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The February Subscriber Flair is the Gladius ship model, by Takuetsu Starships the most trusted name in ship models. Subscriber flair is a small gesture of our appreciation. The ship model should already be in your hangar!
This realistic ship model of the Gladius is the fifth in a collection of Star Citizen’s ships. Display your Gladius with pride, and then collect other models to complete the display. Includes stand and collector’s box.
The Gladius is an older design which has been updated over the years to keep up with modern technology. In military circles, the Gladius is beloved for its performance and its simplicity. A fast, light fighter with a laser-focus on dogfighting, the Gladius is an ideal interceptor or escort ship.
Takuetsu Starships is a leading die-cast model spaceship manufacturer based in Fujin City, Centauri founded in 2894. They hold the reproduction licenses from spaceship manufacturers and engineering companies such as RSI and Anvil Aerospace. Takuetsu are well known amongst collectors to make superior, highly detailed models. They produce perfect replicas of personal, commercial, military and even alien spaceships in various scales.
More information about subscriptions can be found here
Uncle Finn here, yet again. You missed me, didn't you -
So we've taken a look at the feedback concerning the Pirate ID, and feel some further changes should be added to the ID. Specifically, howe they deal with transports and freighters, as well as actions outside of House space, as listed in the rules section.
Moving forward, here is what the new Pirate ID will look like:
Quote:Pirate ID
Independent Pirates are people who want to make money by extorting it from others or through other unlawful means. An independent pirate acts only for his own benefit, and has no allegiance to anyone. Pilot carrying this unlawful ID is a Pirate, who:
- Can defend itself and ships of the same affiliation
- Can demand Credits or Cargo from Freighters, Transports and Liners in House space and attack them if they do not comply
- Can pirate any ships outside of House Space (Bold and Italic) and attack them if they do not comply
- Cannot ally with any lawfuls
- Cannot use any transports with more than 3,600 cargo.
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Greetings Citizens,
New year, same job: make the Best Damn Space Sim Ever! In January, Star Citizen’s teams worked on all aspects of the game, with a focus on improving Arena Commander and preparing to launch First Person Shooter and the first ‘social module’ piece of the persistent universe (oh, wait: and Squadron 42! It’s the first month of a BIG year.)
We also held our first ever backer ‘town hall’ in San Antonio, and couldn’t be happier with how it went. You can see all five of the panels below, and the feedback we collected is already impacting Star Citizen’s long term plans.
Please read on for the latest from Cloud Imperium’s studios and outsource partners around the world.
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Greetings Citizens!
Welcome back for another monthly report! The team came back from the holiday break refreshed and excited to continue the momentum from last year. January was an extremely productive month both on the development front and the planning front laying a solid foundation for 2015. Let’s continue to the discipline updates so we can let you know what all transpired and what we’re working on!
Engineering
With Engineering in January there was a fair amount of long term planning that was covered during a Technology Summit in the UK involving several members of the LA team. During the month of January our LA Engineering team has been working on quite a few things you will see being released over the next couple of months.
We’ve finalized our implementation of the paint system for all vehicles including the buggy. As many of you saw we released swappable buggy paint jobs during January. This was an important step because it finished off our implementation of the first pass of the vehicle paint system. Now that this technology has been finished, tested, and proven on the buggy the Art team can proceed with implementing swappable custom paint jobs for all of our ships which you’ll be seeing very soon. This was very important to us as it allows us to begin delivering on many of the custom skins sold or included with various packages during the original campaign.
Development has also continued on the missiles, countermeasures, and signals system. With the first introduction of this system in December there were some features that we weren’t able to quite finish such as emissive sources that can obscure sensors in a generalized area or direction. Things like nebulas or a star having impact in a broader way. For example you may in the future see that it is much harder to get an Heat lock on an enemy who is flying directly at the molten core on Dying Star because the of the heat from the core blinding the heat sensors on your ship and missiles relative to the lower output of the enemy ship you are attempting to target.
In addition to the features that weren’t quite ready for primetime there are also a fair number of gameplay balance issues and bugs that we’ve been working to resolve within these systems that were highlighted by players in 1.0.0 and 1.0.1. We’re continuing to improve and refine the system in Arena Commander so that by the time the PU comes about its polished and well balanced.
Another important focus for the Engineering team has been a refactor of the item port system. Sounds exciting right? Well it is! As you may or may not know we wrote a custom item way back towards the beginning of Star Citizens development. It is a system for handling networked, animating, and data driven items that are attached to other items or ship parts through what are called item ports. Stated differently, this is the system that makes it possible for your weapons, items, and ships to all attach to one another, update each other with their data (how much energy they draw, etc.), animate, and exhibit the same behavior on all clients over the network. This system is pretty cool and in use already, so why does it need a refactor you might ask… Well let’s explain!
As we’ve continued development on Star Citizen and moved on from the days when this system we’ve added a lot of new features that weren’t around back then. One of the things that we’re adapting the
item port system for is all the player characters. So when you’re Heavy Marine is running around in the upcoming FPS release he will be using the same unified system for his items and attachments as your ship. We’re defining item ports on the character just like ships that have rules about what size things can attach to them and hook up into the player’s data driven entity. So for example if you equip an energy pack to port 24 it feeds into the suit energy which can be drawn down by a personal shield in slot 15. This is just an example for illustrative purposes but it should convey the basic principles.
Where this gets really cool is as we move towards the integration of FPS and ship combat with things like multicrew ships. Because the characters and ships both use a unified item port system they can interact in ways that were never before possible. So for example now when you sit down in the cockpit of your Hornet we can plug in your character and attached items to the ship. I.E. if your EVA suit is low on power we can charge your suit off of your ships reactor via a plug in the cockpit. If you sit down into a turret that is supposed to display a physical screen if you don’t have a helmet the ship can now query your characters item ports and check against the presence of a helmet. If you have one it can pipe in the relevant targeting data from the ship to your visor or it can decide it needs to bring up a physical display instead. Pretty cool, right?
Speaking of the visor we’ve also been refactoring the current implementation of the HUD visor for ships so it is much more extensible, optimized, and completely unified and interchangeable with the FPS HUD. The idea being that you can now toggle between visor modes yourself or the game can switch you contextually based on what you are doing. Sitting in your ship and the ships HUD will pop up in your visor. Hop out and pull out your gun and the visor will flip over to FPS combat mode and bring up a different set of information within the same framework. All in all this will be a much more robust and optimized implementation of the HUD that supports the seamlessness that so critical for the immersion of Star Citizen.
Design
On the Design side, January saw the hiring of two additional Technical Designers here in LA, Matt Sherman and Kirk Tome. They’ve already proved invaluable at freeing up Design bandwidth to tackle some longer term goals without sacrificing continued iteration and polish on the currently released content. We’ve tackled the design and prototyping of several of the longer term systems during this month such as how cargo will work, not just a paper design but actual in-engine prototyping of the core principles of the system working based off the paper design. There has also been a fair amount of design focus on working with Engineering on the polish and development happening on the signature, missile, and countermeasure system that we covered above.
As you may know from the write up on the ship pipeline the Design team plays in important role in the development of every single ship that goes into the game from ideation all the way to final implementation. To that end we’ve kicked off a fair number of ships at the beginning of this year. Ships like the [REDACTED], [REDACTED], and [REDACTED] were all kicked off this month and are moving forward in the Concept phase and still more were greenlit to start moving into the Hangar and Flight Ready phases. The design team has been working diligently on whiteboxes and nailing down metrics for virtually every item onboard ships. This was a step that we added to the Ship Pipeline when we took it over here in LA back in September and it’s already been paying dividends in less mistakes and reworks down the pipe. It’s also proving to be one of the most important stages in ship development!
We’ve spent a lot of time in the past talking about the ship pipeline but what are ships without items? To this end the Design team has begun the large undertaking of mapping out the entirety of the long term plan for ship items. Not only all the functionality of each ship item/weapon but also what different items or weapons of the same type will do differently and mapping that to a particular manufacturer from brand consistency. So not only do we have a lot of new items and weapons designed coming out of January but there is a lot more focus on making them feel different from one another and have distinct advantages and disadvantages and having those relate to the various manufacturers across all the types of items and weapons they make. If it sounds like a massive undertaking, it has been, but we’re already seeing this time spent paying off as it creates a much more unified and interesting framework for items within Star Citizen.
Last but not least is the tuning! Virtually every day our Design team and QA team are discussing balance changes, scouring the forums reviewing player feedback, and discussing action plans for addressing the issues that are identified. It cannot be oversold how important this time spent iterating and collaborating with QA and the community is. During January there has been a lot of adjusting, tweaking, and tuning happening some of which you saw in 1.0.1 and a lot more that will be releasing with 1.0.2. The play experience of space combat is very important to us and very important to the game so just remember, if you don’t like something or have an idea for how we could improve something, voice your opinion and let us know. It may take some time to get feedback addressed but we are always changing and improving it.
Art
Our Art team has had an exciting January! This month we hosted all the global members of the ship team in LA for our first ever “Ship Summit”. It was a great opportunity for our global Art, Design, Animation, and Engineering leads on ships to get together and discuss the current pipeline, improvements/changes, best practices/techniques standardization and for some of them to meet in person for the first time. Coming out of the summit we’ve further refined our pipeline and established common gold standards and techniques around which everyone can align globally.
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The fruits of this standardization and improvements to our modeling techniques are born out in the new items that are being introduced into the game. The new shield generators were all bit using the new pipeline for ship items/weapons and use the latest modeling and Tech Art techniques we’ve begun employing for all ship parts potentially other parts of the game as well. Our items have really come a long way from where they started and the visual improvement is pretty apparent, even for those who aren’t artistically inclined.
Furthering that our Art team has also been busy making use of the new paint system and the work done by Engineering and Design to get it so players can swap paintjobs. This is actually a great example of what makes open development so cool both for players and for developers. With the paint system
you’ve actually seen the first implementation for 1.0 with some ships having bespoke paintjobs using the new system. Then we iterated and for 1.0.1 added them to the buggy to prove the system was extensible and used that as an opportunity to put in the capability for swapping the paintjob at runtime. Once all that was complete we moved on to adding that swapping ability for players on the Aurora with some of the skins that we’ve promised as well as a fun one for the community in 1.0.2.
We’ve also begun concept, modeling, and flight readiness work on a number of upcoming ships. Some fan favorites like [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] are high on our list and progressing well towards hangar ready and flight ready respectively. Suffice to say that while January did not see the release of a new ship there are a lot of them running through the pipe right now and we’re excited to show them off once they’re ready!
Art, Design, and Engineering have been working collaboratively on some upcoming improvements to our damage system for ships that we look forward to sharing with you all once they’re all up and running. These improvements will vastly improve the fidelity of damage to ships while actually optimizing performance from the current state of the system. Coming out of the ship summit our internal team is looking forward to using the new system.
Last but certainly not least on the Art front are Characters. Following the Ship Summit we’ve been working on putting together a demo for the character team of where we can apply some of the best practices and techniques used by the Ship team to the character armors and other hard surface clothing/materials to continue to push the bar even higher for the visuals in Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
Animation
As many of you may already know, towards the end of last year we shot a lot of motion capture and performance capture at Imaginarium in London. What you may not know is that we’ve also created an entirely new and greatly improved rig for our characters this rig was created by the aptly named, John Riggs here in LA in close collaboration with the other members of the Character team globally. So, in the month of January we’ve spent a lot of time refining that rig with the new characters and new animation data from our recent shooting. So far progress has been great and the new visuals are looking very promising and we look forward to improving the animations in the game substantially for everyone as soon work concludes on this.
Well, that wraps up the department updates for this month and covers much of the progress that we’ve made this month. Before we let you go we just wanted to say that it is important to note that while each studio provides the community with a separate studio report much of what we’ve covered above wouldn’t be possible without our comrades around the globe. It cannot be stated enough that while there are multiple studios working on this project there is one team working together and it is only with each other that we’re able to make this the BDSSE.
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Hi everyone!
The New Year is off to a great start and January has been a busy month as always. We’ve made some updates to Arena Commander, have been very focused on planning for the coming year’s development efforts, and we shared a ton of information at the PAX South event right in our back yard here in San Antonio. Many people from the Austin studio were able to attend and participate in the event, and I certainly enjoyed the time this gave to interact with many awesome members of our community. We had Ben and James here and filmed a lot of footage that you may have seen, or will see soon on Around the Verse! Here are some in-depth reports from other teams in the studio!
Persistent Universe Team
ART
Our Art Team this month has been primarily focusing on props, characters, and environments. Our character team, comprised of Megan Cheever, David Jennison, and Wilbur Lord, completed a few of the NPC’s you will be able to see ambling around ArcCorp Plaza when the Social Module launches soon. Specifically we finished up the Medic, Bartender, and one of the Bar Patrons. We’ve got a few more characters to finish up before the Social Module launches, but it is exciting getting to meet a few of the faces we will get to see in the Persistent Universe.
Some of our other artists are working on fleshing out some of the cool elements that will eventually be featured heavily when the game launches. Ted Beargeon has been spending much of his time concepting out a communication relay that will send information through Jump Points. Watch the PU Town Hall presentation to get a sneak peek! Patrick Thomas, our Sr. Artist, finished up modeling the Repair Drones that will appear outside of space stations. Ken Fairclough made some concepts of various medical props that will be found in the Medical Unit. Last but not least, our VFX artist Lee Amarakoon created some nifty fountains that will appear in Terra Tower on the Terra Prime landing zone.
This month we also played host to CIG’s Environment Summit. Artists and designers from Foundry 42, CIG LA, Behaviour, and Illfonic flew down to Austin to spend a week ironing out the kinks for how we build our environments across the project and solidifying crucial details for standardizing environment construction. The Art Directors all got together and spent some time discussing architectural styles for our environments. We’ve got some pretty interesting ideas for creating some interesting and diverse locales across the ‘verse.
DESIGN:
The Design Team spent much of this month creating LISTS! Between lists of props, lists of ship parts, and lists of NPC animations, there was plenty of list-making to go around. These lists will serve a variety of purposes, and all are beneficial. The props list will go to outsourcing to help provide direction when creating the art assets. The ship parts list will help when scheduling out the creation of ship parts and weapons to eventually get them into your hands this year. The NPC animations list will provide a basis for the upcoming motion capture shoots so our excellent animation team will be able to fill our universe with lively characters.
In other news, our alien language designs are now at a point where we can start recruiting graphic designers to help with establishing alphabets for each race. Pretty soon you guys will be able to not only speak Banu, but write it too!
We’ve also been heavily discussing implementation of player occupations, with the first one to garner focus being MINING. Establishing final design details for mining and the beginnings of implementation will be a major focus next month.
ENGINEERING
The Persistent Universe Engineering Team hit it out of the ballpark in January, setting the benchmark for their monthly milestones for the months to follow!
They have completed a proof-of-concept of the backend code for Multi-Player Hangars and getting hangars running on our servers. They still have their work cut out for them to get everything from this early stage to a playable first iteration…but they are extremely stoked for these next stages of development and making commendable progress working together with the UI Team over at Behaviour. All of this will be intertwined with the team’s first version of its Process Manager that is undergoing heavy early testing and iteration as you read this!
The team has also completed the initial backend work for a first version of our in-game Chat system, and is also working closely with the UI Team at Behaviour towards getting this feature ready for our Social Module coming early this year. If you are a chat “fiend” then this will be your dream come true!!
Meanwhile, our PU Engineering Team has been working closely with our boys over at Moon Collider in the UK on various editing tools to help give life to the NPCs that will populate our Social Module. This makes it an exciting time on both sides of the Atlantic.
And if all this didn’t keep the team busy enough…in conjunction with the brainiacs over at Wyrmbyte…they are also investigating methods to get more players into our maps, starting early work on Player Persistence and performing R&D on developing our Economy Server…truly essential elements that will contribute to making the Persistent Universe and Star Citizen a sincerely mind-blowing experience!
As for the upcoming month of February….love will definitely be in the air around the studio. The PU Engineering Team has every intention of focusing a lot of that loving energy into every bit of code that they write! We’re certain it will show through in their work! Have a great and romance-filled February!
Live Operations Team:
QA
Star Citizen QA hit the ground running for the month of January. Fresh from the break, everyone was determined to improve the state of Arena Commander. Immediately QA began sending daily emails to production reporting on the state of the build and highlighting the most severe issues.
The QA team from Foundry 42 in Manchester did an excellent job with an in depth investigation into missiles and counter measures. Jeffery Pease ensured all lobby issues were accounted for and Andrew Hesse worked closely with developers in Santa Monica reporting and testing ship related issues.
Christopher Hill and Tyler Witkin compiled and reported on feedback from the community which sparked some significant discussion by Chris and the rest of development.
Improvements have been made to how our two teams work together. We are now more aligned with our testing and processes. This has helped to make our QA coverage and hand-off process much more seamless.
Further developments have been made in automated testing. Melissa Estrada has made progress on the creation of custom Sandbox Editor levels that can be utilized to automate functionality. She is also currently training our Manchester team on this process as well as general use and testing of the Sandbox Editor.
This month we welcome our newest member to the QA team. Todd Raffray! Todd is a veteran of the industry. He has worked on such titles as Bioshock Infinite, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Wing Commander: Prophecy and Ultima Online. Todd will be working closely with design testing systems as they come online.
It is hard to believe January is already complete. We are incredibly happy we were able to fit so many bug fixes in release 1.0.1 and hotfix 1.0.1a. Now we look towards February with more bug fixing releases as well as FPS/Social Module testing.
IT/Operations
January has been a productive month for us. From providing the user support for multiple team wide summit meetings across multiple continents to designing new methods for reducing transport times for large data we feel like we’re making a difference. Our UK IT team headed up by Hassan has been providing support for our new office in Germany by acquiring, configuring, and installing all equipment from desks and workstations to servers and networking. Working closely with the rest of our IT teams, Hassan was able to bring that office on line on schedule which was no small task considering all the dependencies from outside vendors and suppliers.
We’re constantly working on ways to make life easier for the developers. This month we’ve rolled out a new VPN solution which has made a big impact in network performance for the remote users while further enhancing our overall network security. We’re also working very closely this month with the DevOps team on the ongoing project to improve our build/deployment cycle. This is an area that can be attacked from many different directions so we’re providing DevOps with volumes of analytics and data about all of our systems with one single goal in mind. “Make things faster!” We’ve already made dramatic improvements but we are just getting started. Without going in to too many details, early data is demonstrating modest reductions in build times and major improvements in deployment (takes way less time to upload a version for the public.)
While the largest improvements on this project will come from the DevOps team, all of us in IT find it highly rewarding to be a part of it.
Dev Ops:
The month of January has been a major planning and infrastructure testing time for the Dev Ops team. We have been evaluating configuration management tools, patching solutions, CDN solutions, metrics reporting, and continuous integration tools. Our team has built a plan to redesign and rebuild the Star Citizen build server and launcher. This should make developing the game easier and we will have faster turnaround times for our developers to review the changes they check into the game. We have also designed a plan to help the server team communicate more efficiently to our infrastructure layer which should reduce their work load and automate many of the manual process currently required with starting up and running our game server cluster.
With all the planning, testing, and evaluating going on, we also have launched the 1.0.1 PTU and 1.0.1 patch to live. We added a bunch of new analytic instrumentations and hooked them up to our own database so that our designers can begin looking at live player statistics to balance the game and make design decisions.
Finally, we have been working on a few new launcher versions that we hope to be releasing over the next couple weeks. The Dev Ops team has a bunch more projects they will be taking on over the next month, and are looking forward to releasing more content to the community in our upcoming patches!
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Hi all,
Huge start to the new year. Not to waste time we worked over the Christmas period to set up a bunch of summits to kick off our plans for 2015, the first summit starting on our first day back from the holidays. In the UK we held both a Tech and Audio summit, which both went really well. We’ve broken down all our animation / cinematic needs for S42 in meetings this week, and the guys have been getting all the missions to a first pass playable state. Absolutely loads of new tech work going on, new environments and ship work, and we’re starting the big Wwise integration over the next weeks. This is going to be a big year with lots of updates and content to share with you guys throughout the year. Looking forward to sharing it with you all.
Cheers,
Erin
Programming
Happy New Year!!!!!!
Start of the year and straight back into it with a big tech summit over here in the UK. Over the Christmas period there was a last minute rush to get plane ticket and hotels booked for all the top tech engineers from the CIG Studios, Illfonic, BHVR and Wormbyte and getting everyone together for the first week of this month. One of the things that is great about these summits is that it gives us all a chance to meet up again in person and do some socialising with our far flung colleagues, and reinforce just what a great bunch of people we’ve got working on this project!
The summit itself was extremely productive, a full week discussing a multitude of topics from performance (general profiling, our new Zone system for spatializing everything from the universe down to each individual room in a ship, hierarchical LODs, GPU compute…), streaming, damage systems, UI, build systems, networking/backend, audio, perforce, new graphical effects, and much, much more. As you can see it was a busy, busy time! The upshot is we’ve now got a much better global overview and visibility of what the priorities are, both in terms of what needs to be worked on now, what is required in the medium and long term, and what is on the wish list. It also allows everybody to have a better understanding of which teams are working on what and how their work fits into the bigger picture.
Development side we’re doing various refactors of the code to help make it more reusable and maintainable. So for instance, seats in CryEngine have traditionally been tied very tightly with the vehicles, which is a pain if you want to use them in another location, say in a mining base or planetside. As a result we’re in the process ripping the seats from out of the vehicles and making them more generic. The vehicle seats will then become a specialised version of the new seat class.
Other than that it’s business as usual. Work has been progressing nicely on the various game mechanics such as the conversation system, take-off and landing, PAW, looting, and cameras, as well as continued work moving over to Wwise and general 1.0.1 support.
Design
A new year dawns on Star Citizen and it looks this will be a very interesting one for us. We are really pushing ahead with Squadron 42 and hope that we are zeroing in on what will be a very rewarding single player experience in the Star Citizen universe. The missions continue to get more layers of polish as they emerge from the White-Box stage and as new art work gets integrated they look more and more amazing. A lot of the systems that we require for Squadron 42 are starting to firm up well, and things like “Landing” and “Take-Off” are very close to being deliverable in Arena Commander. The conversation system has been getting a lot more design focus before Christmas and is coming along very nicely.
Arena Commander is in bug fix mode, and I know the guys working on this read the forums every day to pick up feedback from you all. There is a real challenge in getting the play balance right for a game that is in early development as I’m sure you are all aware. But having our community giving such precise feedback during its development is invaluable to us making this game what we all want it to be. Also, as the controls systems get more and more detailed, we have been working on a Tutorial for Arena Commander.
The Ship team have been working on balancing and we have a lot of new modules planned for existing ships like the Retaliator and the Redeemer that should allow players to customize their play experience to suit their style.
Overall a good month back after the Christmas break. Thanks again for all the marvellous support!
Art world!
It has been a fast and furious month, we had LA’s new Art Director visiting the studio followed by a visit from myself, Bjorn, Nathan and Ian to the USA to confirm pipeline updates and improvements; needless to say, all teams are moving in the same direction and we’re looking forward to seeing new content that not only beautiful but highly optimal!
Concept wise, we have hired two new artists who are already making great work for the team; the Cutlass variants and the personal Arc Welder PAW. Gavin has been continuing on the Starfarer interior and we’ll have more to show soon
Environment Art
The team has been working towards getting the Shubin Interstellar interior building set to Greybox complete. The main architectural elements are finished so now we are focusing on the smaller details. Our Vertical Slice level for Squadron 42 is looking really promising, we are still continuing to refine the layout as more assets get transformed from Whitebox to Greybox geometry and as design work on gameplay.
Characters
Barrelling along with creating the character pipeline, new base male, new base female, new base female head, 4 test heads to 3Lateral, Shubin miner and character customisation clothing limits, more
Ships and Weapons
Retaliator has continued to be worked on along with alterations to the ARGO Rescue Utility Vehicle, Idris exterior meshing tests and Gladiator damage preparation. As you know (or might not) we are underway with the development of new damage tech for the ships to help reduce memory bloat and art creation timescales, not long now till we have a final test up and running – can’t wait!
We have also started to look at FPS weapons and how to improve the pipeline and overall long term quality of assets, our first step being the PAW which is now concept complete!
VFX
There has been a major clean up and restructure happening with game content, this is never a glamourous task but always worth it in the end; With many of Sq42 levels being at a an early playable state (I mean early) we can now start to scope out the many VFX we’ll need to make this game shine – watch this space.
Animation
Been mostly organisation this month from animation. The re-target of skeleton on to the new final base character has taken up some time. There has been some behind the scenes naming convention changes and tidy up for handing ship animations back over to ATX with a flexible structure for moving forwards.
I have begun to break down our first animation drop from Imaginarium. We have also steadily continued work on the Gladius and Gladiator to get the landing gears etc in good working order for flight ready releases.
And of course we have been providing any support to AC we have been able to offer
Audio:
This month, the main event we had was a week long Audio Tech Summit that ran from Jan 19th to the 23rd. This was a whole week’s worth of in-depth discussion, gathering together our audio personnel from across multiple studio locations to meet here in Manchester (or video-conference where flying in wasn’t possible!).
This enabled us to hammer out ways to define or improve all aspects of our audio tech, from the ‘glamour’ of run-time audio systems (VoIP/porting, propagation, real-time effects, DSP, etc.) to implementation tools, to more mundane (but necessary) aspects like how best to build our Wwise project and roll it out internally, and other foundation work such as best practices for mapping out ships, planetside locations and so on. Readers of the audio thread on the ‘Ask A Developer’ forum will be pleased to know we included many concerns and questions raised there, in this summit, including how we might open things up to the modding community. We also looked at some third party tech solutions too for the likes of procedural audio and 3d audio solutions, of which there are many.
The overriding theme, if we can call it that, is the need for us to take system-driven approaches to the audio we deliver. With a game of indeterminate scale and potentially limitless quality and detail, we have to look to ensure whatever we do can expand and be built upon in a robust way. These systems need to be designed in a way that never compromises the quality we deliver, and need to allow us to override and apply an artistically-driven approach to sound wherever the system-lead doesn’t quite cut it.
We’ve welcomed another new sound designer to our ranks here in Manchester, which takes our audio ‘hub’ to five, not including a new audio programmer who’s based in Germany and a technical sound designer based in Austin. We’re still looking to expand, this year promises to be a very busy one.
As we’re concentrating on the move over to Wwise now, some of our next few updates (that are still in FMOD) may not be up to our usual quality bar; hopefully you’ll forgive us for that, we’ll try to make sure whatever we put out is as good as it can be but we hope you’ll all understand if things aren’t as good as they should be!
Otherwise in January we’ve been working on pre-prod and production for dialogue sessions, sound effects gathering, but mostly we’ve kept on keeping on with Fmod > Wwise migration. We’ll all be happier when we’re done with that so we can concentrate on making the ‘Best Damn Sounding Space Sim Ever’!
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Design
Like we mentioned in the last report, elevators were a big push this month. These elevators are way more complex than they seem as they’ll allow you to go from your hangar to planetside and more importantly to other players’ hangars. In the same vein, design for the first iteration of the chat system and for the multiplayer experience in hangars has been defined.
More planetside locations have been whiteboxed, and they are now in the hands of our talented team of artists. Nyx is the next “planet”, or rather asteroid, we’ll tackle. We noticed that the pace is accelerating; the team’s hard work on the planning for reusable assets and locations is starting to pay off. While we’re on the subject, iterations on tools have also been made to help us work better and faster.
The mobiGlas AR design is changing quite a bit as we’re starting to implement it for realz. It’s really exciting to see these functions appearing in the game world. Progress on other apps have been slowed down due to our focus on other features.
On the Flair side, we’ve been working on the February Takuetsu Model and preparing a cool lineup for the future flairs that’ll allow subscribers to show off their dedication to the project.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget bug smashing, yeah we do that too! There are a lot of bugs in the ‘verse apparently.
UI
Back fresh from the holidays, the UI team has hit the ground running: chat UI, lobby work, elevator UI, loads of mobiGlas mock-ups, more control customization features, logos, banners…. the list goes on and on.
Engineering
We’ve continued working on CryEngine Tools that will help us create AI used for NPCs populating planetside locations, working specifically on allowing Game Designers to customize their activities based on a time schedule. We’ve also began to start investigating how to hook-up Conversations for those NPCs will have between themselves, as to provide a more immersive experience for the player. We’ve also been very hard at work on modifying the Hangars to allow you to invite friends over to your hangar. We are also working on new UI elements to support this invitation/joining process.
We’ve completed a prototype of the in-game star map, which will eventually be viewable inside your ship and also in your mobiGlas. We’ve fixed a great amount of bugs related to the Lobby and Contacts feature. We’ve also started integrating the possibility of doing FPS matches through a Lobby. Last but not least, we added some very cool Control Customization options, which will let you customize your control in a much more precise manner than before.
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Concept
This month we focused on building one of the major tourism locations on Terra Prime: the Prime Tower.
Standing at a height of 2km, the Tower is definitely one of the most dominant landmarks on Terra III. It features a shopping mall with high-end shops and a park area at the top to rest and enjoy the view.
We’ve also started conceptualizing the Delamar landing zone, located in the NYX asteroid belt. It’s a former mining colony located under the asteroid surface, where rebels took refuge to hide from the UEE awhile ago. Nowadays, pirates have also settled in for the same reasons.
Finally, we’ve finished the Sim Pod concept arts and started the production so you can see it in your hangar soon!
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Greeting Citizens! Has another month gone by already since the last report? I guess it has, but it sure doesn’t seem like it. The FPS team has been focused on getting all of the remaining features implemented and polished for the first release. We’re very close now and we’re super excited for all of you to play it and let us know what you think!
Engineering
The programmers have been putting the final touches on the zero-g push & pull system. This allows you to navigate an environment in zero-g without the need for a jetpack or other form of propulsion. You can grab and pull yourself along surfaces, then crumple your legs up and push off, headed towards another point in the level. This is all done procedurally so it can be done anywhere in any level, without the need for designers placing specific points to attach to. It’s all pretty slick but requires quite a bit of polish and bug-fixing to address all of the different edge cases involved.
Two new weapons were also hooked up, one large weapon that is capable of dealing damage to multiple foes and another that is good for taking out enemies at a distance. I will leave you to speculate over what they are. Work also continues on the HUD and making the 3D radar system work for players who are currently in zero-g, which should be finished soon.
Lastly, lots of bug-fixing has been happening. Mostly for the FPS module but we have also squashed a few of the bugs for the 1.0.1 release.
Animation
The animation team has been busy creating block-out animations for all of the new features, and they just received the brand-spanking-new mocap data from December’s shoot. They are now in the process of getting these animations hooked up in game, which should give us some much more realistic looking movements that are more fluid and natural than what was seen during the PAX Australia demo.
Design
The design team has been putting the final touches on our two whitebox Team Elimination maps. Playtesting and balancing now begins and final art added. Paper designs for future maps and game modes are in the works now. A balance pass is in the works for all of the weapons and gadgets along with the new grapple beam attachment which will be used in the zero-g specific Team Elimination map.
Art
Vents, that is the word of the month for the artists! Art assets are being modified to support the vent and crawlspace system… and there’s a lot of it. This basically entails taking a bunch of wall pieces and putting in vent spaces so they all fit together like nice puzzle pieces.
In addition to all the vent work, the artists have also been busy working on the zero-g specific level concept, which is now going in to full production.
The concept and block-out for the long range weapon I spoke of earlier has also been approved, and work has now begun on the high poly model and visual FX.
VFX
The biggest piece of news from the VFX department has been a new family member for one of our artists. Congratulations Matt! While his new little one has been keeping him busy, he has also managed to create visual FX for the new weaponry and the grappling beam. This work will be ongoing in to next month.
That about wraps it up for all of us here at IllFonic. Enjoy playing Arena Commander 1.0.1 and we will see you very soon!
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Greetings, Citizens, From Terra’s snowiest landing zone.
It’s a new year, and it’s come with its changes. We’ve shown you a new homepage and tightened our integration with Arena Commander V1, we’ve wrapped up a lot of loose ends we’d had through 2014 and now we’re starting fresh with new goals and renewed excitement. Here’s a view of what we’ve been doing this month :
Community Hub
You’ve seen the new Homepage. It’s not final, we’ll be continuously tuning it based on you fans’ awesome feedback, but its goal will remain to appeal to newcomers and convey what Star Citizen is bound to become. That’s why we’re working on a new section, called the Community Hub (can you guess where it will be in the menu?). It will be able to cater to all SC fans, old and new alike. Function priming clearly over form, it will come packed with new features, that we’ll be detailing soon. Without spoiling it, we can say that if you already feel involved with Star Citizen, we’ll be taking it to a whole new level.
Starmap
Most of you caught a glimpse of the Starmap prototype we’ve been building during the holiday livestream. For now the prototype is Unity-based, and we’re working hard to make it as tightly linked to real-time game data as possible. This is a huge undertaking, conjointly with all teams involved in the Persistent Universe, and it will make sure that the Starmap is relevant and reliable. Once we’re done with linking the game and the map, and we’re confident that the map can answer questions like “Where am I?”, “Where can I re-sell my Stimulants shipment?” or “What’s the safest way to go from Goss II to Stanton I?”, we’ll port it into webGL and integrate it directly into the site, like the Holoviewer for ships.
What you can’t see
There’s also a lot of stuff that we do here that never shows up on the website, and it turns out that January has been pretty heavy with these operations. Since the website is also the Pledge gateway, we provide reports and financials to Cloud Imperium Games. We won’t go into any details, but every once in a while, like this month, we spend a bit of time reworking our business back-end system, our stats reporting engine, and the way we share player data with the game client.
Some stuff is not that obvious either but still has an impact : we’re setting up a global effort to optimize the website’s performance, and especially the way we handle smaller screen resolutions, mobile devices, and slower connections. Any feedback is welcome!
What’s to come
We’re always preparing for what’s ahead, and our Design team is already working on the next website updates. This includes new functionalities for Orgs, integrating Arena Commander stats into the Citizen Dossier, evolving the Contact List… and quite a few secrets we can’t really share right now. All to pave the way for the rest of the year and give the BDSSM a platform worthy of its scale. So stay tuned for more, and see you all in the ‘verse!
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With major releases happening in multiple Star Citizen modules this year, all needing significant AI support, the Moon Collider team dived weapons hot into January in a way that would make John Woo proud. We’re really excited about all of the cool AI tech that will be featured in these upcoming releases.
One of the big challenges for us in the next few months is that with so much progress being made on all of the different modules, we need to make sure we get the necessary AI features in place in time for each module to make full use of them. In between Arena Commander, Squadron 42, and the persistent universe, it’s like we’re making the AI for three different games simultaneously! But this is Star Citizen, right? Ambitious goals are why we’re all here, so we’re working hard and we hope you’ll be thrilled with the results.
Design
We were able to send two people to join in on the tech summit in Manchester at the beginning of the month. I think all teams would agree that this was a really valuable event. Certainly on the AI side it was great to discuss some of the big tech challenges that we need to solve this year, and start making some progress towards working them out.
One of the main things we did design work on this month was working out how to support local coordinate systems inside Kythera. When an AI is standing inside a ship, we want to be able to define “up” in reference to the ship, which makes all kinds of calculations a lot easier. But what happens when that ship docks with a station or another ship where “up” is different? Or if an AI is standing on one ship aiming at something on another ship? We want to hide the complexity of the calculations in these situations as much as possible, so we did a lot of work towards figuring out how to make that happen.
On the FPS combat side, now that we have the AI able to perform basic combat, we’ve been working with the Squadron 42 designers to continue refining their behaviors and get them behaving more realistically. This means giving them a greater sense of self preservation, so that they stay in cover more and take fewer unnecessary risks, but without making combat frustrating for the player. We’re also looking at how the AI should work together as a group, such as with sharing information about where the player is, performing flanking actions, providing covering fire, and so on. We expect to do plenty more design work along these lines in the next couple of months as the Squadron 42 maps get refined.
Engineering
Foundry 42 has been doing great work on the Arena Commander tutorial and this month we were able to start providing some support for some specific features needed in particular places of the tutorial. Usually, we will try to identify when support for something specific can be implemented as a more generally useful feature, or if
it’s an opportunity to add a feature that’s already on our roadmap but we didn’t expect to need just yet.
So, for example, we can create a spline for AI to follow, but up to now, they weren’t using boost to help stay on track if the spline was too aggressively curved. Having them apply boost intelligently as needed is quite useful, and since a need for this arose in the tutorial (you’ll have to wait to find out what it is!), we’ve now added that support in. This now allows designers to author tight splines in places that the AI would have had difficulty flying through before.
There was a lot of persistent universe work done this month. I mentioned the local coordinate design work above, and a lot of this design was also implemented, along with increasing the precision of world positions from 32 to 64 bit, which will allow us to keep AI positions accurate in much larger spaces, something that is essential for the persistent universe. We solved all of this at once by refactoring the internal position/vector structures that Kythera uses. It was a big task and it has happened alongside a lot of similar work that other teams have been doing throughout the rest of the codebase. It’s always scary when you go and change one of the fundamental data structures in your code, but it actually went quite smoothly, largely thanks to taking the time to work out the design thoroughly up front. A big shout out to our resident uber-coder Mike Bell for making this happen!
Another big area of work for the persistent universe is the Usables system. This is the system that allows designers to mark up objects in the world to allow AI to interact with them, and to define what those objects do. It is a powerful system that forms one of the cornerstones for making AI in the persistent universe able to do interesting things. We’ve been relying on a simple prototype system up to now, but this month we were finally able to make real progress on getting the full Usable system in place for the designers to use. There’s still more features that we need to add, but it was great to make a solid start on it.
On the FPS combat side of things, we made various small improvements as we continue iterating on the behaviors of the AI and polishing the combat experience. This is being mostly driven by the needs of the Squadron 42 vertical slice at the moment. So last month we added the ability for AI to be tasked with defending a particular area. This month we added a couple more tasks for the AI: holding position, which makes them aggressively defend a specific spot; and combat move, which tells them to move to a particular place while intelligently taking cover and engaging with enemies along the way.
We also improved their standard combat behaviors to make them investigate the last known position of the player if they lose all trace of the player for a while. We still need to improve this behavior to make them coordinate as a group, and just send one or two poor unlucky guys out to find the player rather than several of them going, but that will come as we start to add various types of group coordination.
Up to now the AI characters have been far too accurate with their weapons, making it necessary to fight them in god mode for all but the most masochistic developers. So we added in some accuracy modification support, allowing designers now to tweak the accuracy of the AI and make fighting them a little fairer. It’s actually quite difficult to make AI inaccurate in a believable way, and our change isn’t quite there, so we will need to work on this some more in the future.
Finally, we did some general optimizations to the Kythera AI systems that will be useful across all of the Star Citizen modules. We now have enough core features in place and some good representative levels for each of the modules that we can get a good idea of performance troublespots under “real world” conditions, so we’ve been making significant reductions to the time per frame that Kythera is using when there are large numbers of AI in a level.
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Hi Everyone! I’m incredibly excited to be able to add a Community section to this January report. I promise to keep these short and sweet, since by this point I’m just happy your eyeballs aren’t completely dried out. I hope to cover everything from past events to featured videos to inside jokes from our team, and grow this section with YOUR HELP. Like something? Want to see more? Let us know!
January’s ATV highlight comes from our community week in Austin. Ben, James and Thomas visited the Austin office and captured an extensive amount of PU goodness. On top of numerous interviews, Ben hosted an episode of Around the Verse with returning guest host Pete Mackay. Check out this special Texas-sized episode HERE.
After a quick drive down to San Antonio, our #StarCitizenTownHall during PAX South was a great success. Fans were treated to three panels, an ideas forum, and a special presentation by Chris Roberts. If you weren’t able to attend, or if you just want to relive all the Persistent Universe goodness, all five of the Town Hall panels are available HERE.
Beyond the panels, spending time with fellow citizens during the meet and greet was incredibly exciting. Meeting and talking with everyone in attendance only reinforced the fact that Star Citizen has the best community out there. Austin’s Ryan Archer snapped pics capturing the fun, and included his own blurb about the event. You can check that out HERE.
In the most comprehensive design post to-date, the Chairman presented mobiGlas. Immerse yourself in augmented reality using mobiGlas, and get your first taste of the Star Citizen universe through Chris Roberts’ vision. Words like “bonkers” and “stunning” can be found amongst the comments, but you need to check this one out for yourself HERE.
The forums added another piece of valuable info, thanks to moderator AngryPeas. He has created an info depot for new users that are looking to dig into Star Citizen. It was a great help to me, and I hope to pass along the knowledge to some of you. You can find it in the New Recruits section of the forums, or simply by clicking HERE.
Reverse the Verse is my personal highlight every week. Our team loves hanging out with the community in the immediacy created by Twitch. The #blamejames trend returned, and we’re actively working on getting the Austin office more integrated in RTV live streams. If you haven’t checked it out, we go live every Thursday…sometimes Friday. By following CIGcommunity on Twitch, you can be notified as soon as we go live! Come say hi! You can also check out past replays of Reverse the Verse HERE.
For our subscribers, we promise to bring you even more exclusive content in 2015. One aspect of that promise will be weekly updates to the Vault. Not a subscriber? Gain access by signing up HERE.
So much for keeping this “short.” Can’t wait to have more for you guys in February!
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Greetings Citizens,
Arena Commander 1.0.2 is now available via the Star Citizen launcher! This is a smaller patch which focuses on bug fixes, balance updates and smaller additions to the game. Fixes include everything from lobby kicking issues to the missing glass in the Herald space globe’s cockpit!
One of the most visible additions will be the expansion of the skin system to the Aurora line. You can now select your Aurora’s skin in the holoviewer (two alternates are available now, with more to come!)
Arena Commander 1.0.2 also sets the stage for the shield customization system. Additional shield generators will be available in the Voyager Direct store tomorrow, along with a post detailing our design plans for shields going forward.
A complete list of additions, fixes and known issues is available in the patch notes, online here.
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Squadron 214 is a multi-spacecraft equipped unit (technically, a “multi-level force applicator”) of the United Empire of Earth. The squadron was formally activated in 2675 as part of the military expansion that followed in the wake of Project Far Star. 214 has seen great success in their 270-year service history. The squadron is especially noted for the seven Medal of Imperial Valor winners on its roster, and for their success in short-range bombing missions, being proudly credited with the destruction of a dreadnaught, four battleships, nine “flat tops” and countless lesser fighters in their lengthy history. The 214th has also occasionally been a propaganda darling. “Twelve Went In,” a recruiting holovid, recounted the bombers’ 2720 all-out assault on a Harvester Dropship.
The origin of the squadron’s nom de guerre is shrouded in some confusion. Modern Black Crow pilots and their supporters claim that the name refers to the squadron’s cleverness and penchant for vengeance (Earth crows, now found on over a dozen worlds, are capable of remembering and attacking offending Human faces for years). Historians say that the truth is somewhat less valorous. The squadron was originally known as “Branton’s Braggarts,” a humorous reference to the unit’s overly-vocal pride over achieving the first perfect score in a HARD+ rated simulated bombing run under their first commanding officer, Captain Charlotte Branton. Fed up with the squadron’s braggadocio, ground crews began painting black birds on their spacecraft to show their distaste for 214’s ‘constant cawing.’ By the time Squadron 214 went into action, they were the Black Crows.
Today, 214 is an exclusively carrier-based squadron assigned two flights of Hornets, one flight of Gladius interceptors and an elite flight of Gladiator light bombers, though it is worth noting that one of the Hornet flights is currently inactive as its flight crews undergo transition training for the upcoming F8 Lightning space superiority fighter. The Black Crow’s bomber flights have flown every single-engine bomber in the UEEN arsenal, from the original Typhoon dive bombers to today’s craft, where 214’s illustrious Bravo Flight are using the Anvil Gladiator to further solidify their hard-earned reputation as one of the best bomber units actively operating.
Bravo Flight
The recent exploits of Bravo Flight in the Virgil Raid have become so well known that references to the Black Crows now almost exclusively refer to this distinguished bomber unit. The star of Squadron 214’s service record from the very beginning of training, Bravo Flight has been the exclusive designation of the unit’s elite bomber ships since the squadron’s inception. Bravo’s ground crews and flight engineers claim a spotless record, and only confirmed ace pilots and gunners are assigned to the unit.
Bravo garnered attention during the Vanduul push after 2681. Battling the encroaching horde from Orion to Tiber, their Gladiators pulled double duty as S&R craft up to the last minutes of the Tiber pullout. Since that time, the ‘bloodthirsty birds’ have found themselves forward-deployed to counter suspected Vanduul clan movements time and time again.
The Raid
Dateline: Vega System, just off the heavily guarded Virgil jump point. On the morning of August 9, 2932, a detached UEE Battle Group went to action stations. After a tense twelve hours with guns ready, the force issued an all-clear stand down. Aboard the UEEN Typhon, temporary home of the 214’s Bravo Flight, word quickly spread: Virgil’s aging Early Warning satellite network had relayed a distress signal from somewhere in the system. Admiral Bonds requested permission to jump his force to Virgil to investigate, but was ordered by High Command to abandon any investigation. Remote sensing had identified a 55% probable Vanduul clan in the system’s environs, and Command was not to risk personnel or materials investigating a system that had not been inhabited in a century.
The mood aboard ship was stricken. Here was a military rescue beacon deep in the heart of the site of one of the Empire’s bloodiest defeats. At best, they reasoned, command was letting a fellow pilot die, and at worst they were ignoring an opportunity to settle a very specific age-old score with the Vanduul. “We won’t forget,” flight leader Tam Thackston wrote in a delay-send message to his commanding officer as his crews universally agreed to break ranks and risk court martial to come to the aid of those in need.
Running with low-emission gear, the six Gladiators of Bravo Flight launched with full comm silence (and the suspected collusion of the Typhon’s flight deck officer). Three retained their standard torpedo loadout, while three others were configured with autodocs and other search and rescue equipment. Passing by UEE radar stations and tracking buoys, they were prepared to meet with resistance, but were only met with encouragement and wishes of luck from their fellow starmen. The unit made a low-flash jump to Virgil, and once across, Bravo triangulated the signal and determined it to be coming from the surface of the innermost planet.
Thackston opted to use a larger amount of fuel and proceed in a roundabout manner rather than heading directly to the planet and risking giving away the location of the jump point to the Vanduul. Unfortunately, his caution proved costly: the extended flight plan ran Bravo directly into an enemy patrol. A battle broke out, with the Gladiators attempting to eliminate a quartet of Scythe and a command-and-communications ship before they could call for reinforcements. The fight was over quickly, but with heavy losses: Bravo 3 sustained a direct blade collision during the fracas, killing gunner Paul Ransom and leaving his ship dead in space. The surviving pilot conducted a difficult combat EVA and boarded the S&R equipped Bravo 5.
Once past the Vanduul, the surviving Gladiators approached the planet’s equatorial zone, the apparent location of the now-silent beacon. The flight leader’s ship touched down near the source while the remaining ships provided a makeshift combat air patrol. There, the charred fuselage of a long-lost Wildcat deep space fighter was located in a clearing where its impact had knocked down several of Virgil’s giant trees. Investigating the wreck, Thackston discovered a pair of Human skeletons, one in a tattered flight suit, both wearing Black Crow patches. This ship must have been lost decades earlier in one of Squadron 214’s prior battles with the Vanduul. With some searching, the source of the signal was discovered: the Wildcat’s black box recorder, apparently re-activated in a recent lightning strike.
Thackston hurriedly buried the remains, first removing the dog tags so they could be returned to Kilian, and took off to rejoin his flight, the Wildcat’s flight recorder securely stowed aboard his Gladiator. Believing they had permanently shamed their squadron’s honorable history, they returned home fully expecting to be drummed out of the service for their disloyalty, but upon arrival they discovered that public opinion had come down harshly against Navy command once news of the beacon had spread. With the sack of Virgil still a sore point in Human memory, the pilots of Bravo Flight were feted as incredible heroes for having helped put a small part of that dark day in history to rest, along with revealing the incredible fate of their fallen comrades: the Wildcat and her crew had bravely perished when they opted to stay behind and cover the desperate evacuation in Virgil’s final hours. Together, they are just two more reasons that the Black Crows of Squadron 214 deserves to crow.
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Squadron 214 is a multi-spacecraft equipped unit (technically, a “multi-level force applicator”) of the United Empire of Earth. The squadron was formally activated in 2675 as part of the military expansion that followed in the wake of Project Far Star. 214 has seen great success in their 270-year service history. The squadron is especially noted for the seven Medal of Imperial Valor winners on its roster, and for their success in short-range bombing missions, being proudly credited with the destruction of a dreadnaught, four battleships, nine “flat tops” and countless lesser fighters in their lengthy history. The 214th has also occasionally been a propaganda darling. “Twelve Went In,” a recruiting holovid, recounted the bombers’ 2720 all-out assault on a Harvester Dropship.
The origin of the squadron’s nom de guerre is shrouded in some confusion. Modern Black Crow pilots and their supporters claim that the name refers to the squadron’s cleverness and penchant for vengeance (Earth crows, now found on over a dozen worlds, are capable of remembering and attacking offending Human faces for years). Historians say that the truth is somewhat less valorous. The squadron was originally known as “Branton’s Braggarts,” a humorous reference to the unit’s overly-vocal pride over achieving the first perfect score in a HARD+ rated simulated bombing run under their first commanding officer, Captain Charlotte Branton. Fed up with the squadron’s braggadocio, ground crews began painting black birds on their spacecraft to show their distaste for 214’s ‘constant cawing.’ By the time Squadron 214 went into action, they were the Black Crows.
Today, 214 is an exclusively carrier-based squadron assigned two flights of Hornets, one flight of Gladius interceptors and an elite flight of Gladiator light bombers, though it is worth noting that one of the Hornet flights is currently inactive as its flight crews undergo transition training for the upcoming F8 Lightning space superiority fighter. The Black Crow’s bomber flights have flown every single-engine bomber in the UEEN arsenal, from the original Typhoon dive bombers to today’s craft, where 214’s illustrious Bravo Flight are using the Anvil Gladiator to further solidify their hard-earned reputation as one of the best bomber units actively operating.
Bravo Flight
The recent exploits of Bravo Flight in the Virgil Raid have become so well known that references to the Black Crows now almost exclusively refer to this distinguished bomber unit. The star of Squadron 214’s service record from the very beginning of training, Bravo Flight has been the exclusive designation of the unit’s elite bomber ships since the squadron’s inception. Bravo’s ground crews and flight engineers claim a spotless record, and only confirmed ace pilots and gunners are assigned to the unit.
Bravo garnered attention during the Vanduul push after 2681. Battling the encroaching horde from Orion to Tiber, their Gladiators pulled double duty as S&R craft up to the last minutes of the Tiber pullout. Since that time, the ‘bloodthirsty birds’ have found themselves forward-deployed to counter suspected Vanduul clan movements time and time again.
The Raid
Dateline: Vega System, just off the heavily guarded Virgil jump point. On the morning of August 9, 2932, a detached UEE Battle Group went to action stations. After a tense twelve hours with guns ready, the force issued an all-clear stand down. Aboard the UEEN Typhon, temporary home of the 214’s Bravo Flight, word quickly spread: Virgil’s aging Early Warning satellite network had relayed a distress signal from somewhere in the system. Admiral Bonds requested permission to jump his force to Virgil to investigate, but was ordered by High Command to abandon any investigation. Remote sensing had identified a 55% probable Vanduul clan in the system’s environs, and Command was not to risk personnel or materials investigating a system that had not been inhabited in a century.
The mood aboard ship was stricken. Here was a military rescue beacon deep in the heart of the site of one of the Empire’s bloodiest defeats. At best, they reasoned, command was letting a fellow pilot die, and at worst they were ignoring an opportunity to settle a very specific age-old score with the Vanduul. “We won’t forget,” flight leader Tam Thackston wrote in a delay-send message to his commanding officer as his crews universally agreed to break ranks and risk court martial to come to the aid of those in need.
Running with low-emission gear, the six Gladiators of Bravo Flight launched with full comm silence (and the suspected collusion of the Typhon’s flight deck officer). Three retained their standard torpedo loadout, while three others were configured with autodocs and other search and rescue equipment. Passing by UEE radar stations and tracking buoys, they were prepared to meet with resistance, but were only met with encouragement and wishes of luck from their fellow starmen. The unit made a low-flash jump to Virgil, and once across, Bravo triangulated the signal and determined it to be coming from the surface of the innermost planet.
Thackston opted to use a larger amount of fuel and proceed in a roundabout manner rather than heading directly to the planet and risking giving away the location of the jump point to the Vanduul. Unfortunately, his caution proved costly: the extended flight plan ran Bravo directly into an enemy patrol. A battle broke out, with the Gladiators attempting to eliminate a quartet of Scythe and a command-and-communications ship before they could call for reinforcements. The fight was over quickly, but with heavy losses: Bravo 3 sustained a direct blade collision during the fracas, killing gunner Paul Ransom and leaving his ship dead in space. The surviving pilot conducted a difficult combat EVA and boarded the S&R equipped Bravo 5.
Once past the Vanduul, the surviving Gladiators approached the planet’s equatorial zone, the apparent location of the now-silent beacon. The flight leader’s ship touched down near the source while the remaining ships provided a makeshift combat air patrol. There, the charred fuselage of a long-lost Wildcat deep space fighter was located in a clearing where its impact had knocked down several of Virgil’s giant trees. Investigating the wreck, Thackston discovered a pair of Human skeletons, one in a tattered flight suit, both wearing Black Crow patches. This ship must have been lost decades earlier in one of Squadron 214’s prior battles with the Vanduul. With some searching, the source of the signal was discovered: the Wildcat’s black box recorder, apparently re-activated in a recent lightning strike.
Thackston hurriedly buried the remains, first removing the dog tags so they could be returned to Kilian, and took off to rejoin his flight, the Wildcat’s flight recorder securely stowed aboard his Gladiator. Believing they had permanently shamed their squadron’s honorable history, they returned home fully expecting to be drummed out of the service for their disloyalty, but upon arrival they discovered that public opinion had come down harshly against Navy command once news of the beacon had spread. With the sack of Virgil still a sore point in Human memory, the pilots of Bravo Flight were feted as incredible heroes for having helped put a small part of that dark day in history to rest, along with revealing the incredible fate of their fallen comrades: the Wildcat and her crew had bravely perished when they opted to stay behind and cover the desperate evacuation in Virgil’s final hours. Together, they are just two more reasons that the Black Crows of Squadron 214 deserves to crow.
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Chris Roberts answers your questions about Star Citizen in the latest edition of Ten for the Chairman! Chris answers ten questions chosen from development subscribers in each show. Want your question considered? Learn more about subscriptions here.
Questions covered in Episode 52: 2:28 – Custom Crew Uniforms. 3:24 – Banu & Xi’An embassies. 4:30 – Missions for more than one ship. 5:04 – How inventories work. 7:22 – Purchasable voice packs. 8:27 – Org contracts. 9:42 – Planetary quarantines. 10:50 – FPS dungeons/instances 13:19 – Tevarin update 14:21 – Organization leader tools
It has recently occured that a sizeable chunk of users are unable to use the launcher and are met with this error. This error is due to your IP being considered as harmful by Cloudflare and is most of the time due to your ISP using Dynamic IPs and someone using it at some point got caught doing bad stuff with it resulting in a blacklisted IP. The other common reason is the use of a proxy.
Rest assured that we are working on a solution for the users affected by this problem. We will release a new installer probably tomorrow containing an updated DSLauncher. It will also contain all updates we've released up to now.
For the users that aren't affected, the update will be deployed through DSLauncher, so you have nothing to do.
It has recently occured that a sizeable chunk of users are unable to use the launcher and are met with this error. This error is due to your IP being considered as harmful by Cloudflare and is most of the time due to your ISP using Dynamic IPs and someone using it at some point got caught doing bad stuff with it resulting in a blacklisted IP. The other common reason is the use of a proxy.
Rest assured that we are working on a solution for the users affected by this problem. We will release a new installer tonight containing an updated DSLauncher. It will also contain all updates we've released up to now.
For the users that aren't affected, the update will be deployed through DSLauncher, so you have nothing to do.[/feedquote]
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Greetings Citizens,
As we announced two weeks ago, RSI is moving into Europe with the formation of Roberts Space Industries International Ltd. To accomplish this change, we have made a major revision to the pledge store’s functionality, which includes the addition of an international store run by RSI International. As a result of this store change, all backers will be required to accept a new ToS, Privacy Policy, and EULA when connecting to Star Citizen game or pledging through the store (these will vary depending on which store you access.)
Also, the RSI International pledge store will begin charging VAT on orders placed by backers in the European Union. In order to reduce the impact of the VAT changes for users paying in Euros, we are keeping the dollar-to-euro exchange rate steady rather than matching it to the recent loss of value to the USD. While it may become necessary to adjust the exchange rate in the future, the immediate impact should will be positive for many European backers and offset a large part of the VAT tax! While this does not impact backers now being able to pay in GBP, the launch of the international store does mean they will no longer be charged a foreign transaction and currency conversion fees.
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Greetings Citizens,
I’ve seen a number of questions from backers who would like to know what we are going to do about stretch goals and Chairman letters in the future. As I indicated in the last letter, I would like to celebrate the goals with increasingly in-depth design posts, one of which you find yourself reading today.
These posts take a lot more work than the average chairman letter, but I think they add quite a bit more to your knowledge of what we’re doing with Star Citizen. And as with every aspect of the game, crowd funding means that we can do them right rather than fast. Going forward, we hope to have one for you roughly every other week.
And before you think I’m just trying to get out of my correspondence, we will also have a monthly ‘Letter from the Chairman’ where I can celebrate Star Citizen’s backers, poll you on important questions and let you know what’s on my mind. Starting February, we intend to do these around the middle of the month, split between the monthly reports.
Below, you will find what may be our most comprehensive design post yet, beautifully crafted by the team at BHVR responsible for developing the mobiGlas system. It’s everything you wanted to know about Star Citizen’s in-universe AR device… plus a lot you wouldn’t have thought to ask!
mobiGlas is going to be an important aspect throughout Star Citizen’s world, and something that speaks directly to my goal of removing immersion-defeating outside menus from the game world. I’m very pleased with what BHVR (working with the rest of the teams) have come up with, and I hope this post lets you see the amount of work we’re putting into making this exactly right.
- Chris Roberts
Design: mobiGlas
by Dave Richard, Lead Designer at BHVR
//COMMUNICATION RECEIVED.
//OPENING MOBIGLAS COMM.
Greeting Citizens,
When we started working on Star Citizen, we were trying to wrap our minds around the daunting amount of mechanics and features that would be present in such a rich game universe. Part of the team was tasked with designing character customization and the in-game shopping experience. We were trying to figure out a way to make shopping into something intuitive, immersive and viable in a multiplayer setting with the least amount of edge cases possible.
At that time, we knew very little about the mobiGlas, except that it was going to be the mobile device of the future and that it would be built from a very strong piece of polymer known as Glas. We had a hunch that the answer to our problems rested upon this device.
As we iterated on various ways to create the shopping experience of the future, the first augmented reality (AR) design of the mobiGlas was born, and from that point, it became clear that AR interfaces would be used widely across the game.
We pitched it to Rob and Chris (more than a year ago now). The goal of this concept was to present a unified user interface for Star Citizen. We proposed a personal electronic device that all players have with them all the time. It could be used as the ultimate replacement to traditional game menus and heads-up displays, while staying true to Chris Roberts’ vision of a totally immersive experience where shopping, messaging and customizing is made in a physical way with diegetic interfaces.
Since then, collaborative work between talented individuals has made the mobiGlas grow into the current design, while staying true to its original purpose. The following article is a deep dive into the mobiGlas current design state. We’ll go over the device itself, its uses, and some of the Augmented Reality Systems, as well as an overview of the apps you’ll be using every day.
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“Compact and light, it comfortably attaches to your wrist. Easy to use, it augments your life everywhere, all the time. With a mobiGlas, transform the ordinary into microTechordinary! Like all microTech products, the new mobiGlas has stunning visual design that conjugates style, power and usability without compromises.”
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As Chris Roberts put it: “I’ve charged the mobiGlas team with a very difficult task: creating a realistic interface that will help keep your affairs in order in an expansive galaxy that we hope players will further expand in unknown directions. It’s almost like building our own in-fiction operating system for an imagined future, and it’s very different task than building spaceships.”
And it’s exactly that! Our team is imagining an operating system from the ground up. It is incredibly challenging and satisfying!
Our first goal when we initially came up with the augmented reality feature was to integrate the game’s interface in-line with Chris Roberts’ vision for a fully immersive experience. Not only do the mG and all its functions fit in fiction, they come from the fiction. The hardware is built by the in-game mega corporation microTech, while the apps are developed by various fictional in-game developers. It’s important to us that you feel the personality of each developer when using its products.
Holding a series of apps made by different companies, they need to have their own branding. So like the rest of the universe, brands are created for every single one of them. This helps advance the idea of a living, breathing universe. Like today, everything has a brand. We want to put that forward in every aspect of the mobiGlas. If you enter a shop, you might be tempted by its new arrivals, or a seasonal sale. No worries, it won’t be like the worst shopping websites you can imagine, far from it. No spam mail on your mobiGlas!
The mG is a device used by your character(s). NO gamey shenanigans. This is called diegetic interface, where what you see is the same as what the character(s) sees.
This is really exciting to us, as we get to design an interface that is an integral part of the Star Citizen universe and not just an overlay that takes you out of the experience every time you use it. The augmented reality takes advantage of the high-definition environments, as interface elements are found in the 3D space amidst the game’s reality.
One of the biggest challenges when pushing for innovative interfaces is to make them intuitive. No matter how cool it looks, an interface is only as good as its simplicity to use. Obviously we’re keeping this in mind at all times. One thing you’ll notice when playing with the mobiGlas is that even though the device is set 900 years in the future, and looks like it, the flow and controls are based on what you know and use at the moment. We’re inspired by the real world’s best interfaces, taking the systems we like and giving them a new voice in the mG. We want to keep you in the comfort zone of current user interfaces, but still offer a far-future aspect.
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Augmented reality is a technology that is already available in our day and age. We wanted Star Citizen’s interface to be something more than a gimmick. It’s not just about the visuals; it’s about interconnecting every single feature of the game. The cool thing about what we’re designing is the fully contextual aspect of the interface. It adapts to your context, situation and position. The interface systems and the compatible entities found in the universe (practically anything) are interconnected, allowing us to link objects and characters to any relevant database and giving you fast access to the information you need. Aim at a character to know her affiliations; aim at a gun to get its market price in the current system; aim at a Consolidated Outland Mustang advertisement in the Terran subway to plan a route to the closest retailer. The uses are infinite and we intend to make the most of it.
The mG is an essential tool no matter your aspirations. It helps you track missions, review trades, plan routes and directly interact with the world in so many ways. It supports every gameplay role you can imagine. Not just a replacement for traditional menus, it is a tool in combat, space and planetary exploration, mining, scavenging, role-playing and more.
I’m sure by now you’ve gotten the point: your personal mobiGlas will be your best companion throughout your adventures in the ’verse, and we’re incredibly proud and excited to be working on it.
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The first thing we’d like to clarify is that the mG can show 2D and 3D information (text, panels, objects) in two concurrent ways: through augmented reality, using an AR display such as contact lenses, and through a holographic “screen” projected from your character’s forearm. It’s important to understand that this is not a choice — both AR and holo-screen interfaces are used at the same time to create the full experience.
On top of that, we intend to make the mobiGlas connect to external devices such as ships and screens in the environment. Imagine guild members in their hangar’s conference room seamlessly exchanging information by flicking it from their mG to a giant screen.
If we get a bit deeper in the visual style of how we are developing the mobiGlas, we based our initial concepts on the work done on the ship HUDs. Because they are part of the same universe, a mobiGlas needs to feel familiar to ship pilots. We took a lot of references from sci-fi movies that utilize a futuristic UI. We had to bring a lot of thought into them, because the style seen in those movies isn’t made to be used by a normal user. They are made to seem usable, when in reality complicated screens should display only the most pertinent information and clear user experience (UX) rules. We also looked at references in the video game world, such as the Dead Space series, one of the best examples of diegetic UI. They had a different challenge though, being a (mostly) single player game with a 3rd person camera.
A key part of this FUI (fictional user interface) style is having clear shapes, mostly geometric. Also important is a strong use of straight pixel lines. Since the menus are floating screens, we are using solid color backgrounds to help separate sections visually. We used just a few colors, with strong complementary accent colors as the main visual scheme. Mainly, blue is the general color used throughout the mG screens. Blue is the culturally recognized color for holographic effects; using this helps place Star Citizen in the classic sci-fi realm. To feature light effects, most of the text is white or a paler color from the background. We are already blurring the background and putting in a subtle color filter to help legibility.
The base model mobiGlas is a holo-projector on your wrist that projects a layered series of grids above it. In that sense, our visuals all rest on a grid system. The device creates a projected cube, and the mobiGlas screens are spawned inside. The grid system is then reflected on the general layout of screens.
Fully Diegetic
What I find exceptionally amazing about the mG is the fact that it exists 100% in the game world. As opposed to the AR interface that you can only see through a contact lens, the holographic screen projected from your forearm can be seen by the other characters as well. This allows us to create powerful immersive scenarios: Imagine exchanging information by showing your mG to another character, or at the opposite extreme, spying on someone else’s mobiGlas to steal sensitive information.
Some establishment might jam or block your mG to avoid scanning patrons. Try bounty hunting in these locations without the ability to get the names and IDs of people around! We always keep in mind the in-fiction parameters on how the mobiGlas screen system and augmented reality lens would work. We want to bring immersion and gameplay even into the menu systems.
Interconnection
Probably the most important thing to understand about the mobiGlas is that it is connected with practically every other component in the universe, from player characters to Takuetsu ship models. Thanks to the TAG system, which we’ll explain further another time, the mobiGlas can fetch data on anything that has been tagged, and interpret it depending on the situation.
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Through AR or through the holographic screen, you are able to collect information and cross-reference it. You can interact with the world and use it as a shortcut to a relevant app and its data. For example, while visiting planet X, you see a big billboard showing off a video commercial for a ship sale at Astro-Armada. You activate your mG AR mode to discover various holographic “buttons” floating right there beside the billboard. From here you can activate mG.compass, an app that shows you the way to Astro-Armada (think GPS), access the galactapedia network to get more information on the ship, or compare the ship stats with one of yours through mG.shipWorks. So many possibilities.
With such a wide and broad game universe the ability to connect game components through the various apps for comparison and specialised information is critical. Mastering this functionality will give you the edge in many fields.
h2. New Technologies
The mobiGlas interface is being developed so that it can be used and reused with different hardware. The Oculus VR is definitely a device that makes the mobiGlas look particularly stunning. It brings you close and personal with your mG device, putting an emphasis on the parallax effects of the holo-projector screens.
Even closer to our reality is the reuse of interface elements on your tablet or other mobile device. The idea is that the Star Citizen companion app is your character’s mobiGlas wrist device (kinda old-gen though!). The visuals would be the same as in the game, but more importantly, the functions and data would cross from the PC to the tablet and vice versa for one seamless experience.
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The mobiGlas is a forearm mounted electronic device capable of projecting a holographic interface and render an augmented reality interface through any AR display, such as contact lenses, glasses, visors or screens. It is developed by microTech, a corporation specializing in electronics, based in the Stanton System. The mobiGlas is now used in a wide range of fields, both civilian and military. Here is a breakdown of the mobiGlas main components:
-Wrist mounted case
Physical part of the device, solidly attached to the wrist. Fits most space suits and civilian clothing, or can be attached directly to the arm.
-Universal mobiGlas Connector (UMC)
The male part of the UMC.
-Holographic Projector
Made from a super resistant glas lens, the projector sits in a protected crease on top of the wrist case.
-Holographic Screen
Counts as a component even though it’s not physical. The layered screen is entirely holographic. 3D holographic objects can be projected, as well as flat (screen) holograms.
-Back Panel
While you see the main interface on one side of the holographic screen, the other side is displaying something else, an opaque image for example.
-Biometric Battery
This component feeds your device with power and monitors your vitals for security reasons.
-Primary Scanner port
The mobiGlas comes with the default MT.Scanner, used to get info about your surroundings. It is a short range multifunction scanner. Can be upgraded.
-Specialized Scanner Port
An opened slot ready for custom specialised scanners.
-Data Drive
This is where data is stored. The data drive is synced on the user’s genetic signature and shuts down or is destroyed if it loses contact with the user.
-Intra-System Comm. Card
For intra-system communication. The comm. Card can be changed for specific needs.
-Power Chip
The P79xx is the most powerful chip yet used in a personal device. Its technology is based on microTech’s high-end experience on ships’ electronic components.
-Chip slots
Open slots to insert augment chips. There is a large collection of chips, mostly by microTech but also by other developers.
-Wireless Emitter
This is to be connected and synced to any ship, power suit, environmental suits or power armor equipped with an AR display visor or other compatible devices.
-Optional Armor Cover Add-on
To protect the mobiGlas from hazards.
mobiGlas Series
As mentioned earlier in this article, Star Citizen’s interface is another chance for us to expand on the fiction. The mobiGlas, as we present it, is but the first and most widely used model of intelligent device you’ll be able to own in the PU and in SQ42.
Just like ships, we aim at building various models and series of mobiGlas-like devices. Don’t be surprised if a competitor to microTech appears with their own intelligent devices introducing the type of competition we see among mobile devices today!
Different generations of mobiGlas would present different functionalities, performance and capacity. The goal here is not to limit some models but rather give a wider array of functions to some models versus less varied but more specialised functions in others. For example, the UEE navy mG and the Advocacy mG are special models built for those organizations with specific apps, functionalities and access rights.
Obviously different models have different aesthetics even in the same series. The visuals of the physical device and the interface style would be custom for each model. “Princess Glitter Pink” mobiGlas was the fad in 2942 you know.
You can modify or change your mobiGlas for another model as long as you can afford it and can find the model you want. Some are rare! mobiGlas, mobiGlas S, mobiGlas+ ?
The first models available in the PU are the standard mG and the exploration mG, which was awarded to all backers before the “42 million” pledge goal:
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_ “Explorer-class mobiGlas Rig – Every player who backed before we hit $42 million will start the game with their own, visually distinctive mobiGlas “ExoGlas” rig which can be used to access the Observist at any time. This backer-exclusive mobiGlas kit comes pre-loaded with additional galactic information that new players would ordinarily need to explore or barter to fill out; it’s our way of honoring the information you’ve collected about the Star Citizen universe through the RSI site and community over the past year!”_
Add-Ons, Chips, Apps & Hacks
Just like many other components in Star Citizen, we want you to be able to have a lot of choice when it comes to customizing your experience. The mobiGlas is no exception, from shady corners of the universe to top notch UEE computer science laboratories; you’ll find experts that can alter and tweak the standard mobiGlas.
Upgrading brings new or enhanced functionalities to the mG, and sometimes at a cost, either monetary or worse … try to stay legit, Citizens, or you might lose an arm in the process!
Add-Ons are physical devices clipped to or inserted in the mobiGlas case. They range from specialized scanners to shielding shells. The most diverse add-ons on the market are called augment chips. These little pieces of hardware contain code and sequences that enhance functionalities into advanced, specialized tools.
Last but not least, you’ll have a variety of apps to choose from. As you might have guessed, apps are software that are either part of the basic mobiGlas package or bought (with UEC) and downloaded from the mobiSTORE. We aim at providing many apps to choose from, that present similar content but in different ways. Beyond the basic packages, these extra apps might feature specialized content that are great for some of you and near useless for others. It’ll be up to you to find and make best use of your favorite apps.
Functionality groups
The mobiGlas is a very complex device that features many possible functionalities. To help organize them and interpret them in various game systems, such as damage states, they have been classified in four functionality groups:
Group.A
Essential Functions: These functions are at the very foundation of the mobiGlas. They are critical to the mG experience and to the core game components. These functionalities appear no matter what, even in an extremely damaged or cheap version of the mobiGlas. A good example of an essential function is the ability to access your communication availability options.
Group.B
Advanced Functions: These functionalities are part of the core design of the mobiGlas but are not essential. They usually are more specific to a particular system, and if they don’t appear in a model or get disabled, you could manage without them. An example of an advanced feature is the planetside map and radar functions.
Group.C
Specialized Functions: These super advanced features are to be used in very specific cases for specific character profiles. They are usually linked to chip add-ons or special models. For example, a biometric scanner is a Group.C function.
Group.D
Extra Functions: Extra functions are inconsequential to gameplay. For example, these include themes and styles. In case of a damaged mobiGlas, the system cuts off Group.D functions in order to prevent further damage from unnecessary functions.
Damage
Like pretty much any item, the mobiGlas is not impervious to damage. The mG damage level follows the left lower arm damage status as explained by [REDACTED]-illfonic in the “Design: Healing Your Spacemen” article.
Normal: In its normal state, the mobiGlas features are all working perfectly. Smile.
Hurt: In the hurt state, some functions are disabled and glitches can be experienced in the interface. Some Group.B functionalities are disabled. Group.C functionalities are mostly disabled.
Damaged: In damaged state, the advanced features (Group.C) such as the chip add-ons and the scanners cannot be used at all. Furthermore, the mobiGlas interface becomes very glitchy. Even more Group.B features are disabled.
Ruined: In ruined state, non-essential mobiGlas features are practically useless. Frequent glitches make it harder to use.
GLITCHED INTERFACE
When damaged, you’ll experience visual glitches with the mG and its AR display. The goal here is not to make your lives difficult when trying to interact with the interface, but just to dress it up and offer a fun challenge. Effects such as phasing, displacement and color inversions could be used sporadically to illustrate a glitched interface.
For example, the words on screen could phase and be displaced. Large chunks of pixels could move around or stay stuck to the screen until the next refresh. Portions of the screen could have inverted colors.
MOBIGLAS ZONES & RANGES
“Ranges” or “AR zones” are used to know if an object looked at through the mobiGlas AR display should be shown and if it can be interacted with. They are custom per object, relative to their size, position and context. For example, massive objects such as billboards or capital ships have mid and long range zones that go much much further than the ranges of a Thorshu Grey!
All objects that are interactive with the mobiGlas have a range and angle of interaction. In order to interact with the object you must aim at it, be close enough and see it clearly on the screen. This avoids any confusion or conflicting selections.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the interface zones used by the mG:
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A-Holo-Screen: The projected holographic screen takes 95% of the player’s display space when open. The main screen is where the bulk of interactions are made in the mobiGlas and the main medium for on-screen interface. In case the players have no AR display devices, it can be used as the “window frame” to the augmented reality.
B-Extended Holo-Screen: Some apps necessitate an extended, panoramic view.
C-Close Range AR: In AR, objects seen in their close range usually display low to no information as they are too close to render properly or to be read properly. In some situations a special icon tells the player the object is too close.
Being too close (zone c) to an object makes it unselectable. This is to ease the selection of components within other components (e.g. a shot of whiskey on a table). The table itself is too close to be selected, making it easier to select the shot glass.
D-Mid Range AR: In AR, this zone is the sweet spot where an object’s full AR information and interactions are available. When the object stands inside the mid range, the object shows that it is selectable. At this range, the player can select and interact with the object.
E-Far Range AR: In AR, objects in their far range appear and show minimal information. The far range objects’ information and feedback are disabled when mid range objects are in front of them. In some contexts, long ranges can be infinite.
h1. USING THE MOBIGLAS
“Your day starts with putting in your AR contacts, or AR display glasses, which automatically connect to your mG. Following a quick boot-up sequence the augmented reality interface is displayed. Now you have access to a massive amount of meta-data found in the world just by looking at things around you.”
You’ll be using the mobiGlas in practically every context. Considering that all citizens are allocated a mobiGlas, it’s everybody’s personal assistant device, as ubiquitous as smart phones are today, if not more!
As it connects to all sorts of things around you, it syncs pertinent information contextual to your situation. Whether you’re reading the planetary news while taking it easy at Café Mussain or reviewing your ship’s armor status whilst in the heat of battle, the mobiGlas apps are tailored for a wide array of gameplay situations.
The AR interface is very powerful and intuitive, offering an experience closer to reality, while putting traditional interfaces in a coherent, in-fiction context. When shopping at a location, rather than getting a big scroll list of items for sale as in a traditional game interface, your shopping is done via AR overlaying actual, physical items. AR is dynamic; the interface shown in the world is filtered based on several factors such as your location. For example, while entering a shop like Cubby Blast on ArcCorp, your display shows off a connecting icon and boots the mG.easyShop app AR interface. In this context, items available for purchase are shown and highlighted right there in the world, with the addition of AR labels showing you the prices and specs of these items.
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The idea is that your mobiGlas device is constantly linking to local servers for information depending on the location (so each store serves up specific local data that your AR interface can display). At any time you can choose to change the AR filter to another mode to be able to access other type of information. For example, while still in that same shop, you could switch to the exploration filter which shows AR labels for players’ information such as player handle, bounty, etc.
The mobiGlas wrist device is used for entering commands and to display objects or extra panels projected from the holo-projector. Some apps use only the holo-screen, while others rely heavily on AR. The holo-projector is similar to the ship HUD in the sense that it uses 3D objects in combination with panels and text to give you the right information.
“Forget about the old ways of touching a screen. The mobiGlas finally replaces the 900-year-old technology with an ultra-precise portable holographic interface. With the Holographic Augmented interface, project critical information directly in your reality with unprecedented clarity. What you see around and over real objects and persons becomes interactive; you can literally touch the meta-data.”
Moving things around
Where it gets interesting is with the advanced uses of AR in combination with the attached wrist holo-projector. For example, you can take and move objects around in AR for various reasons. While shopping, you can “pick up” the AR version of a shelved object, effectively creating a new AR object with following labels that you could keep “on the side” for quick comparison with other products elsewhere in the shop.
The same goes for mG.shipWorks, an app allowing you to customize ship loadouts directly on your ship, using holographic representations of ship components which can be “grabbed” and moved around.
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The real power of the mobiGlas comes from its augmented reality interface. Since AR requires more exploration and explanation we decided to share more information on that mode. The system is quite simple in theory: 3D Interface objects are placed directly in what you see instead of flat on your screen.
As you might have guessed, implementing an AR interface is easier said than done. Various systems must be put in place to make sure the information and interactions are well interpreted and easy to use, avoiding frustrations. I know I’ve rage-quit games because of appalling user-experiences; how about you?
AR Objects
AR objects are what appear in the AR display. There are several categories of these special objects:
ENHANCED ENTITIES
Enhanced entities are real world objects or life forms with an added effect such as outline, lighting or shader seen through the AR display. The objects are part of the environment. They move, act and collide normally. Enhanced entities have short, mid and long range values, and states that alter their appearance.
HOLOGRAPHIC OBJECTS
Holographic objects have very similar rules to enhanced entities, but are not real and thus have no collision. They are attributed a special material that makes them invisible by default but visible while looked at through the mobiGlas. Like enhanced entities, they have short, mid and long range values, and states that alter their appearance.
Navigational icons and signage are notable holographic objects that appear only in augmented reality to avoid cluttering some of the more pristine areas of the universe.
AR LABELS
AR label, or “larbels” as we like to call ’em, are 2D panels placed in the 3D world. Labels are used to view additional information and data about objects found in the environment, such as prices, descriptions, names, etc. They vary in style, shape and form, depending on their location and use.
AR labels are either always there; appearing when in long, mid or short range; or appearing when in focus. This is defined per label. On top of all this, labels can update and expand with more information the more attention you give the related object.
AR Object Status
AR objects, no matter what type they are, appear differently depending on the range at which they are viewed and the state they are in.
[Out of Range – Long]
When an object is further away than its long range zone, it is invisible, even through the AR display.
[Out of Range – Short]
Objects that are too close are out of range. They cannot be selected.
[Idle]
AR objects are idle when seen at a long range. An idle object can be seen through the mobiGlas but cannot be interacted with or even selected. The highlight or holographic object should be dim.
[Selectable]
Every AR object seen through the mobiGlas in mid range is in a selectable state. Selectable objects have brighter highlights and the holographic objects are almost opaque.
[Selected]
When you focus on a selectable AR object with the mobiGlas it becomes selected. A selected object’s highlight becomes very bright and animated to clearly show what is selected.
AR Object Limitations
AR information can be blocked or altered in many ways and for various reasons. Here are the various status names and descriptions.
[Altered]
The mobiGlas can be hacked to display deceitful information. Altered labels are hard to detect without proper equipment and appear as legit labels with altered information.
[Blocked]
Blocked information is made unavailable by the user who owns the information. This is done in multiple ways using mobiGlas advanced features like jammers. Blocked labels don’t appear at all or show the following label: [UNAVAILABLE].
[Contextual]
Contextual labels only appear to a user who’s in the right context to see them or needs the information at the moment based on the context. For example, to normal folks, bounties only appear if they currently own the bounty contract, but to a licensed bounty hunter with the appropriate app, all bounties are visible.
[Restricted]
Only members of the same faction as the restricted object/player and of a clearance level equal to or higher than the restricted level can get this data. Everyone else gets the following label: [RESTRICTED].
[Unavailable]
Sometime there is no data available for the label to show. In those cases, the label doesn’t appear at all or displays the following: [UNAVAILABLE].
AR BASIC CONTROLS
Maybe you are wondering if AR is something that would always be there, ALL the time. The answer is no. AR is necessary to access a lot of information and features but doesn’t have to be ON all the time. You decide what your experience should be. While the AR display is off, some objects can be interacted with that automatically opens the mobiGlas’ AR display with the relevant filter ON.
MOVING IN AR MODE
While in AR mode, you can move freely, even though you need to be in first-person view to see the AR interface. There is no restriction on the type of movement you can do with the AR vision ON. For example, walking, running, crawling and horseback riding are all super cool in AR.
SELECTING/INTERACTING
AR objects sometime have complex interactions. To access those interactions, you must select the object first. To select an AR object, you just have to walk in the mid range of the selectable item and center your view on it. This is called focusing. When selected, the object is highlighted in the 3D space with a very bright holographic outline. To start interacting with the object and accessing all its options, hit the accept/action button.
CHANGING FILTER MODE
It’s possible to cycle between the various filtering modes (more on that later) by using a set of buttons yet to be determined. It is also possible to access a specific filtering mode automatically and contextually by focusing on an object, by entering a world area tagged with a filter type, or by interacting with filter boxes.
MOVING AR OBJECTS
One powerful thing the AR mode can do is let you move holographic objects around. This is done automatically in some modes, such as with the hangar customization furniture placement. The controls are similar as “holding” an object in most FPS games. The object stays centered in the screen except if it collides with environmental boundaries or anchor points.
We soon realised that with so many AR objects in the world, the environment would be quickly cluttered with interface items, which is something we wanted to avoid for readability. This brings us to:
AR FILTERS
There are so many interactive items available in the world that we decided to add a filtering system to focus on the objects you are interested in at the moment. While your AR display is ON, you can switch filtering modes at will. Each filter shows different categories of AR objects. Some filter modes use a combination of categories. We might even let you create your own filters at some point.
Practically any app found in the mG has its own AR filter. Here is list of filter examples:
Exploration mode
This is the most global AR filter there is, and is the default filter. With the exploration filter, every AR object is shown. When an AR object has additional information that would appear in a different filter, that additional information is indicated by a specialty filter icon, allowing you to switch to that particular mode in order to display the info. Interacting with AR objects in exploration mode switches the AR filter to the correct specialty filter automatically.
AR.easyShop
Syncs with shops and other mobiGlas devices that are broadcasting items for sale. Your mobiGlas shows AR information for any object that can be bought or traded.
AR.shipWorks
Focuses on any shipWorks AR objects available, such as ships and ship components.
AR.hangarService
Focuses on room customization. Shows anchor points and customization grids, and highlights movable objects.
Others
This filtering list is forever expandable. Upgrades, mods and hacks can potentially add new filtering modes as well.
AUTO-FILTER FOCUS
To ease the use of AR mode and limit the amount of button pushes necessary to get information from it, the filters are set automatically, based on the object viewed prior to opening the AR mode. For example, while you’re walking around Casaba Outlet (a clothing store) and looking at cool jackets, when you activate the mobiGlas AR vision, the system interprets that the current focus is a coat in a shop and thus switches to the shopping filter automatically.
AUTO-FILTER AREA
Opening the AR mode in auto-filter areas activates the corresponding filter automatically. That said, it does NOT force you into using that specific filter; you can always switch to another. Note that the Auto-Filter Focus has a higher priority than the Auto-Filter Area. For example, a character enters Dumper’s Depot and opens the mobiGlas in AR. The AR automatically sets itself to the Shopping Filter since Dumper’s is a shop.
FILTER ICON
Filter boxes are AR objects that show a specific object has additional AR functions in another filter than the one selected at the moment. For example, while in Exploration filter in your hangar, while looking at an expansion door you’ll spot an AR hangarService filter box. Selecting the box in mid-range switches the AR filter to the corresponding type.
AUGMENTED OBJECT TAGS
Augmented information found in the world is tagged with content type using the TAG system. This is used to filter what is to be shown in the various modes of the mobiGlas.
When an object is a locked selection, the outline of the object becomes brightly highlighted. If, by object movement or your movement, the locked selection exits the soft selection circle by 50% or more, the object is automatically unselected and the bright highlight disappears. While in this state, you can interact with the object. Any items inside the soft focus area get softly highlighted and some additional information is displayed.
C-Soft Selection Circle
This large circle defines the area where the locked selection can move without AR information being lost. When the locked selection exits the soft selection by more than 50% of its total area, the object is unselected automatically. The soft focus circle is static in location and size. All other items, which are not inside the soft focus area, show only their anchor icon and name.
Other AR Systems
FOCUS SYSTEM
The focus is how much attention is given to an AR object. This is measured by how much time you look/aim at an object in the world. As your focus is prolonged on an item, its labels will expand and display more information about the object.
LAYER SYSTEM
In terms of aiming, the mobiGlas interprets what is aimed at by using the ordering of what is seen. So for example, looking at a coffee mug on a desk, the coffee mug is on top of the desk so it is prioritized.
DENSITY SYSTEM
When multiple objects are cluttered at the same spot, you are able to move the cross-aim slightly to switch between the different objects. The system cycles between the various items that are in the same general area.
Labels appear relative to density. The aimed-at or locked object information appears in priority, while the rest appear only if the current label density is judged acceptable for readability.
MOBIGLAS APPS
You might have been wondering exactly what kind of apps you can expect to find in the mobiGlas. As a last treat, we’d like to share with you short descriptions of some of the apps we’re currently developing.
MG.HOME
HOME is your hub; it’s from this customizable menu that you’ll access the rest of the mobiGlas content. Being an operating system holding various apps, the home page will have a dynamic app layout to facilitate your experience.
Mainly, HOME is a portal to the other applications that it displays with branded icons. The app selection is contextual to the current situation, featuring content that makes the most sense to you at that moment. Favorite applications and recently used applications are also found on this screen. HOME analyzes what apps you’ll likely need to see and offers quick links to them.
HOME is built with widgets that can be modified and rearranged to fit your play style. You choose which information shows up where and in how much depth this information goes. For example, I keep my alertCenter widget handy in HOME to have a glimpse at any notifications that came in recently. The news and economic data widgets are also very useful to see what kind of contract could be available in the neighboring systems.
The more you use your mobiGlas and customize HOME to fit your needs, the more accurate and efficient you’ll be.
MG.ALERTCENTER
This app is exactly what it sounds like. Anytime any of your apps receive new data, for example when you receive a contract update or a hangar invitation, you will receive a notification, which appears in the alert queue of alertCenter. Notifications also appear in a dedicated section of your AR display. That way, you’re always notified when something important happens, no matter your situation.
alertCenter offers a slew of options to customize which event should appear as a notification and when. Most of you are going to have busy, busy days in the Star Citizen universe! Use alertCenter and never miss anything.
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MG.EASYSHOP
EasyShop is the mobiGlas application that allows you to buy and sell things, from ships to handkerchiefs. It is what links you to a store’s inventory and facilitates your shopping experience.
The shops in the persistent universe feature actual physical products that can be looked at and bought just as in a real world shop. To buy an item, you use the AR display with the shopping filter ON. The mobiGlas syncs with the broadcasted information of the shop to show data on shelved products.
While most shops takes advantage of the AR display, some stores choose to show their products via a catalog. easyShop is also a platform to access these catalogs. Catalogs are dynamic and feature beautiful holographic projections of products. They can be re-arranged, searched, sorted and filtered at your discretion.
MG.CARGOMANAGER
Simply put, cargoManager lets you search and manage your entire inventory. It consolidates every possible cargo you might have: hangar warehouse, ship cargo, pants pockets, etc., and categorises them into a database.
It allows you to access your entire inventory from ship to weapons, from hangar to resources. It is like an encyclopedia of your possessions. Therefore, it provides the tools needed to track, compare and manage your possessions, guiding you towards informed decisions.
MG.CONTACTS
The contacts directory is the complete repository of the contactable entities you have met, collected from the persistent universe or added manually. Primarily, it allows you to find, add, remove, ignore and block other Characters. Other functionalities, such as grouping, search options and filters, allow you to find, organize and manage your contacts. Contact entries include players, NPCs, planets, corporations, orgs and so on.
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MG.SCHEDULER
mG.scheduler is a planning application. Missions, contracts and special events are automatically or manually entered and tracked by scheduler. It allows you to quickly get information about important events such as starting/end date, who issued a contract, what’s the goal, a backlog of conversations and so on.
Mundane events such as appointments and shipping estimates can be automatically entered as well. You can enter your own notes and events or sync with the scheduler of a particular individual or org. Adding custom events, reminders and appointments to the scheduler is a breeze. Enter the name of your event, a starting and end date, along with an optional location and contact label, and move on to your next task.
The scheduler is the go-to app to plan ahead and stay at the top of your game. Important events, urgent missions and critical deadlines are clearly identified. Filtering options allow you to see what is relevant to you at this moment. The scheduler automatically warns you of upcoming events and milestones, with reminders of varying degrees of urgency. Never miss a contract deadline or your mother’s birthday ever again.
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MG.HANGARSERVICE
Your Hangar customization and upgrades are done through the mobiGlas by interacting with AR objects through the hangarService, an app designed to access hangar-specific functions. hangarService is provided by your hangar manufacturer to expand your hangar, customize your living quarters, purchase specialty rooms, design your interiors, change your hangar access rights, modify your ships’ placement, and more.
MG.SHIPWORKS
shipWorks is akin to the holo-table, but with added functionality that allows you to interact with your ships in augmented reality. It is an engineering app. shipWorks allows you to easily search ship components in your inventory or equipped on a ship. With the smart sort and filter features, compare similar assets to make a strategic choice and customize your ship with the perfect load-outs.
Get direct access to repair, refuel and re-arm options, tag parts of ships to be serviced, and review power management configurations and cargo space before taking off to the dangers of space travel. Get a full statistical report on your ship. Analyze the damage state of your ship’s individual parts and hull.
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MG.SKYLINE
mG skyLine is the mobiGlas version of the galactic map directory and navigation planner found in ships. It features a full-blown star map to find your way around the known galaxy and its myriad of systems.
skyLine’s strength comes from its ability to be synced with other apps for dynamic information, such as market data, pirate sightings, tourist must-sees and much more. It’s a NavMap++. It’s a complete atlas, “GPS” and repository of your planetary and galactic data.
CCB FINANCE
CCB Finance app is everything about finance, economy and money. You can review your transactions (old and pending), review the market data and see your current balance. You have access to the data needed to analyze the economy. Link CCB Finance to the AR display to get market data on what you are looking at.
AND MORE
mG.handShake helps you to create contracts with the aid of templates; mG.sleeve is your collection of passports, licences and other official “papers”; mG.spectrumGate grants you access to the spectrum and the galactapedia; mG.smartTrade simplifies trading with other players. These are the first applications that will be found in the mobiGlas.
NEXT STEPS
As with any game, we can only get to a perfect result by testing it in its real context. The next steps, as features planned for Star Citizen become real, are to build, test and polish the mobiGlas, and to give you access to those features in an easy and intuitive way while staying true to the fiction.
With our internal tests, team of experts and your feedback, we can make the mobiGlas experience a fantastic one.
The next steps we have in mind are to:
Give you access to the mobiGlas to get your feedback. User testing is the only way to make a user interface near perfect.
Push the visuals. There are all sorts of little tricks to make the AR interface sit in the world in a believable way, but these little tricks necessitate a great deal of effort.
Create more apps and iterate on the first handful of functionalities already in the game as they become available to you.
We hope that once you get your hands on the mobiGlas you will find the experience pleasing even though, in the beginning, it will be far from the high-level vision we have for it. Until then, enjoy the game and see you in the ’verse!
END TRANSMISSION
DISCLAIMER: As with any design post, this article represents our current thinking for the systems covered. All content is subject to change as a result of testing. The numbers provided here represent data that is current as of publication, but which will likely be altered in a number of ways before launch to create the best possible Star Citizen experience.
