game is very smooth and intuitive. We’ve also made sure that other players viewing you doing emote animation from a chat command will see the same animation as you do on your side. We’ve added a functionality that allows a player to easily switch between a few predefined Player Loadouts in his Private Hangar before going outside to meet the world.
Speaking of Area 18, we’ve worked on making sure that all interactable objects (i.e. Elevator Console, Doors) present in ArcCorp’s Area 18 work as intended in a multiplayer Environment. You’ll also be able to appreciate the work we did regarding the Augmented Reality (AR) functionality of the mobiGlas. We’ve optimized the way we detect AR-enabled objects and also the way the system will choose to display AR information on screen. This is also valid for when looking at other players; you’ll now be able to see the name of the players you are playing/chatting with.
We’ve added more UI feedback in the Transport Elevator Console to inform players of the status of the transition between two different areas. We’ve also added a search functionality to the In-Game Contact List and fixed some existing Issues with adding and removing contacts. We’ve also reworked the way we integrate Loading Screens into our game so that we can quickly add new Loading Screen Art per Level in the future.
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What’s up mah Citizens?! Coming straight outta Denver, it’s the monthly IllFonic studio report! I’m sure you all have probably heard the news, that the team here has been scaled back as Star Marine transitions to be internally developed at CIG. This is true, and was always the plan. However, we do still have a smaller, lighter team working on the FPS module to help wrap things up. Read below for the nitty gritty details.
Art
On the art side, we have been making a polish pass on each of the FPS weapon based on feedback from Chris and the Art Directors at CIG. We have also been creating clean and dirty version materials of each weapon. This will be used to show wear and tear on a weapon as it ages and sees some heavy usage.
Animation
The animators spent most of the month cranking away on retargeting all of the FPS animations over to the new rig. They have also been re-rigging the weapons to accommodate the system change of the weapon being parented to the hand instead of the spine. New animations have also been created for juking/stepping while in a crouched state. Magazine check animations were also created to support a new reloading mechanic that will intelligently check the magazine currently in the gun against the other ones the player is carrying and either replace the mag with a fresh one or pop it back in. Lastly, they have been going over the remaining mocap data, cleaning it up, and prepping it for implementation. This includes things like vaulting, mantling, sidling, injured locomotion sets, etc…
Engineering
The engineering team has mostly been focused on fixing bugs. They also spent time on implementing the new mag check system mentioned above and creating the rules for a new game mode similar to Headquarters or King of the Hill. Over the last week or so, the majority of their time has been spent helping out CIG with the large merging process that has been going on. Taking the work from each of the different release branches, and consolidating them all back in to one.
That’s about it for this month Citizens, until next time!
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Hello and bonjour from Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in this last month:
Jump Point – The Producers
Our very own Grand Poobah, Benoit Beausejour, was featured in the August issue of Jump Point Magazine, in the “Producers” section. He and other Producers (from CIG and partner studios) were interviewed about their roles and responsibilities, challenges, and mission. Several Producers took part in this in-depth (15-page) article, so if you’re interested in learning about the inner workings of a gaming company, you should definitely check it out. Thanks to David Ladyman for putting it all together!
Starmap
This month, our main focus has been the element that we have code-named “Control Disc”, which allows you to retrieve information about a particular celestial object. Not only did we revise the design to fit smaller screen resolutions, but we also explored different animation effects on the disc itself. As complex as the Starmap project has been, the Control Disc is perhaps the most complicated element since it requires integration of WebGL, static HTML elements and the Starmap database.
Although we will continue tweaking until the very end, the current WebGL viewer looks amazing. We refined the Galaxy and System views, and developed a “console” so that we can easily adjust color and animated effects for each celestial body. Next month, we will improve the transition effects, i.e. from Galaxy to System view, and from System to System.
Work continues on the 3D animated versions of the celestial objects – for example, planets, stars and space station.
Also this month, we began discussions about the audio component of the Starmap. We would like to add some sound effects to enhance the experience, without being distracting. For those who like to browse the web in complete silence, we will also offer a toggle option.
Issue Council
We are now in the final stretch. We’ve cleared the majority of critical bugs and are now working on the FAQ and Help pages. We’re working with CIG to set a launch date. We plan to start rolling out the Issue Council in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for it in the “Community” submenu!
Community Hub
The hub is ready! Soon, it will be accessible to a select few Star Citizen members so that they can contribute some starting content to the Hub (artwork, videos, external links, podcast feeds, and livestream feeds). Once we have received some submissions, we will be ready to open it up to all Community backers. The presence of the hub on our staging servers has already spun many other ideas on how we can use this to power other parts of the community (10 FtC questions, game feedback and others).
Ship Happens
This month’s Star Citizen presentation at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, was accompanied by the sale of several limited ships, such as the Merchantman, the Reclaimer, the Carrack and many more. There was also a surprise flash sale on the website for those who could not attend the event in person. During the presentation a competition in Vanduul Swarm was announced, allowing the first 1,000 people who completed wave 18 to buy the Esperia Glaive, a reproduction of the feared Vanduul fighter. Toward the end of the month, the highly popular Vanguard Warden went back on sale, flanked by its new siblings the Sentinel (an E-War focused variant) and the Harbinger (a bomber focused variant). This sale also saw the introduction of the new Battlefield Upgrade Kits for the three variants, allowing you to hot-swap your Vanguard’s equipment between that of a Warden, Sentinel or Harbinger, to suit your next mission.
What you didn’t see
We completed the migration to Google’s GCE this month, resulting in a 20 to 25% increase in performance across our infrastructure, and also significantly reducing the monthly cost for CIG. This move is also significant in that we finally moved away from the original hosting provider that we’ve had since the original crowdfunding campaign. We’re leaving the family nest because we’re all grown up now, sniff! On the technical front, our GCE environment is fully based around “containers” (docker). This major advancement makes operating the site servers and processes more integrated and really helps in streamlining how we get code updates to production.
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Some months we find ourselves focused on two or three big features, but August was one of those months where we found ourselves doing lots of small tasks: bug fixes, feature improvements, responding to feedback from designers. They were all important and useful, but they don’t always make for exciting reading for you, the backers. So we’ll spare you the talk of merge conflicts and build configuration bugs, and stick to the cool stuff!
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An interesting piece of design work we’ve been doing is a refactoring of the Kythera perception system for characters. Now that designers have spent a reasonable amount of time building behavior trees in Kythera and using our perception system, they’ve found that they want some aspects of the perception system and the way it interacts with behaviors to work a bit differently. In particular, they want behavior trees to have more control over how AIs respond to certain events in the world such as hearing weapon fire or some unexpected noise, and to also control when AIs look for better targets and when they stick to their current one.
Right now the Kythera perception system will take in stimuli from different sources (vision, sound, and tactile events for characters; radar signatures for ships), perform calculations on whether enough stimuli have been received for an AI to have noticed something, and then pass this information through to the target selection system, which will look for the best target at any point in time. There are various parameters that each AI can set to affect how both their perception and target selection work, but from the behavior’s point of view, it is just told what the current best target is.
This setup allows for simpler behavior trees, and has worked really nicely for ships, but for characters we’ve found that the behavior trees tend to be set up quite differently from ships. In human behaviors, where the acting element is so complex and vital, more control is needed, so it’s desirable to move some of the logic of the perception system into the behaviors, even though this can make them more complicated. So we’ve been working on a design for an improved perception system that will allow behavior trees to be authored with the control that designers want to have. We’re also looking at whether we can improve ship behaviors as well by making similar changes to their behaviors, and that’s something that will be ongoing in the next few months.
Engineering
We made quite a few good improvements to ships this month, particularly with regard to improving their behaviors for Pirate Swarm. Some of the highlights are improvements to approach and retreat behaviors that better take into account max weapon range and current shield levels; changes to make AI missile usage less predictable; and some improvements to avoidance so AI are less likely to crash into other ships.
We also fixed an interesting bug where AI would sometimes behave strangely when going to fly on a spline in scripted situations such as the tutorial. We use the reported thrust values from IFCS (Intelligent Flight Control System) in order to plan out ship movement, but sometimes IFCS wasn’t fully online when we were planning, and so we weren’t working with correct values. So we added a way for a ship behavior to make sure IFCS is fully online before doing something that depends on it.
One nice change we made to character visual perception is to allow them to see things at greater than 180 degrees if desired. Our visual perception system had both a primary and a secondary vision cone, where the primary cone mimics regular vision abilities, while the secondary cone is intended to mimic peripheral vision. That means targets in the primary cone will generally be detected fast by the AI, while the secondary cone takes longer.
The problem is, AI often seem stupid when their peripheral vision is less than 180 degrees, so the obvious solution is to increase the field of view of the peripheral vision. The issue there, though, is that the primary and secondary vision cones are precisely that: cones. The mathematics of the view cones completely breaks if you try to go above 180 degrees. So to fix this, we needed to change the geometric shape that defines the vision space of an AI from a cone to a more appropriate shape when the field of view is 180 degrees or more (which is basically a sphere with a cone cut out of the back of it).
We also continued to make some improvements to the behavior tree editor in DataForge. We added the ability to now specify inputs to BT nodes as a dropdown list of predefined values when this makes sense, such as when telling a character to change to a new stance. Behavior trees can now also embed other trees within them, which allows designers to put a common piece of behavior in its own tree and then add that to their trees in multiple places as needed. As the trees get bigger and more complex, this will be invaluable for keeping them readable and avoiding duplication.
Finally, we made some great performance improvements to the Kythera Recording Server, which is the system that allows designers and programmers to record AI behavior and then play it back with detailed debug information to help figure out bugs or look for ways to improve behaviors. There is potentially a lot of debugging information that needs to be saved for this system to be useful, so we improved the system to be better at detecting what data has changed since the last update and what hasn’t, which means it can better compress the recordings. This is both good for disk space and for making it easier to export recordings to give to other developers.
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Red One, Jared. Red One, Jared. Red One, Jared…
Hey guys, Community Manager Jared “Disco Lando” Huckaby here. August was a big month for the Community Team, starting with the realization of Gamescom 2015. Just about everyone on the Community Team played a part in making this event perhaps our best yet, and it was a terrific opportunity for the staff in Santa Monica to meet the CS staff in Manchester in person for the very first time, as well as many of our European backers.
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We’d also challenged ourselves to really spruce up our live events. To this end, we undertook many initiatives such as sending the bulk of the Community Team, adding the on-site “Concierge Store” (not to be confused with Concierge backing services generally – this is special in-person functionality for live events), and improving the overall quality of the items presented to our attendees.
Our first order of business was to create a new, protracted series of collectable ship pins. Something that could be collected from each event a person goes to. Since we knew Gamescom was going to feature multi-crew predominantly, the Constellation became the logical choice for our first pin. I discovered existing artwork used for a patch series and was able to repurpose that for our needs.
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A free fly promotion had become a staple, but we wanted something more than just a card with a code. Working with Ryan Archer in Austin, we developed a foam version of the Gladius that was just as much collectable as it was a way for potential fans to discover the game. While we can’t say it “flies,” we can certainly refer to it as, “throwable.”
In years past, posters had become a Gamescom tradition, but in our efforts to increase the quality of overall presentation, we commissioned BHVR to imagine Köln, Germany in the year 2945. Working with art from Nicholas Ferrand, we designed the limited edition poster that we gave out to attendees, complete with the signatures of our studio heads and members of the Community Team.
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Coming from the community, I have an affinity for the truly great works that our fans create, and one of the finest creations is the Hunter web comic by Adi Nitisor. Working with Adi, I was able to point him in the right direction and get the necessary clearances to print up physical copies of his first issue for our attendees. Our fans truly make Star Citizen, and it seemed right to include a little piece of their work along with our own this Gamescom.
Finally, when decorating the E-Werk event space, I wanted something that would truly evoke the sense of what multi-crew gaming could look like. To that end, I worked with fan content creator FiendishFeather for nearly a month to create the giant banner that hung over the heads of our fans in the venue. Rendered entirely in the game engine, and using 100% Star Citizen Assets. Rendered as a single scene with zero compositing, it measured out at a whopping 27325×7200 at 100dpi. I have to thank Feather for trusting in me that he could do this, and that the crazy things I was asking him to do would work out. It’s just another example of how working with our fans allows us to create something greater than either of us could alone. (You can see the image in the Foundry 42 update above.)
With Gamescom we wanted to return to livestreaming. Gamescom has always been special to the history of Star Citizen thus far. To that end, Thomas Hennessy, Alyssa Delhotal and I worked to ensure that we’d have a plan in place that would address many of the issues from our past livestreams, principle of which were available bandwidth and the proper configuration and use of our in-house streaming equipment.
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Once the curtain opened, Hennessy worked the controls for the livestream and both directed and operated the switching between cameras, while I worked with the A/V company who was responsible for the camera operation, the demo switching for the presentation screen and livestream, and the audio.
After the presentation, because we know not everyone can watch it live, Hennessy and I stayed in the Crow’s Nest until 3am editing the demo segments and posting everything to YouTube as quickly as technology would allow. Challenges aside, we consider the entire event a tremendous success.
In addition to Gamescom, we continued our efforts providing an unparalleled amount of information to our backers through weekly webseries, comm-links and more. Of course, we get to do all that because of the continued contributions of our Subscribers. Thank you for enabling us to share as much content as we do, you guys are awesome, and we’ll never stop thanking you all for that. With that in mind, we started our #IMASTARCITIZEN social media initiative, with Digital Info Cards you can create for yourself at http://www.imastarcitizen.com and retro trading cards that are released every day on our Instagram account.
Finally, a special welcome to all our new backers who joined us in August. If you would like to follow our development on social media, here’s a page full of resources for everyone to enjoy.
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Howdy folks!
Jason Hutchins, here. I’m working with Disco Lando on the update this week since Ben is in Atlanta for DragonCon! Have a great time, Ben! If you’re at DragonCon this weekend, you should go check out the various Star Citizen panels and tell Ben I miss him.
The Big Merge Update
As we wrap up the staging merge this week, we go into final integrations of the Global Instance Manager that was recently deployed with the Social Module update. Some folks are going to work on this final merge step this coming weekend in order to make ready a code review based on the merge. If all goes as planned, we’ll be on a single dev stream early next week! Great news for the overall project.
To date, the CryEngine 3.7 SDK has been integrated, and the dev stream we used for both the Social Module release and FPS development have been merged into the game development stream. One of the things this has done is point out some conflicts to us, which we are finding and addressing. Many of them require a manual review, as newer is not always better when streams diverge, but we’re getting it done, and pushing every day towards putting Star Marine in your hands.
And now, because we’re talking about our First Person Shooter… BULLET POINTS! (DL Edit: I’m so sorry…)
UI:
Last week I mentioned a UI summit. That summit is over, the talking is done and the plans are made. This means that key members of the UI team are in Manchester to lock down the base UI systems that will be used all over Star Citizen – Visor (AKA Player HUD), Ship’s HUD, Diegetic screen displays, HUG and mobiGlas, they are working together to make sure all the systems integrate well and are unified.
While the UI team is looking at the work needed for the next major upcoming releases, they are also working hard to get the HUDs working properly in this pre-merge environment. Once the merge finishes, we can resolve conflicts and get back to work on the new HUD widgets needed for on-foot gameplay.
Up Next: The HUD’s integrated chat widget, and additional Radar functionality.
Engineers and Artists at BHVR are starting work on the interstitial Score Screens and LoadOut Lobbby screens for Star Marine this week.
Gameplay:
Merging staging stream to Game-Dev
Spent much of the week fixing crashes and getting a dedicated server connection to run, largely due to merge conflicts, and we’ve had tremendous success! As of today, we are now able to connect to an internal server.
Resolving merge conflicts in the stream, last hand merges should be done by EOD today, to allow for automated merges over the weekend.
Engineers are triaging FPS bugs, in general, looking at what must be fixed for launch and what improvements we can make for the next major release after that. We know you don’t want perfection right off the bat, and we also know you are going to help us find bugs we’re not seeing in our small-scale tests.
The next Game Mode that we’ll introduce for Star Marine gameplay is shelved and ready to integrate and start testing next week.
Cover system progress is being made, fixed up network syncing, other glitches, and moved it into the player’s moving state. This allows for proper transitions, smoother movements, and accurate
Start work on LH68 Gemini ballistic pistol art cleanup, added iron sights to it, other art clean up issues will continue into next week. We’ll have screenshots to share in next week’s report.
Weapons are almost all done and ready for reviews. What’s left?
Sniper VFX
A new gadget model for the Area Denial system, it is essentially an EMP claymore mine. With new VFX to match the gadgets new size. The old gadget we made was too big, so we are going to repurpose it to be another gadget with different functionality.
Working on line art for helmet interiors for the HUD, this is will continue into early next week.
Animation:
Editing the crouch to vault low mocap data.
Helping engineering identify missing assets.
Creating pistol walk slow and run fast sets from the matching stocked set.
Addressed feedback on the pistol mag check animations.
Captured video of weapon selects, deselects and reload for UK Audio team to review and sync.
Working on cleaning up sidling (AKA Front Press) left and right mocap data. Sidle and Slide, to very different motions.
Reviewing and breaking up Heavy weapon mocap data.
Fixed finger pose from re-targeted pistol idle. Finger straight until you are ready to shoot, people! Safety first.
Editing no weapon vaulting mocap data.
Editing the mantling mocap data.
Working on fall animations from vaulting.
In order to close down the animations needed for the Star Marine launch, we are systematically cleaning up all available assets, and cranking out the new assets. There’s still a big list to burn down but we have a plan and we are making good progress on it every week. We are all quite eager to get into the unified dev stream and to continue functional testing and playtests. As many people already know, these are not animations isolated to the Star Marine module, these are going to be seen in the hangars, planetside locations, and Arena Commander scenarios!
Audio
Setting up the general HDR mix this week.
Implemented sniper rifle audio assets.
Iterating on weapon reload sounds, using video reference provided by the animators at Illfonic
Music is being composed and recorded for the Star Marine simulation and its lobby and score screens. We don’t need music to ship it to you for testing of course, so that won’t hold us up.
Last Friday I mentioned that the Foundry 42 audio team did a recording session of a lot of different firearms for use in environmental audio. I’m happy to share that video with you today. Enjoy! Big thanks to Stephen Rutherford, and Matteo Cerquone at Foundry 42 in Manchester for putting this great explainer video together for us, and even bigger thanks for improving the gun sounds in the environments.
