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Hallo jinnx,

wir wünschen Dir viel Spaß im Forum.

Zeit: 25. Juli 2015, 15:02

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Hallo Cybertraxx,

wir wünschen Dir viel Spaß im Forum.

Zeit: 25. Juli 2015, 12:06

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Zitat von Star Citizen

Star Marine Status Update

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Greetings Citizens,

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As you can tell, we’ve had a very busy day at Cloud Imperium! But the Merlin and Alpha 1.1.5 aren’t our only focus: work continues on the Star Marine FPS mode. This week, we spent a lot of time focused on general gameplay and the animation system. As Chris discussed on 10 for the Chairman, getting the animation matching the vision is one of our biggest challenges… and it’s important because the technology we premiere here is going to be used throughout Squadron 42 and the persistent universe. It may seem like a lot of extra work right now, but it will all be worthwhile down the road when we’re seeing smoothly animated NPCs and players living in the ‘verse.

We’ve broken this week’s updates down into Gameplay, Animation and Art sections, with information on both our progress and the blockers we’re seeing. We’re attaching two videos to the post to show you how it’s really going: an animation and weapons test above (check out those jukes!) and a Gold Horizon walkthrough below. Enjoy!

Gameplay Progress

On the gameplay side, it was a week of fixes and adjustments! Fixes include a bug with the cover idle animation not playing, issues with cover look-poses, a crash when connecting a second client to a local dedicated server, an issue where the game was swapping to the default weapon on client connect, a problem with weapon offsets affecting ADS and ADS movement lag that we had been seeing! We addressed a bug that was causing the HUD to report a suicide upon connection, an issue with the weapon reticule not fading correctly and a pair of grenade-related bugs: one where swapping grenade types after a throw wasn’t depleting your inventory and another where your fixed weapon would not be selected after running out of grenades. We also finished work from the previous week on the sniper rifle recharge issues. Whew.

On the adjustment side, we greatly improved fidelity and positioning in multiplayer by adjusting movement transitions on the dedicated server. We reduced feedback loops created during cover stance changes by adjusting cover rays to follow the eyes, and we adjusted spawn points for the new Free Play practice mode. This alone improved the playtest significantly; greatly reduced spawn camping! We improved the process for our designers, as well. By updating math to handle procedural offsets for ADS Y axis camera positioning and by working on procedural offsets for weapons, it will be much easier for designers to adjust relative camera positions using ADS without needing to update or redo animations. There was work done on the recharge station, which does not always activate over the network. And it wouldn’t be game development if we weren’t causing more problems for ourselves once in a while: we managed to break (AND FIX) weapon hand placement while firing.

Gameplay Blockers

Working on smoothing out cover transitions and fixing ADS disconnecting when leaning out of cover, this is ongoing.

Working on prediction issues causing client aim to not synchronize, this is ongoing.

Adding Objectives to the Gold Horizon level for Team Elimination game type, will fundamentally slow down the gameplay on the level to encourage more of a capture and hold and careful play style.

Animation Progress

Any week where we get to play with machine guns is a good one! Animation finished updates to the Behring P4AR firing animation this week and kicked off work on the Behring ATT-4 AND the prone-firing for the Devastator Shotgun.

But it wasn’t all rifles and SMGs: we also tweaked jump timing, fixed blending issues with the walk slow and assisted engineers with their cover fixes. We made some great progress polishing walk starts/stops/jukes, some of which you can see in the attached video. We locked down our work on crouch turns and starts, and wie will continue working on crouch stops and the prone mode.

As we mentioned last week, Ragdoll death animations weren’t quite up to snuff (whoa, unintentional pun there.) That video got a lot of comments in the forums. It wasn’t merely a distraction, though: the research done while making that video helped point out an issue with our skeleton. What we found was an issue with the way our character’s skeleton joint orientations were set up. So we spent the last two days working on an updated rig with correct joint orientations to satisfy the requirements of CryEngine. Ivo, our animation specialist in Frankfurt, has a new rig in test now to check against the SDK. Then, he’ll check it against the animation code changes we’ve made specifically for Star Citizen and the end result will be a much improved ragdoll!

Animation Blockers

Will need a pass to re-target animations on the new character rig.

Started working on crouch stops, this is ongoing.

Melee animations have not started yet.

Injured locomotion animations not finished, multiple states need clarification.

EVA style animations for ZeroG not able to be cleaned up and used until we get the new rig. This is needed for ZeroG gameplay on Gold Horizon, let alone SATA Ball.

Art

The art team conducted a lighting pass to improve client performance. This included the re-addition of breakable lights (visible in the screenshots and video.) The re-work of Gold Horizon assets continued, with updates to stair heights and panel textures. (In the case of panel textures, we create two of each: clean and dirty. That will let us build more interesting levels more quickly in the future!) We worked with Cort Soest and Sean Tracy from Austin to reduce LODs and improve framerate issues. That work is ongoing, but it’s already showing positive results.

Art and design have continued to work together to improve the flow of the level. This week we added additional signage to Gold Horizon to ease navigation, and we have also updated floor decaling to this same end. Our weapons team certainly wasn’t idle, either: they finished a revision of the P4AR (including updated decals!) and then exported that work for use in other weapons by the same manufacturer.

Art Blockers

Continuing work on Gold Horizon assets so we can use it as a building block set for future releases.

Working on 1st person hit reaction HUD mockups, iterating on the look with Chris and the team in the UK. As mentioned previously, this is a big team effort requiring audio, animation, VFX, and HUD UI to make it look and feel right.

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…e-Status-Update

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Hallo MrTento,

wir wünschen Dir viel Spaß im Forum.

Zeit: 24. Juli 2015, 22:25

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Zitat von Star Citizen

Star Citizen Audio Update

Hello everyone!

We’re proud to present our first iteration of Wwise audio for Star Citizen. Moving over to Wwise sets us up well to support the expansive scope and scale of our game.

We’ve spent some months first migrating our content from our previous middleware solution, then refactoring and reengineering how audio is implemented within CryEngine. We’ve mentioned in previous updates what features it lists, but I’ll go over some of the key points here as to what it brings us. (Warning, the list it isn’t all exclusively glamorous features, and there may be use of terms such as ‘pipeline’, ‘workflow’ and ‘iteration’ coming!)

Reduced dependency between sound designers and audio programmers is probably our first big win. We still need audio programming resources to integrate our sound in the game, for sure. But there’s a lot you can do within Wwise that previously we’d have to define in relatively hard-to-get-to code.

Within Wwise we can:

Author sound structures, and re-sequence and re-layer sounds to give infinite variability.

Then use simulation tools to prototype how they’ll behave in a game context.

Integrate those sounds into game-friendly bank structures, set them to stream from disc/disk or stay resident in main RAM etc.

Set up the event hooks that get converted to CryEngine triggers and parameters.

Once implemented, we can then connect to and profile the game itself, and monitor how the game audio is behaving, check for bugs or resource spikes. And mix, change properties of the sounds, all in real time.

That all seems a little dry perhaps, but the more we have this basic pipeline in place and solid, the more time we have to do the something more exciting; like making awesome sounds in the first place, iterating on them, and putting more effort and consideration into how the whole soundscape comes together.

For a game of the scale of Star Citizen, especially as we move into having the Large World online, this is particularly important. Our base tech is the foundation for everything else we do and we can’t begin to look at the funkier features until we’re 100% happy with this integration.

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Figure 1: Some screens from the profiler, position editor and mixing layout. Wwise is very grey, but you get used to that.
A lot of this though is standard Wwise goodness. With a toolset like this, as well as migrating our previous audio, we’ve already been prepping hosts of new sounds for modules such as FPS, for the PU, all within Wwise already. Many of these will in turn feed into Squadron 42 as well as the larger universe.

With an ongoing release cycle, we need to be able to have confidence in our mix as we progress. To this end, Stefan set up what’s called a Soundcaster session – essentially a pallet of events that one can trigger – that acts as a reference point for setting relative loudness for all types of sounds in the game.

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From here we can determine just how loud guns should be, and just how quiet, say, ambience could be in relation to them. Having this to refer to seems trivial, but simply having this to hand, having a ‘whole project’ perspective at any one time, outside of running the game itself, makes it much more possible to ensure we’re working to similar loudness standards; one fewer thing to worry about and another step towards a higher quality experience.

Here are some words from other members of the team on what the Wwise move brings and some samples of Wwise in action!

Graham Phillipson, Audio Programmer

From a code perspective Wwise allows us to trigger events that are more powerful than just “play sound” and “stop sound”. This means that in many cases we can add simple audio hooks into the game and the sound designers can use them to trigger complex audio events that play/stop sounds, affect mix changes and change switch and parameter states. It’s also been really good for profiling and debugging; when we connect to the game we can see graphs of instance counts, CPU usage, stream counts and bandwidth and memory usage, and mix trees. Solo and mute functions are also useful debugging tools. The 3d object viewer gives us a good illustration of what sounds are playing in the game world without all those pesky game graphics getting in the way.

Luke Hatton, Senior Sound Designer

Having joined the team last July when we were using our previous audio middleware solution through to this release, it’s great to finally be settled in Wwise with our audio content migrated over. Just recently, hearing Betty again in the cockpit and ship enter/exit mechanical parts working again in the new sound engine has been very rewarding. For us, working internally, the start of the Wwise conversion process meant that many months ago we started again with no sound at all in our internal build, and it has slowly been sonically restored. How great it is to be at this new starting point where I’m certain the sound will go in that much slicker than ever before!

The major win for me personally is that we now have a clean, tidy and easy to maintain tool for all of our sound assets and all of our real-time processes. What I mean is, any sound can be renamed, re-bussed, categorised in a different way and this will not affect the in-game hook we have. It means we can try structuring our data one way, change our minds for whatever reason and it won’t cause a lot of re-working. Because of this, we’re now producing audio content in a much more systemic way than before; we are creating robust systems that cater for general scenarios, rather than crafting specific one-off sounds which are dependent on specific animations/scripting.

The Wwise release is also representative of a larger and more streamlined audio team in comparison to a year ago. With so many sound designers and assets being added on a daily basis, our new naming conventions and workflows allow for an easier time making decisions, which can filter through on a game-wide level. If something is put into our Wwise project which doesn’t make sense, or isn’t clear, it’s a matter of having a quick group chat and changing it. In this way, it’s easier for work to be peer-reviewed now so we can sanity check each other’s content or audition new sounds very easily.

(All this recapping reminds me, I really need to change our thruster ‘RPM’ parameter to just ‘Thrust’. We currently use a parameter named ‘RPM’ in Wwise (the same name as it was in FMOD) to drive thruster sounds, so it needs changing to something that makes more sense. Our thrusters don’t actually ‘revolve per minute’. Now easily done!)

Matteo Cerquone, Junior Sound Designer

I was lucky enough to join the CIG Audio team after the transition from FMOD to Wwise, I skipped the first part of the process of converting assets to the new audio engine and that gave me more freedom in terms of audio implementation.

Working with Wwise is a great experience as it allows us to manipulate, re-shape and mix audio in real time according to what is happening in game.

I found myself working on the sound design for the missiles, and implementing those assets in game using Wwise allowed me to add variations depending on the distance and speed: each missile, once launched, has three different loops that describes how far this object is from the listener perspective, the first loop is composed of a rocket layer and different characteristics sounds that describe the brand and type of missile (in most cases this would be a specific beeping sound), the second loop is a more distant perspective of the rocket itself and the third loop is a far off, distant perspective rocket sound.

With Wwise we can blend between these three layers and add real time parameters such as volume or Doppler effects according to how far the object is from the player. When being chased by a missile you can now definitely hear how distant it is (blend between different loops, volume, low pass filter etc..) and how fast is approaching you (thanks to the Doppler effect), also if a missile is close enough you can recognize the brand and type of missile before getting hit (or escape if you are lucky).

Similar approach was used for the explosions of such missiles, we have created different explosion sounds according to the brand and type of missile, if the missile has hit or miss and if it’s happened far away from the player or close. Again Wwise gives us the tools for not just triggering the correct sound but to blend them together and create variations (if you are close enough you will also be able to hear the debris sound of the ship being hit).

Another great help is the possibility to have a cleaner mix, when working with the primary thrusters for some of the ships I wanted to duck down the sound of the main engine whenever the overdrive was engaged, with Wwise I could use a meter that controls the volume of the main engine according to how loud the overdrive is (side-chaining), so now every time the overdrive is engaged, the primary engine sound will automatically duck down.

Darren Lambourne, Senior Sound Designer

Wwise is a very freeing and creative tool. Being able to move quickly from a concept, a high level idea, to something functional in the game engine is so crucial to bottling that initial inspiration.

The diagnostics are second to none, letting us get to the heart of a problem quickly and solve it rather than just applying a patch to mask the issue. That’s important on a project of this size, there are already a bewildering number of audio systems in our game universe and that number is growing every day. We’re trying to create something truly special for the audio in Star Citizen. Getting eyes on the project as a whole and drilling down into problem areas that can impact both the fidelity and the smoothness of our audio systems is absolutely essential to ensure that we keep out the bad stuff and emphasise the good stuff.

Jason Cobb, Senior Sound Designer:

From my perspective the conversion of audio middleware from Fmod to Wwise has been a year’s long process that began with early naive aspirations for a quick change-over and only concluded after a drawn-out haul of many incremental yet monumental changes.

From an audio content standpoint, the earlier and faster we converted over, the least amount of Fmod content and implementation would be have to be re-done. Seems like a no-brainer but unfortunately the situation would not allow for such a fast change-over with everyone focusing on each next release or demo version that year.

In May 2014 we examined an integration of Wwise in CryEngine which had been done by an outside company. This was at a time before Crytek had released an official Wwise integration and we did not yet have any details about it or an eta when it would be available which was compounded by the uncertainty of their financial situation at the time. For a short while it looked like we had a path to a fast, straight-forward Wwise integration and minimal data changeover job.

One factor at that time was not enough engineers available to dedicate one or more to integrate Wwise using the example we had been provided, yet alone our own take on it. Even still if we had used a third-party or in-house Wwise integration, it would have made future CryEngine SDK integrations that much harder to do.

By choosing the yet-to-be-delivered Crytek Wwise integration we minimized the amount of divergence between the Star Citizen game engine and the base SDK CryEngine. Still from an audio standpoint this guaranteed a lot more audio content would be created and implemented with Fmod, which made the task of converting this Fmod audio content and implementation into a much larger and more difficult job.

It was not until the end of September 2014 until we kicked off an integration of CryEngine that included a Wwise integration. Instead of directly replacing Fmod calls with Wwise calls in their game code like the other example integration we looked at, their version instead converted game audio calls to the newly conceived Audio Translation Layer, as an abstraction to allow for different audio middleware to be swapped out underneath – a great feature if you are selling a game engine that needs lots of options for a variety of customers but maybe a little more than we needed on Star Citizen at the time. Still, always good to have future options and we have since made greater use of this audio translation/abstraction layer to store event metadata.

Unfortunately by the existence of this abstraction layer and its associated data files, it created a new step in the audio content workflow which required the sound designers to take the work they had just made in Wwise designer tool and manually create new objects referencing these same events, parameters, switches, states and sound-banks, saved into ATL files and managed in the audio controls browser. The early days of this workflow were somewhat primitive and slow and very much unlike the smooth experience of using Wwise in any other game engine I have shipped before. For this reason I decided to script a workflow solution that would simply automatically create the necessary ATL files for us when we build sound-banks in the Wwise designer tool. Then the sound designers will have no extra steps to manually create and manage these ATL files in CryEngine other than making sure they are checked in when updated. We can just immediately use our sounds in the game engine as soon as we build them into a sound-bank.

Meanwhile the audio team was still working in Fmod for the series of game releases and demos, with lots of new and exciting game content and sounds going in over the rest of that year. The Wwise integration branch kept making progress but the challenges of completing all the code side work in conjunction with dependencies from other development integrations and game releases meant that it was a few months before the window appeared where Wwise could be safely made “live” in the main game development stream.

Along the line dedicated audio engineers and additional sound designers were brought on board and the task of converting the audio content and implementation was able to begin in earnest. Across all the game files we data-mined for Fmod event strings and setup a conversion table to enter the new Wwise event / ATL trigger strings, which were then converted by scripting automation of search and replace across batches of hundreds of data files at a time.

To cut a long story short, by the time we wrapped up all the audio code and data implementation conversions, to date we have touched untold thousands of game data files and created close to 10000 new Wwise events and well over 1000 sound banks. It feels so good to finally be done with this task and now get on to the actual fun parts of making new content once again, not to mention now having the tools needed to better refine, modulate, mix and optimize, the game sounds with the features provided by Wwise and the ATL.

Ultimately, we’re not finished yet, by quite some way – but we feel we’re in a much better place to keep improving and keep building. While we’re proud of what we’re getting together, we’re not 100% happy by some way, we realize still have a lot of work to do and now we have more of the tools in hand to do it.

As always we’d appreciate your feedback and reports of any issues with the sound of our game. The ‘Ask A Developer’ section of the forums, there’s an audio topic which is where we hang out and respond to sound queries. Thanks for listening!

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Zitat von Star Citizen

Star Citizen 1.1.5 now live!

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Greetings Citizens,

Star Citizen Alpha 1.1.5 is live! Today’s patch updates Arena Commander with two newly flyable ships and a host of bug fixes, balance changes and ‘under the hood’ features. You can access 1.1.5 now. The complete patch notes are available here.

Player Count

We’re proud to announce that the Battle Royale and Squad Battle modes in Arena Commander can now support up to sixteen players! We will add this feature to additional game modes in the future. Our engineers are hard at work on increasing the overall player count, with plans to go beyond 16 in future iterations.

Balance Changes

With 1.1.5, we’ve revisited balance across the board. This patch stops just short of a number of systemic changes we’ve been working on, so 1.1.5 represents some drastic shifts in preparation for that – and to get a little better perspective on the game for when those systems come online.

Ships are now tuned to retain momentum, meaning that combat skews a little further towards planning an attack and reacting against your opponent. This also means less blacking out from common maneuvers.

Twitch actions are still very important, but are in limited supply with the new boost consumption rates.

Shields and hull health were increased across the board, increasing Time To Kill to the point where pilots under fire have the opportunity to react. To balance this, shields take much longer to begin recharging, so it is much less likely for combatants to find themselves in an infinite loop of regenerating shield health.

Missiles have been given disruption damage in addition to their traditional attributes, and so are much more effective at bringing down shields. This, coupled with increased tracking distances, make missiles more effective on approach. Increased locking time makes them less useful while actively in the fray, so they are now better at softening up the opponent than blowing it out of the sky.

The Mustang Delta can now swap out the rocket pods for other Size 2 weapons, the Avenger can now equip Size 2 weapons on the wings, and the Aurora now has a top speed of 175.

Shields now only reduce ballistic damage by 30%, but armor no longer has a significant effect on energy weapons. The down side is that it now takes much longer for ballistic weapons to bring down shields.

The range and velocities of weapons have been retuned, and gatling guns now fire while spooling up.

The Joker Suckerpunch has also seen an increase in disruption power – this should help bring down those powerful shields – and the damage for weapons have been rescaled according to their size. In addition, weapon mounts have had their slew rates reduced according to their size. The choice between fixed and gimbaled loadouts is more meaningful than ever.

Some of these changes affect the balance of power between controllers – mostly they don’t. The real focus is on elevating the level of tactical play and decision making in everything from loadout to combat maneuvers to choice of battleground, and all the wild spaceship shenanigans in between. Overall, the broad strokes of these changes seem to have been largely successful during early testing, so while there are certainly changes left to be made, compromises to be found, and behaviors to be improved, the vision of what Star Citizen can be only grows clearer.

Our design is for different types of weapons to impact shields and armor in different ways. Shields should be most effective at blocking energy weapons that have no mass, while ballistic rounds can pass through them (with some loss of kinetic energy) and then damage armor. With armor, the opposite is true: energy weapons are especially effective against armor, while it is more difficult for ballistic shots to penetrate it. Ultimately, the pilot is forced to make gameplay choices about how best to balance his defenses: more armor to protect against ballistic rounds, or better shields to counter energy weapons? Similarly, attackers must choose the type of gun they think will be most effective for a particular situation: energy weapons, balanced between their recharge ability and how well shields can block them, and ballistic weapons, which carry limited ammunition but which can hit at armor with little attenuation from shields.

Kruger P-52 Merlin

Originally designed to pair with the RSI Constellation, the P-52 Merlin is now available to all pilots! A dedicated parasite fighter, the Merlin is designed to be transported from place to place aboard a larger ship. Boasting a centerline Gatling cannon and a Lightning Power engine, the Merlin is a fast, maneuverable ship that packs a surprising punch! Ideal for racing, local reconnaissance and fast combat.

Backers who own the Constellation Andromeda and the Constellation Aquila can fly their Merlins today! Additionally, pilots who have a Constellation Phoenix, 890 Jump, Idris or Carrack in their fleets will be awarded a loaner Merlin in place of their parasite ships that are still in development. Anyone else interested in trying this new fighters can pick one up in the RSI Pledge Store

Vanduul Scythe

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Fast becoming the symbol of the Vanduul Race, the Scythe is the foot soldier in every raid and the target of every human fighter pilot. Featuring a hefty weapons payload, the Scythe’s real asset is its maneuverability, found in the twin main and twelve maneuvering thrusters.

The Scythe is now flyable, which means that early backers who picked one up during the initial campaign can now access them! Additionally, Imperator Subscribers will have access to fly the Scythe in Arena Commander based on their subscription time. You can learn more about the Subscription program here.

Wwise

Star Citizen Alpha 1.1.5 overhauls our audio system with the new Wwise system! We asked the audio team to put together an article on what this update means, which you can access here.

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…en-115-Now-Live

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Hi Starmyth,

we wish you a lot of fun in our community.

Time: Jul 24th 2015, 5:56pm

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Hi IronRaptor,

we wish you a lot of fun in our community.

Time: Jul 24th 2015, 5:48pm

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Hallo Lancer,

wir wünschen Dir viel Spaß im Forum.

Zeit: 24. Juli 2015, 13:49

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Zitat von Discovery

As the Omicron Update is still MIA, in the next patch Omicron Zeta will receive a set of changes in order to improve server gameplay.

The general layout has been severely reduced, halving travel times in general. This system has been a severe pain for a large amount of Omicron players. Nobody really wants to fly 200/300k to encounter a player. Mu JH<>Delta JH and Rho JH<>Delta JH have been reduced to ~30k. Nomads have been brought closer as well as the average distance from Iota's JH to any other in Zeta is between 30k to 40k.

Rho/Delta/Mu/Iota JHs have been placed relatively close to field edges to avoid problems with capital ships stuck in rocks.

Do not build a POB in Zeta until the update, otherwise your base will end up most likely anywhere but where you'd like it to be.

Here's how the map is going to look like.

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Quelle: http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=131858

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Hi Moromete,

we wish you a lot of fun in our community.

Time: Jul 22nd 2015, 10:27pm

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Hallo Mik2402,

wir wünschen Dir viel Spaß im Forum.

Zeit: 22. Juli 2015, 18:19

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Hi Bacox,

we wish you a lot of fun in our community.

Time: Jul 21st 2015, 3:47am

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Zitat von Star Citizen

10 For the Chairman Episode 60

The Chairman is back! This week Chris Roberts and Ben Lesnick sit down to discus the current status and future of Star Citizen. Chris answers ten questions chosen from development subscribers in each show. Want your question considered? Learn more about subscriptions here.

00:00:00 – Introduction and Squadron 42 Update
00:19:39 – What is the status of Star Marine?
00:31:08 – Have you been in contact with the team?
00:34:12 – Why is there stuff in the leak we haven’t seen?
00:38:20 – What are your thoughts on controller balance?
00:46:57 – What’s the story behind recent staff departures?
00:54:09 – Why isn’t the concept ship I bought playable, yet?
00:58:48 – Why do you still have concept sales?
01:02:28 – How has Star Citizen changed since the beginning?
01:14:11 – Is Star Citizen impossible to finish?
01:24:41 – What’s next for Star Citizen?

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Zitat von Star Citizen

Letter from the Chairman

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Hi everyone,

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On the set of Squadron 42
Now that I am back in Los Angeles I thought I would write a letter to all of you who have backed Star Citizen. I haven’t had the chance to communicate to everyone as frequently as I normally have due to my directing duties on the Squadron 42 performance capture shoot. Directing a shoot is a pretty intensive affair which absorbed most of my time. The rest of the hours I wasn’t sleeping were taken up with the business of directing a game as large as Star Citizen with video conferences and emails or online collaboration with the six development studios spread across two continents and six time zones. To help address some of the questions that came up during the shoot, I’ve put together a special 10 for the Chairman companion piece to this letter, which you can find here.

A week ago Wednesday we wrapped the main performance and motion capture for Squadron 42, Episode 1, after 66 shooting days. We started shooting on March 31st at Ealing Studios in London and completed principal performance and motion capture on July 8th. This is more shooting days than any film I’ve ever been involved with! I directed my last scene on Friday July 3rd, leaving David Haddock, our lead writer, who along with William Weissbaum wrote the Squadron 42 script, to direct the last three days of secondary character “wild lines” and motion sets the following Monday through Wednesday.

A Grand Tour

That Monday I took a train up to Wilmslow to the Foundry 42 UK Office to spend some time with the Squadron 42 development team in person as well as gather key people from our various studios and our technical partners for a technical summit on our character and facial animation technology and pipeline. Like everything on Star Citizen and Squadron 42 we are aiming to push the envelope – with the tech we are working on for animation, shaders and AI we are aiming to give you a fluid immersion inside the story of Squadron 42 and later the bigger world of the Persistent Universe of Star Citizen, in a way that conveys the emotional subtlety of film. It’s one of the reasons why our performance capture shoot was so long – maybe 10% of the scenes we shot were for cinematics, the rest were all for scenes where we allow full player control that play out during game control from your POV. Most games just record voiceovers for these types of scenes over a few days, but for us it was important to capture the full performance of our amazing cast. This allows us to then blend the captured performance of the actor’s face and body with other motions to adjust the game character’s looks and movement so they react in a natural manner to the player’s actions (whatever they may be). At the fidelity we are going for we are definitely breaking new ground, but luckily we are working with some of the leading companies and people in the area of scanning real people and bringing their performances into 3D in the most life-like way. 3 Lateral and Cubic Motion are well known for their amazing work in this field and we are partnering with them to push performance capture and real time playback beyond what you have seen in a game before. Internally we have been hiring up some incredible talent, including the architect of the CryEngine animation system, who recently joined us in Frankfurt.

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Some photos from my adventure in London
Wednesday night I flew with my brother Erin to Frankfurt Germany to visit the German Foundry 42 development studio, where the 22 newest members of the Star Citizen family have just moved into their new home, after being crammed into temporary offices for the last few months. The energy and enthusiasm there was fantastic to experience first-hand. We have been lucky enough to have some of the best technologists and game developers in the business join us these past few months, the very people who were involved in building the engine we are using. These are guys who did things with a PC in 2003 and 2006 that no one thought possible. Star Citizen is lucky to have them and we spent Thursday and Friday going over our engine and technology road map, as well as reviewing some of the work they have been doing these last months. As we have mentioned before, Star Citizen (and even Squadron 42) presents a challenge in terms of detail and scale that no game has tackled successfully to date. To do what the game requires there needs to be a different approach to how things are organized, rendered and updated. This is why we spent eight months converting the engine to 64 bit precision and why we have developed some new technologies like the Zone system and local grids, which fundamentally change how the engine organizes, streams, updates and renders objects in the world (or more accurately: the ‘verse). We can now manage one massive play area with all sorts of objects; single seat fighters, multi crew ships, capital ships with hundreds of rooms and thousands of objects inside, huge space stations or incredibly detailed landing environments. We will be showing you the first preview of this in action at Gamescom. We still have lots of work to do, not the least being the network side of things, to be able to update all this with a decent amount of players participating. Even in the early stages it is incredibly exhilarating.

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Squadron 42 concept art, the "Chop Shop"
Squadron 42 is going to be something special. I could feel it on set with the performances we were getting, with me knowing how we can bring those into the game. Squadron 42 is going to be like this amazing sci-fi movie where instead of just watching, you truly feel you’re in the world, emotionally connected to the other characters in the story. The action goes fluidly from space, to ship board, to on-foot gun battles aboard ships, stations and asteroid bases – all from the same 1st person point of view, all fluidly blending with no loading screens.

I look at the work Tony is spearheading on the Persistent Universe side: some of the environments we are constructing, the rendering and graphics technology we have in the pipeline to render these worlds in a fluid manner to go from space flight to being on-foot at your destination. Also the attention Tony is spending on making sure there are many different careers and roles you can play in the bigger universe. I know the dream game that I have always wanted to make and that you all want to play and backed for is closer than ever.

I have never been more excited by what we are building then I am now.

That’s not to say I did not come home to a little drama

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Star Marine & Production

It seems some gaming outlets got a little confused with my last FPS letter, which was no different to the one that we did back in May to let people know where we were on Star Marine / the FPS module. As you all know we are shy of announcing firm dates for module releases until they are in the Public Test Universe (PTU) as it’s hard to predict exact dates in open development, especially in the stages that still involve R&D, unless you build in large time buffers. We have been burned by this multiple times before so I have heeded all your wishes to not give out dates until we are sure. Perhaps we stressed the point a little too strongly as suddenly gaming websites were running with the headline, “Star Citizen FPS delayed indefinitely!” which was unfortunate as this phrase is usually a euphemism for a project being put on indefinite hold or canceled.

Don’t worry, it’s not! We’re hard at work on the FPS – as you can see from our update on Friday – and you will have it in your hands sooner rather than later.

Shortly after the FPS flap, the news that the LA Studio’s Executive Producer, Alex Mayberry, had left for personal reasons after a year on the job combined with a couple of other staff departures that we had previously announced had some people worrying about whether they should be concerned.

With a company the size of CIG and its subsidiaries there is always going to be turnover. We are a very large company now, dedicated entirely to making Star Citizen and Squadron 42. We have four development studios: Los Angeles, Austin, Wilmslow, UK and Frankfurt, Germany. Our internal headcount has gone from five at the end of 2012 to 59 at the end of 2013 to 183 at the end of 2014 and to 255 now. That’s some pretty huge growth. The turnover at CIG is no more or less than it was at Origin, EA, Digital Anvil or Microsoft when I was making games there. The difference is that since we conduct our development in an open manner people get the opportunity to know some of the individuals working on the game, in a way you wouldn’t with a normal publisher, so a departure becomes more noticeable. Sometimes an employee may get an opportunity to go elsewhere in a role they feel will be more rewarding personally. Sometimes our breakneck pace of development is too much, or sometimes people just want to make a change for personal reasons.

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The Foundry 42 DE team!
We made a conscious decision early on to go where the developers were as opposed to making them come to one place. If I hadn’t done this we would only have an office in LA as that’s where I live, but I decided in today’s world with fast Internet (we run 1 Gigabit connections at all our offices), Cloud and online sharing technology we don’t have to force talented people to leave their homes to work on Star Citizen. This approach has allowed us to staff up with some of the best people in the business. The UK and German office are key examples of this. This approach of distributed development is not new or unusual but it does require you to work hard to keep all locations working together as harmoniously as possible.

As such, we are constantly reassessing our development structure and methodology to improve our efficiency. With Alex’s departure we took the opportunity to streamline all production leadership under Erin. Erin has an amazing track record, delivering more than $500M worth of Lego games during his seven years of running Traveler’s Tales Fusion, not to mention the titles he has built with me at Origin, EA and Digital Anvil. I had asked Erin to take on this role originally when he joined but at the time he wanted to concentrate on building up Foundry 42. Now with Foundry 42 as our largest studio (between Wilmslow and Frankfurt there are 138 people) and those teams operating efficiently, Erin felt comfortable taking on a wider role. I could not be happier as he has been with me since the first Wing Commander and the best producer / production executive I know.

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Meanwhile, the PU team in Austin is working on the next planet in the ArcCorp system
Open Development

If you have followed Star Citizen from our kickoff in October, 2012, you know that the game we’re building today is a bigger and more technically accomplished project than I thought was possible back then. The original crowd funding goal was to raise enough money to deliver regular community updates, access to the multiplayer dogfighting alpha and a single player campaign called Squadron 42. You can see the first goal, which was achieved on 25th of October 2012 here. It’s no secret that I originally thought I would have to build a smaller game first and then over time add features and content to get close to the full living universe that I have always wanted to realize. This community came together and, both through your financial support and your belief in the project, made something incredible possible. You went above and beyond in backing our dream and so we are going to, also. Because of you, we’re building cities where I had hoped for just landing pads, we’re building armadas of starships where I asked for squadrons and we’re populating a living, breathing world in ways I didn’t dare to dream of in 2012.

You all know that already; you’ve lived that. You’ve seen Star Citizen evolve and start to come together. You’ve watched our atoms form molecules, our modules form a real, playable game (that you can boot up and play today!). There are people out there who are going to tell you that this is all a BAD THING. That it’s ‘feature creep’ and we should make a smaller, less impressive game for the sake of having it out more quickly or in order to meet artificial deadlines. Now I’ll answer those claims in one word: Bullshit!

Star Citizen matters BECAUSE it is big, because it is a bold dream. It is something everyone else is scared to try. You didn’t back Star Citizen because you want what you’ve seen before. You’re here and reading this because we are willing to go big, to do the things that terrify publishers. You’ve trusted us with your money so we can build a game, not line our pockets. And we sure as hell didn’t run this campaign so we could put that money in the bank, guarantee ourselves a profit and turn out some flimsy replica of a game I’ve made before. You went all in supporting us and we’ve gone all in making the game. Is Star Citizen today a bigger goal than I imagined in 2012? Absolutely. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not: it’s the whole damn point.

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Will it take longer to deliver all this? Of course! When the scope changes, the amount of time it will take to deliver all the features naturally increases. This is something we are acutely aware of. How do we balance the mutually conflicting wants of the community; to have this hugely ambitious game, but not wait forever for it?

Our answer is to embrace open development and share features and functionality that will go into the final game before everything is completed. Originally we had just planned to share a multiplayer dogfighting alpha and then the beta of the game (which would have just been Squadron 42). As we smashed every stretch goal, and continued to power through additional ones, it was pretty apparent we had to find a way to keep people engaged while we were building this virtual universe. In today’s 24/7 short attention-span world people don’t have the patience to wait around for years. This is why we decided on multiple modules: the Hangar, so you could first see your ships and walk around them in the manner you would in the final game, then Arena Commander, to allow people to get a taste and give feedback on the basic dogfight and flight mechanics. Star Marine, which will be available shortly, is the module for backers to experience and give their feedback on the First Person Shooting component of the game. Not long after that we will be releasing the next level of Arena Commander, allowing players with bigger ships to fly them with friends, on maps that are closer in size to the huge ones you’ll have in the final game. Then we’re rolling out aspects of the Persistent Universe: first there will be just planet side environments to explore, but not long after you’ll be able to transition to space and fly to another destination, and then after that to another system. We have taken this route to allow people to experience and give feedback to make the game better as we build it. Almost no one else does this. And we’re still doing it: case in point, our first 16-player version of Arena Commander went to the PTU on Saturday! I’ve said it countless times: my goal is to make the journey of Star Citizen’s development worth the price of admission and the final game be the best bonus in the world.

So while it will take longer to build the full vision that all of you are helping to achieve by contributing your funds, our plan is to have you play large sections of it without having to wait for everything to be done like you would on a normal retail product. That is the advantage of being online and on the PC. It should be a win / win: you get to play a more limited version early, a version that is closer to the original goals, but you know the bigger, fuller featured version is coming – and the best bit is that you get it all for your initial pledge!

Is ‘feature creep’ a worry? Sure… it’s always a worry, and we are well aware of it. However, building the game to the stretch goals embraced and endorsed by the community is not feature creep! We made the decision to stop stretch goals at the end of last year. That was a hard choice to abandon one of the central tenets of crowd funding projects, the idea that the sky is the limit… but it’s one we felt we had to make for the better of the game. Today, we have a radical design that’s like nothing else in the industry and we’re building towards it every hour of every day. We count on the community’s continued support to build the game to the high level that we set out to accomplish. Allowing independent authors to do more is the point of crowd funding, and going beyond our limitations is the entire point of Star Citizen.

Occasionally I see comments out there from people who haven’t taken the time to watch the thousands of YouTube videos of people running around their ships and hangars or dogfighting in space, or visit our site to read the vast amount of information we make publicly available that call us vaporware or a glorified tech demo. Arena Commander, which is still evolving, is a better looking and playing game than a lot of finished games out there. We are maintaining a live game and building one all at the same time. It’s harder than just developing, as most companies that run online games will tell you, but it’s worth it, both to ensure you get to experience features as soon as they are ready and to make a better game in the long run.

This is all being made possible by your enthusiasm and support. As we promised since the start of the campaign, we invest every dollar raised into the game. Anyone with knowledge about game development can assess our spending based on the information we share every month. It speaks for itself that from the outset our TOS provides for an accounting to be published if we ever had to stop development before delivering. With the progress and the funds we’ve raised this is no longer an issue, but quite obviously we wouldn’t have provided for this clause, if we weren’t using your funds very carefully for the development of Star Citizen.

The rest of the team and I are immensely grateful for all your support and passion. We’re hard at work on finishing up the next Arena Commander patch, Star Marine, the Persistent Universe, Squadron 42, as well as working on something special to show you all at Gamescom!

We genuinely want people to be happy with their decision to back Star Citizen, because I and everyone else on the team passionately believe in Star Citizen. This is the dream game that all of us have wanted to build all our lives. And while I can’t promise you everything will always go smoothly or features or content won’t arrive later than we want them to, I can promise that we will never stop until we have achieved this dream.

To paraphrase a key speech from the beginning of Squadron 42;

“Several years from now, when you are surrounded by your loved ones, and they ask you what did you do during the battle for Space Sims and PC games, you can look them in the eye and say; I helped make Star Citizen.”

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Zitat von Discovery

As of today, the Registration Agreement has been updated to what should be its (not even?) final form.
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The previous agreement update had a flaw due the Wiki's licensing scheme being fairly outdated. As of now, the Wiki has been updated to operate under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. You can find a really simple version explaining it here: https://tldrlegal.com/license/creative-c...nc-sa-4.0)

The forum Terms & Conditions have received several updates. The T&C had nothing related to posting copyrighted materials, which threatened the safety of the server as it could have been shut down with something like a DMCA. It isn't possible anymore. We have modified the terms related to third-party information sharing as it still was possible to share personal information. This as well is now impossible.

We have added the terms protecting you in the event Disco is ever tied to a legal investigation, as unless we state it in the T&C we have no legal obligation to inform you of said investigation.

Content that falls under the new CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license has been clarified. "content of your own intended for use by groups... of which you are a member at the time of posting" means informations that will be used by the faction as a whole, such as Lore or Faction Information. Individual diaries or such things are not part of this agreement unless you specifically state it belongs to the faction.

We strongly suggest you read the new terms with the utmost attention.

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Zitat von Discovery

As of today, the Registration Agreement has been updated. The second paragraph will read as such:
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For pretty much all of us, nothing will change. This change is mostly intended to safeguard the integrity of faction content.

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Hi Chuba,

we wish you a lot of fun in our community.

Time: Jul 19th 2015, 1:24am

Profile: Chuba

Your Serverteam.

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Zitat von Star Citizen

Star Citizen Alpha 1.1.5 PTU Available!

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Greetings Citizens,

Star Citizen 1.1.5 is now available on the Public Test Universe! The PTU is our ‘test’ server, designed for letting the Star Citizen community review earlier builds of the game than our standard live server. If you’re interested in joining the PTU test for 1.1.5, you can learn how in the PTU FAQ. Patch 1.1.5 adds two flyable ships, the Scythe and the Merlin, as well as a host of balance changes and bug fixes. You can find the complete patch notes here.

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Zitat von Star Citizen

Star Marine Status Update

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Greetings Citizens,

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The Winner!

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It’s that time again! As we promised, here’s your comprehensive review of what the Star Marine team (and those supporting it in this final push) worked on this past week. We’re going to format this update a little bit differently, more akin to the big Monthly Reports that the team puts together. Please join me as we walk through each of the different disciplines currently working to get Star Marine to the PTU!

Before we begin, we haven’t forgotten last week’s poll! It seems the Ghost Sight is the odds on favorite. The poll wasn’t just for show and we’re going to go with the community’s choice here. As a result, we’ll be integrating it as standard equipment for the ATT-4! If you loved one of the other sights, don’t worry: they’ll return in the future as modular options (and will likely appear as standard on other guns.)

Engineering & Code

We started things off by making a number of netcode improvements in the lead-up to Thursday’s internal company-wide playtest… and using the results of that playtest, we’ve gone on to make several others! A big focus of these changes is making sure that movement transitions are serialized. Issues with passing/clipping through objects have been significantly de creased with a pair of fixes by Paul J. He’s updated the game to use the living entity’s orientation rather than the articulated entity for intersection tests and also fixed a frame behind issue with the living entity’s bounding box calculation. In plain English: no more clipping problems!

We also tested passing data from game servers to our Platform services; that’s the process by which the game talks to the website and your Leaderboard data appears here on RSI. We identified one issue there, with a fix in progress as we speak. And we resolved another pair of outstanding issues: one that caused problems equipping/throwing grenades while holstering a weapon and the other that prevented the personal shield from being destroyed. We’re continuing to investigate a cause for issues with player prediction that are currently resulting in teleporting and hits not syncing up between clients properly. This investigation is ongoing, but we’re very hopeful this bug is about to be smashed.

Player Locomotion/Animations

The player predication and network improvements mentioned above have already had a positive impact on the animation status. Steve Bender, the animation director, has been reviewing and experimenting with Ragdoll effects for death animations. We’ve also been working on the non-cardinal direction walk jokes, the directional jumps in first person and several other specific animation types. Weapon holstering animations are in progress for the ladder mount, walk, run and spring, as are ‘transition’ animations (switching from a pistol to a rifle.) Making sure these look right in both first and third person is a real challenge, but we’re happy to report that it’s coming together.

I mentioned ladder animations, which have been a major focus lately. We’ve been tweaking the l adder animations to change climbing speed and are currently working an issue with ladder mounts and dismounts. They’re working, but they glitch sometimes in multiplayer and don’t synch properly. We’re looking into that, of course! Next, we’ll be using animation resources around the company to focus on updating crouch jukes and issues with our prone animation. We have the process for this down at this point, it’s just a matter of getting the animations to the right people!

Level Design

Our designers continued to look at Gold Horizon from the standpoint of a competitive combatant. This week, that meant tuning Gold Horizon’s player focal points and sight lines to make for a better battle experience. We conducted a performance pass, addressing areas of the level that were causing too many LODs. The result is a better framerate than we’ve seen! We fixed issues with the energy recharge stations and we have redone some of the lighting to improve their breakable functionality. We’d previously set things unbreakable to address a crash and now we’re going back and applying the proper fix to make the levels truly interactive. There are a LOT of lights, so that process will continue into next week, wrapping up just before the next big company-wide internal playtest!

The plan next is to add some additional spawn points to Gold Horizon for the new Free Play (FFA) practice mode suggested by the company. We’ll also be making a material surface pass on the level; certain tracer effects are not being cleaned up when they hit an imporper surface material. Since those tracers can reduce the frame rate when they don’t disperse properly, we need to make sure they do!

Game Design

Designers have been looking at individual game modes this week, discussing how to make Gold Horizon’s Team Elimination mode the slow-paced tactical gameplay we are aiming for. We want it to be a simulation of the rest of the Persistent Universe’s First Person gameplay rather than a throwaway action mode that doesn’t speak to the larger project. We want gameplay where there are consequences for death, so that the player is encouraged to be slow, careful and there’s a reason to help your friends and do your best to overpower, deceive and defeat your enemies. Next we’ll be making some tweaks to the practice mode, adding a round timer to Free Play (and some iteration testing associated therewith.) We will be adding a scoreboard for the ends of matches and testing a small respawn delay with a countdown timer to see how it impacts the overall feel.

Weapons & Gadgets

We’ve got guns! The Devastator Shotgun animations had a pass to add more pop and attitude during reload/fire. We did some exensive work on the two-handed gadget deploy/throw animations, breaking them up into three component parts: weapon deselect, gadget grab and throw and weapon select. These are undergoing review now and are looking good!

Sometimes, though, we make a gun TOO good. The ATT-4, seen last week, is a very satisfying game to use… to the point that we now need to enhance the other weapons to its level (rather than tuning it down, which might happen on an ordinary project.) We’ll be looking at our options there next, and we’ll also be doing a pass on the Laser Snipe rifle’s scope, VFX and charging mode. The feedback from QA is that it needs to feel more satisfying to use.

User Interface/HUD

Icons, icons, icons! New icons are being implemented for guns, grenades and gadgets, with new health icons expected shortly. We’ve finished work on updating the weapon select/ammo counter widget for the new HUD and we’ve begin to integrate a new Message/Chat widget (work should be done on this next.) We’ve been looking at several options for improving the aiming reticule and speeding up the ADS transition. We’ll continue iterating on this. Up next is the health/injury display widget, which needs to be updated to the current standard.

Blockers

We’re going to end off this week with a list of ongoing blockers. These are the issues that are truly preventing Star Marine from going to the PTU… and as such, they’re the ones we’re most eager to tackle!

Netcode issues. For the last couple of weeks I have read backer comments that we have been glossing over them. Its true, I was… but only because they’re very difficult to drill down to. What we are seeing in playtests are issues deploying gadgets, firing at targets that aren’t where you expect, and other issues that can look like high latency situations even with a solid connection to the server. Issues like this can and will exacerbate other smaller issues that on their own may not feel like a big problem. The netcode is improving (wait till you see 16-player Arena Commander matches in 1.1.5) but there’s still certainly work left to be done.

Jukes and stops need to be tuned. Our aim is less juke at slow speeds, more jukes on high speed strafes, turns, and stops.

There is too much weapon sway while in ADS (Aiming Down Sight) mode. We need to tune this such that the only movement comes from player input, some of our immersive animations from breathing, the results of being near cover, getting hit, or transitioning from a juke while moving are too strong.

Animations for all weapon types are not done, we’re burning these down; it takes time to clean-up integrate, test, and iterate on the animation to make sure they hit our high standards.

The new Visor HUD not quite ready yet (this requires code, art, tech art, animation, UI design, and audio support to get finalized).

There is a bug with Radar not drawing properly in ADS

Audio cues are not hooked up for all weapons, hit indicators, and UI elements. This will require a dedicated pass.

Proper positional audio for footsteps, and weapon fire aren’t being reported correctly to the player.

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Quelle: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/tran…e-Status-Update