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This month’s Subscriber Flair is the Aegis Sabre ship model! This realistic ship model from Takuetsu Starships, the most trusted name in ship models, is the thirteenth in a collection of Star Citizen’s ships. Display your Sabre with pride, and then collect other models to complete the display.
If you’re an active subscriber, the flair will be attributed to your account today. If you subscribe over the weekend, the Sabre model will be attributed to your account on Tuesday June 14th! More information about subscriptions can be found here.
Please note that the models will be distributed to your accounts today, but they will not show up in the hangar until Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 is available on the live service. Sabre owners who purchased the ship during the initial concept sale will recieve a limited edition version of the model in a unique livery. This will be distributed in a future patch.
As most of you know, we’ve been working hard to launch Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 this month. The patch is currently on the PTU undergoing testing from our backers. As they can attest, we’re battling some blockers largely related to networking. We’re making good progress, and will keep you updated… we’re as eager as anyone to see our backers battling it out aboard Starfarers, shopping for clothes and earning in-game currency. Meanwhile, development goes on for all aspects of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, whether they’re intended for Alpha 2.4 or a future release. Without further ado, here’s May, 2016 straight from the developers that lived it!
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West Coast, Best Coast
Hello Citizens of the Stars. Once again it is that time where we share what our developers in the City of Angels have been up to. Needless to say, getting 2.4.0 out the door has completely dominated all of our schedules. Ensuring we release a quality product to you is always our top priority; however, doing so requires quite a large amount of attention to detail when you are attempting to create one of the most technically advanced games ever. So let us recount what each team at the CIG-LA office has been up to during what has been an unusually overcast-weathered month of May.
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Much of what is happening in 2.4.0 is based upon what the Engineering team has been laying down tracks for. Shopping, persistence, bug fixes, and so much more. While Mark Abent has been focused on the 2.4 Phys Controller and Seat Integration, he and Paul Reindell have been helping the Engineering team in supporting the Persistence and Shopping features.
Ariel Xu has still been poring over his Port Editor and Loadout Editor and has recently implemented simulation parameters into the Loadout Editor. This will allow simulations between similar assets such as collision proxies, ropes, etc. These kinds of internally-built tools help streamline the design and engineering process.
Chad Zamzow has started working on Coolers and Heat Sinks, updating the technical design document and has started testing the system in ships along with testing the functionality of how IR and heat signatures can be tuned. While Patrick Mathieu has done a code merge for the Seats and Controller managers, he has also had a hand in several other systems such as the Energy Control Manager (for power plants), Flight Controls, and the game’s event system. Chad McKinney wrote a technical design doc for the engineers on Signal Pipes after he worked on the Entity Health components (essentially the wear & tear functionality of components that are being sync’d with Tech Design). Chad has also been helping the QA team by providing custom builds for QA to test very specific parameters of the game. Flight Engineer John Pritchett has also been hard at work, currently in the UK office working on positional controls for capital-class ships.
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Being a Technical Designer is much more than coming up with game design ideas. A Technical Designer has to know how these systems and designs are able to function within the game based on certain parameters such as game engine limitations, resources, etc. With those things in mind, Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome has started testing the Power Plants and Shields 2.0 systems along with designing an overview of how overheating/heat spiking will affect ship components. On the ship side, Kirk has also been working on the Origin 85x and coordinating efforts with the Engineering team on how heat and wear will function in terms of design.
Along with ship systems, as many of our astute readers know, the Tech Design team also performs the designing of how ship functionality will operate in-game. Calix Reneau has started working on the F7A Hornet, the Prowler, and space stations while Matt Sherman has been working on the white box for the long-awaited Drake Herald all while getting the Reliant flight-ready.
Matt has also been working on supporting the newly-revealed Buccaneer and has also added some much needed updates to the Carrack design brief. There is a touch of Exploration he has been peering into but let’s wait until next month’s report so we can report on what he has accomplished thus far.
The LA Tech Design team was also joined by a new member, Stephen Hosmer. So stay tuned for next month’s report to see what our newest Tech Designer will have accomplished by then.
Art & Animation
The Art team was joined by our new Character Art Director, Josh Herman, who brings quite a bit of experience with him in regards to characters and delivering the highest of quality.
CG Supervisor Forrest Stephan has not only been working on clothing support for the character team for 2.4.0, his efforts also look steps beyond what we are currently delivering and extend out to 2.5.0 and further.
A large number of the artists have been dedicated to building the upcoming Caterpillar. Gurmukh Bhasin and Justin Wentz, our ship Concept Artists, have been doing exterior passes of the Caterpillar. This included adjusting the Command Module, turrets, decals, tractor beam room, engines and cargo, as well as the materials pass. On the interior side, Daniel Kamentsky and “Jin” Hyun have been busy with the interior cargo module.
The other half of the CIG LA Art staff continues to work on character art. Omar Aweidah and Cheyne Hessler’s bespoke character hair is currently in progress and looking fabulous while Jeremiah Lee’s costume concepts have been perfected and approved to move into production.
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As we have explained in the past, the Global Tech Content team is a difficult one to categorize because it extends into everything we do at CIG at a global level. We had a new Associate Tech Animator join the team and are excited he’s here! Erik Link started this month and will be working with our animation team so stay tuned for next month’s report to see what accomplishments he has contributed to the team. But for now, Erik has been working on cleaning up Mannequin and digging deep into our systems to help increase our deliveries.
Last month we reported Gaige Hallman had been working on the clothing volume system to determine how clipping will work. While a few related bugs have popped up, Gaige was pretty swift at getting them resolved and has been working on asset rigging for the Shubin Miner uniform, while John Riggs has been working on fixing the Vanduul Hand Geo and Skeleton just to name a few.
Matt Intrieri, apart from working on asset validation tool, he has started on the Tech Art white box for the Drake Herald while Patrick Salerno has been working on the Reliant grey box Tech Art. Last but not least, Mark McCall completed working on skinning and implementing the RSI Pilot Flight Suit Jetpack.
Narrative
Continuing from our last update:
Squadron 42, Squadron 42, Squadron 42.
Yeah, we were on full-blast for the past month. Both Will and I were over in the UK to help out with the pick-up performance capture shoot. We got to have some familiar faces back to the set as well as some new actors join the show. We were thrilled to have on set to play the role of . It went better than any of us could’ve imagined and was spectacular to watch this character who’s been kicking around for a while, finally be brought to life in such a dynamic way.
Otherwise, on the PU front we’ve been delving into things that shan’t be made public yet, so unfortunately there’s not a lot to tell.
Now, back to the mines of Squadron 42.
Until—
Oh, if you haven’t heard, there has been a revamping of the Ask A Dev forum thread. We’ve just started to dive back in and answer your questions, but if you had a question that was still unanswered from the old Ask A Dev – Lore thread, feel free to repost it in the new one and we will do our best to get to it, progress permitting.
As I was saying, until next month.
Quality Assurance
This month the CIG-LA Quality Assurance team was all hands on deck and focused on all the new 2.4 features, including the new PU Clothing, and the shopping system, a vast amount of persistence and performance testing, and help troubleshoot stability issues. Saitek was gracious enough to provide us with a Saitek X-56 Rhino H.O.T.A.S. peripheral so we were able to put the controller through its paces after a very short fight over who got to use it first. However, the most exciting thing this month was the privilege of an early look at preliminary large scale solar systems with procedural planets, going from space, to atmosphere, and eventually landing on the ground. At this point the terrain is visually pretty sparse looking, but this early on, the excitement is about the technology itself. There’s nothing quite like flying through and around canyons in an M50!
Conclusion
There you have it folks; that was the month of May in a nutshell for us at the Los Angeles branch of Cloud Imperium Games. It should go without saying that there is much more going on behind the scenes to make all of these milestones possible and we can’t wait until you see what we unveil next.
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Game Dev: Bigger in Texas
We’ve continued to crank away on 2.4.0 through the month of May. We’ve generated 145 builds from the build system; we deployed 98 internal server builds and published 14 of them to the PTU for external feedback. Everyone in the studio has been working night and day and we’ve been making a lot of great progress to support the many technological and design changes that are part of this version. We’re very excited to see this version continue its march soon to the Live server, and as you can imagine teams are already hard at work on 2.5 and beyond.
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The merry month of May has been a productive one for the Austin Dev Team. We’ve spent most of the month wrapping up our tasks for 2.4.0 and planning ahead for 2.5.0. The Design Team has been polishing features in 2.4.0, specifically Shopping and Port Modification, so that they are in tip-top shape for when 2.4.0 goes Live. Robert Gaither has jumped over from QA to help out with placing all of the item ports in the hangars so that you guys are able to customize the layout of your flair objects and ships. He’s been meticulous in making sure that the item port placement makes sense for each type of flair and linking up the item ports so that placing larger flair and ships cancels out the ability to place smaller flair and ships in the immediate vicinity.
Lead Designer Rob Reininger has been polishing and fixing bugs with the Shopping experience, in addition to planning for several features coming down the pipe. We’ve got a final design for “Kiosk Purchasing” in front of CR and are awaiting feedback. This feature will allow for purchasing of items that are too large to display in a conventional shop, such as ship components, ship weapons, and the ships themselves! We’re also putting focus on designing additional phases of “Try On/Inspect Mode” where each type of clothing asset will have a specific camera record that “zooms in” to specific parts of the body depending on what you’re trying on. So for example if you’re trying on shoes, the camera will zoom in to the feet. There will also be specific “Try On” animations for the character as well so that the character can check himself out while he is trying on the latest and greatest swanky apparel.
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Speaking of new swanky apparel, both Rob and Robert have been working with the Character Team to create briefs for and schedule in additional assets for future releases. Our goal from this point forward is to have new clothing assets ready for every new release. Sometimes these will just be material/texture variants of existing assets but sometimes we’ll have brand new assets from all-new clothing lines and manufacturers. Our major focus for 2.5.0 will be to have some more grungy frontier clothing ready for you guys.
Designer Pete Mackay has been iterating on the ship pricing formula he’s been working on. He’s also been designated as the Design Owner for Game Analytics going forward as well. Pete has been talking back and forth with the Gameplay Engineering Team, the Server Engineering Team, the DevOps Team, and the Platform Team to nail down the best approach for capturing and displaying game analytics from various aspects of Star Citizen. We want to know how you guys are playing so we can focus on the things you like the most and get you more of what you love, and tracking game analytics is the best way to do that.
The Backend Services Team has been furiously smashing bugs with the Persistence Backend all month in an effort to get it ready for release. This is the most massive change to our core technology we’ve had since the debut of the Large World tech, and with that comes a lot of hiccups that need ironing out. The team has been doing a great job though and we’re in the final stages of polish on this before release. We’re now looking ahead to 2.5.0 and beyond. Our near-term taskload includes Persistent UEC, which will allow us to actually use UEC as part of Persistence instead of just our test currency Alpha UEC. Ian Guthrie at Wyrmbyte has also helped us create an Analytics Service for Gameplay Engineers to hook into to provide the data that Pete Mackay needs as mentioned above. As always, we’ll be knocking out bugs with Persistence as we see them as well.
The Art and Animation Teams are trucking along with their longer-term tasks. The Ship Team is still up to their eyeballs in the work for the Hornet F7A and the Herald. Jay Brushwood has been on the set of the mocap shoot at Imaginarium the past couple weeks capturing new enter/exit animations for all the ships, which we’ll start getting in pretty soon so you guys can get in and out of your ships more quickly! Daniel Craig has wrapped up his work on the updated 300i enter/exit animations and will be moving on to the Avenger next. Our PU Team has been supporting S42 with implementing background animations. They’ve specifically been working on animations for the Mess Hall scenes and interacting with Ship Terminals. They also helped us out in a pinch by getting in some new “Weapon Inspect” animations that you can see in action while inspecting the weapons in the shops. Oh, and that death animation that happens for when a player enters an airlock without his spacesuit on? You can thank Vanessa Landeros for that!
Emre Switzer has been doing a lighting revamp for several areas of the game. He’s already tackled ArcCorp and will be moving on to Crusader next. He’ll also be touching up some of the ships as well, like the Reliant.
Lastly, we wanted to reach out and give a hearty thanks to Mark Skelton for all of his effort and devotion to this project and especially this studio. Mark has moved on to a new project and new chapter, but we wish him all the best in his future endeavors and can’t express enough how sorely he’ll be missed. Thanks Mark!
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April’s 2.4.0 testing continued well into May with the build making its way to the PTU. As of this writing, QA has deployed 14 builds to the PTU since the initial release to the Evocati testers.
With the assistance of the testers on the PTU, we’ve been able to reliably reproduce a number of various issues which resulted in Code 7 disconnects. This has greatly assisted us with identifying the various causes of these disconnections, which has allowed the Network Engineers to address them as we identify them. As a result, a significant number of these specific disconnects have been corrected since the start of the PTU. We’ve also seen a number of server/client crashes fixed, as well as improvements to the Port Modification system, and a large number of fixes related to shopping. Not to mention, enough improvements in item persistence to allow us to begin persisting the database across multiple builds.
Internally, we’ve been gathering lots of server/client performance data for the Engineering team to analyze to see if there’s any improvements that can be made in the short term to help with performance while we wait on the larger improvements coming later.
We’d also like to welcome Tori Turner to the QA Team, who has been assisting our Squadron 42 testing team.
That about wraps up this month, aside from continuing 2.4.0 and Squadron 42 testing there’s nothing much new to report… well, aside from preliminary testing for Procedural Planets, as well as the first forays into the Solar System map…
Game Support
May was another busy but solid month for the Game Support Team.
As everyone knows, 2.4.0 has been not just our focus, but the entire company’s focus. Chris Danks and Will Leverett spent the first part of the month with Evocati Test Flight, helping get bugs into Issue Council and then into our dev pipeline. As 2.4.0 managed to get into a state where we needed more people, we opened up to our PTU 1st Wave testers, and then Subscribers.
To build any community, you have to dedicate time and energy, and we’re very proud of the fact that CIG has allowed Game Support to do just that with both Evocati and PTU testers. We’ve put a lot of effort into making this successful, and we could not be more pleased with how awesome our volunteer testers have been. It’s really through their passion for this project that we have had such fantastic results which have helped us tremendously in our efforts to complete 2.4.0.
As a reminder, for those wanting to participate in Evocati or PTU, it’s possible through being an active member of the Issue Council. We’ll be adding to both Evocati and PTU ranks later this summer, so jump on in at https://robertsspaceindustries.com/community/issue-council!
We were also thrilled that our friends at Turbulent visited us for a week in Austin. We got to spend a healthy amount of time on a variety of topics, not the least of which is Issue Council improvements. We’ve identified a handful of requests that we’re going to start developing on, some of which came from the community, some internally. We’ll be very excited to get those out!
We’re also growing in Austin, Texas! We’ve been interviewing candidates for a Game Support role to help with various tasks such as account security, technical support, and our publishing process, and we’ll be excited to have another hand to improve the level of service we can provide.
IT/Operations
More progress was seen on the patch reduction size project in the month of April. As previously mentioned, this is a big overhaul so it’s definitely going to be summer before we get to the point where we can roll this out to everyone but we’re hoping to start seeing real world use of the new system soon for internal testing. This month has been all about carefully incorporating the changes which support the new patching system into our build pipeline without affecting regularly scheduled deployments. This is no small task but we are making progress on schedule as we had hoped.
As we work through the build pipeline we have found that it may be possible to obtain some further optimizations in the build process. Much in the way we are breaking out data in to its smallest parts which will allow us to deliver more granular changes within our patches under the new system, we’re now identifying ways we should be able to increase granularity in our build process. If this works, we may be able to compile portions of the build down to certain individual changes further reducing dependencies on other aspects of the larger build. In other words, by reducing dependencies we might be able to kick certain types of build changes out in seconds where normally we would have to wait minutes or sometimes hours for that type of fix.
We certainly have more discovery and testing to perform but hopefully we will have much more to report in this are as our work on our huge patch project progresses.
LiveOps/DevOps
This month we have been super busy keeping up with the dev teams work on persistence. We’ve delivered 18 publishes to PTU along with countless deployments for QA and individual use dev testing. Literally, countless deployments because at some point we lost track during the late nights. Our primary build system cranked out 145 builds generating a total of 18,350 gigs of data. Alternate build systems aren’t tracked but are doing almost as much work considering that we’re now requiring code pre-builds prior to code being checked in for the testing and production builds.
April has also been a month of spring cleaning for us. We’ve reworked a number of internal tools and docs and we’ve completed our planning for our new publish orchestration system. The goal of this project is to make our publishes more automated and configurable. Currently we have a decent system which is fairly dependable but the addition of persistence has shown us that we must be able to make a myriad of configuration changes quickly and easily rather than manually. Our new system will enable all of this for us and be much more extendable meaning we can handle changes much better than we can today. While this may not show up as a neat flashy thing that people see in the game, we’re really happy we get to do this work because it makes the job of publishing Star Citizen so much better in the long run.
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Forging Ahead
Greetings Citizens,
Another productive month in Manchester! Chris spent some time with the team this month working on Squadron 42, and we’re very excited to be getting closer to sharing more information on that part of the project. Here’s a report from each department about what we did this month:
Concept Art
Ahhh the month of May, everything is blossoming and so is the teams work – we are really getting into a groove here and the concept team are pumping out a lot of super high quality work. We’ve done a large amount of work for future ships this month, these aren’t needed for Sq42 but are needed for the persistent universe and to keep on expanding the roles in the games, we have 4 unannounced ships/vehicles in concept right now and they are almost all complete, it’s hard to choose which will be my favourite, they are all really exciting in their own way!
We’ve also continued to work heavily on ship items, mainly power plants, coolers and shield generators – look out for the Gorgon Industries – it’s got some serious bite Weapons are continuing both on FPS and ships, working out upgrade paths for all the different sizes of ship guns and how to be efficient with our designs but also give the fans what they’d like. Props and prop dressing has continued, the list of required props is getting longer by the day so we will take on additional resources to fill that gap so that Sq42 can look its best. That’s all for now folks!
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The last few remaining art bugs for 2.4 have been ironed out, hopefully you guys will be playing it before too long as we’re looking forward to seeing what you guys think of the new features. As always the team is hard at work on Sq42 development, not too much information can be told but we are ending the Greyboxing phase for the Shubin interior levels, finishing out Final Art on some other undisclosed locations. We are still pushing forward on Final Art for our VS level, everything from lighting, materials, atmospherics, props, terrain, rocks, and buildings are being worked on. That’s all for this month folks, enjoy 2.4!
Props
This month has been a heads down and getting things done month. After wrapping up 2.4 requests and bugs the team have been focusing on either ship items (formally components) or props to add narrative to Squadron 42. Because of the way we approach the props anything we create can be used anywhere in the game, even if we theme particular props to tell a story in one area we can then override the material and reuse the asset in another area, this means we get a bit more reuse for our time investment and it reduces art fatigue.
Ben Curtis has been spending a lot of time on documentation this month, now we have the new shader tech mentioned last month it’s time to get thorough documentation together and update some of the old ones. We have a few new starters over the next month so it’s important to have everything easy to find and refer back to, as we get more resources in the future this becomes more and more important.
Looking forward the whole team will be focusing on the ship items for a couple of sprints to make sure there is plenty of content when the feature goes live. It is going to be a busy month but we can’t wait to get all the content out to the players so you can start really customising the performance of your ships and making them your own.
Spaceships
Work continues on our ‘big guns,’ the Idris, Javelin and Bengal. As we reported last month, interior work on the Idris has largely wrapped up and we’ve moved to building some story-specific Squadron 42 variations… but we can’t talk about those just yet! The Javelin and Bengal exteriors are ongoing, with the latter’s team benefiting greatly from the work done on the former.
Towards the smaller end of the spectrum, work is ongoing on the F7A Hornet, which will be the hero ship for Squadron 42. We’re going for updates to the Hornet that make it clear this is a different, military-specific version, and so far the results are great! We’ll share more of that as Squadron 42 gets closer. We also completed work on ‘pods’ for the Argo transport which will let you use it for a number of different utility functions.
On the concept side, we are finishing up work on one of the ships you’ve been waiting for: the Drake Dragonfly “space motorcycle.” We think we’ve come up with a plan for a very cool, very SMALL ship that’s going to work very well alongside some upcoming game systems. More on that soon! We also pitched several designs for Aegis’ next ship. Can’t reveal more yet, but it’s a tough one!
Graphics
This month the graphics team have finished off a number of features and fixes which we hope will be in the backers’ hands very soon.
The first of these is a major upgrade to the particle lighting system. Previously the particles were lit by a different system to the rest of the game, and while this was cheaper it had many visual problems such as lack of shadows and incorrect brightness or colour for some light types. We’ve now changed it so that it uses the new tiled-lighting system and so matches the rest of the lighting much better, but we’ve also added fully volumetric shadowing. This means we get accurate shafts of light passing through particles which looks very impressive in our tests and we can’t wait to see what the artists can do with this.
The tiled lighting system in general has also had a major upgrade, partly to allow the particle lighting, but primarily to achieve greater performance on modern GPUs. This has been deactivated in recent public builds but we expect it to be enabled in the next major release. While looking at the lighting we’ve also started to improve the quality of rectangular area lights. Real-time renderers need to make many compromises to achieve any form of area lighting in real time, but we’re hoping to improve the results of these because sci-fi environments so often use rectangular lights.
Our work on the various high-dynamic-ranges features continues with the completion of the light-linking feature to allow realistic levels of brightness and glow from our lights. Next we’ll be focussing on the exposure control system to make it better approximate the complexities of the human eye and brain’s amazing ability to adapt to environments which high contrast or very low light levels.
Some other more minor changes include: uncapping the GPU texture budget so that GPUs with more memory can benefit from higher texture resolutions and less likelihood of seeing any ‘popping’ from the texture streaming, completion of our internal render-profiler, continuation of our major UI refactor mentioned last month, and various bug fixes with culling.
Engineering
For the engineering team, much of this month has involved 2.4.0 and helping get it into a state where we can finally release it to live. Bone has been finishing off the port modification system, allowing to customise your hangar and change your ship loadout from inside the game, and it is now complete and is in the final stages of bug fixing and polish. Similarly the shopping is all in and working and again we’re just fixing up any bugs and polish that comes along.
Our network team have been up busy fixing up the disconnection issues we’ve been finding on the PTU build. Unfortunately these have been pretty gnarly and hard to track down and fix, they’ve been coming from the changes required for persistence not playing well with the current networking system. One change required of persistence is being able to reuse entity ids, which the engine was never really designed to do, and as a result we’re having to deal with the consequences of that. Long term George is working on a new message queue system which should be able to deal with all these problems a lot better.
In-between the bug fixing and polish Craig has spent some more time on the carrier takeoff and landing, Steve has been making more progress on the Object Container system and also our entity component system, which breaks down an entity’s update into smaller individual blocks which can easily be reused. It will help clean up a lot of the codebase as well as helping on the performance side. Sadly for the UK office he’s now leaving us and moving to our sunny LA office, our loss and their gain.
Gordon’s been doing more polish work on the cover, as well as the vaulting and mantling. Romulo has been doing the player refactor and moving armour over to the new Item 2.0, as well as some weapon polish. Jens has been working on player moving and the head stabilisation.
Audio
This month, will try to keep this a bit snappier just because there’s a lot to cover. Apologies for flitting between bullet points and paragraphs!
Darren Lambourne has been busy with:
Setting up new variable boost layer for thrusters on many ships
2nd Pass on BEHR Laser Cannon S5
Reworking and fixing anim sounds across several ships, including Connie pilot/co-pilot seats. General stock-take of missing audio
Beginning setup of the AEGS Idris audio scheme
General bugfixing across several ships
Luke Hatton has been working on:
The cockpit interactive user-interface sound, adding sounds for the power distribution triangle and shield distribution
The Aurora series now have their own pass-by whoosh sounds and should be more easily distinguished when flying past you
On the FPS side, sounds for hitting targets with projectile weapons have gone in, along with kill confirmation sounds for both friendly and enemy characters
Stefan Rutherford performed something akin to open-heart bypass surgery on the Wwise project side of things – he generally maintains this, ably assisted by Jason Cobb. We’ve put a lot of thought recently into how the game will be mixed (both for S42 and the Live release) and as part of ensuring things work and scale this needed doing. On top of this, he produced new FPS weapon sounds and editing up the recent weapon recording session material.
Both Phil Smallwood and Bob Rissolo were on-set at Imaginarium to continue with recording duties for our monumental Squadron 42 cinematics. Our lovely new dialogue rig, the D1000 got its first major run out, which Phil’s been debugging a little, smoothing any rough edges. Both returned to master and edit the resultant dialogue.
Matteo Cerquone has mostly worked on Squadron 42 ambiences, with Ross; assisted with checking fidelity of sounds affected by a wholesale conversion settings change in Wwise (part of a general optimisation pass), and cleaning up old Foley events in the character tool.
Ross Tregenza did:
A lot more work on the Music Logic system – it now has huge web of fully functional states combined with a growing web of momentary stings, and all new music in place, it’s also beginning to expand beyond space-flight music into FPS & EVA
Squadron 42 level ambient sounds – the levels are advancing well with Ross and Matteo starting to add a load of ambient audio to the spaces, lots of levels really starting to come alive there.
Battle-chatter – working with the AI guys to start getting the battle-chatter dialogue systems up and running properly
Simon Price has continued laying down pieces of the dialogue pipeline, improving the scalability of it over the last month. Most recently he’s been working on migrating dialogue data over to use external sources. Perhaps that doesn’t seem hugely exciting but it’s part of the overall ethos of keeping things sensible and not overloading the Wwise project with duplicated structure.
Sam Hall has been working on a system for dynamically loading audio assets, to ensure we only have loaded in memory what’s absolutely necessary. Different kinds of sounds have different requirements as to how resident they tend to need to be; some kinds (such as ambient sounds that aren’t required to synchronize too much) can stream in, and any kind of latency isn’t perceptible or appreciable. Others, such as gunshots that the player triggers, need to be ready to go instantly. So after sorting through what needs to be resident and what doesn’t, it’s been a question of ensuring the system can bring in audio assets to memory as soon as they’re needed in each case. For a game such as ours it’s important we only have loaded, what’s important to the player; loading everything won’t be an option while scaling up of the universe continues apace.
Sam’s also been adding more music logic events and parameter tweaks to improve the dynamic music experience. And of course has been fixing audio bugs as they’ve arisen.
Graham Phillipson’s been busy on the in-game VOIP tech, we’ve actually had something that we could demo internally as a result of this which went down well – of course, we’re really keen on getting this out to the community. Adding to the ability for the community to, well, commune, I think it’s going to be a huge benefit for everyone and it’s been great to hear it in action. Standard audio bug fixing duties and audio system back-end stuff too, much as usual. Graham added the ability to assign parameters to Audio Trigger Spots which gave all the sound designers much cheer. Though this seems a small thing in the grand scheme, it ensures we’re not just creating new objects in Wwise for subtle contextual changes to audio in the game; it allows us to add change at the point where the change is required rather than, again, duplicating contexts at source as well as at the destination.
Ewan Brown is a new Senior Audio Programmer and has been settling in, getting to know the code-base and how things fit together, providing tool support to the likes of Mannequin. There’s a lot to pick up on and he’s going to be assisting Sam and Ross with their musical endeavours too.
Jason Cobb has been busy with the following:
Developed audio build validation scripts
Bug fix various voice leaks, documented two test cases for fixes needed for Flowgraph audio triggers to play correctly with zones
Bug fix support for hard-coded mat_water material fx
Started development game audio inventory script
Various wwise project upkeep, optimizations, support for Stephan’s environment re-org effort
Area-based mix state markup for multicrew ships. 90% complete
Investigated situation for markup of single-seater ship interiors.
And that’s all for the moment, please do ask more questions on the forums and we will try to get the whole audio team answering where applicable. Thanks for listening!
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Changing the Worlds
The weathers not sure what it wants to do out here in Frankfurt, sunny and hot, overcast and raining, last month had a fair share of it all. The office grew by 2 people in May, Janine helping out with production and David joining the weapons art team. We’re just about at capacity in the office so we officially started an expansion. When we moved into the office space last July the owners of the building put the adjoining space on hold for us for a full year, one of the perks they offer to new tenants. At that time we didn’t know if we would have any need for it, but thought it was a nice gesture.
The team has also been doing some excellent work not detailed below on the procedural system… they would rather let you see it in action than spoil all the details now, so stay tuned on that front!
This month we also kicked things into gear with Gamescom, it only makes sense for Frankfurt to help out as much as we can since we live here. Not too much can be said at this point, but we’ll definitely be there in August.
Cinematics
This month we had our 2nd performance capture shoot for SQ42 at Imaginarium Studios in Ealing London that complemented and completed scenes in the earlier chapters.
Last summer was our main shoot that gave us approx. 75% of all needed material for SQ42’s story. With this new shoot complete and another final shoot upcoming in July we will have collected every bit of performance! Highlight of this shoot were scenes with the Idris’ quartermaster handing out big guns as well as an in-universe spectrum show with a furious and most importantly hilarious host!
For the shoot the Cinematic team built some of the needed environments to be used for live-mocap and coordinated efforts to get all needed level segments, characters sorted in time for live-mocap to be effective. (Live-mocap is a process where we can see the motion data live in our engine on actual in-game characters inside the actual scenes/levels)
Michael, our Lead Cinematic Designer, has finished a first pass on an important, longer cinematic piece that happens in the middle of the story campaign.
The Cinematic animators have been providing support to the Gameplay team in the UK while they wait for data to get back from the shoot. They’re also finishing up sorting the quad cam video data from last year’s p-cap shoot. When that’s done the animators on the Cinematic team will review the p-cap shots with the quad cam data and make sure that the animations are playing out as they are intended.
AI
Subsumption editor has been updated to version 0.901 and we started to implement some more functionalities exposed now in the tools for the designers. First of all we created some new Subsumption tasks to allow designers to use the following functionalities:
1. Querying the Tactical Point System
2. Move to a specific cover location
3. Shoot from the cover the NPC is in to his attention target
We exposed a way for designers to suggest the next activity or subactivity for a given NPC. We also completed the first pass to support Action Areas. As we explained in the monthly report from April, those are the elements in the world that allow designers to mark areas with specific information: a multicrew space ship, for example, might have an engine room, a hangar, a control room and so on. Action Areas allow the NPCs to reason about the environment to fulfil their tasks. Those game elements are also used to notify the NPC when another NPC is entering/exiting the area or to re-route specific events that are intended for the characters present in the area. We also implemented the basic code to handle Subsumption events, designers can create those specifying different properties (for example if the event is something the NPCs should see to perceive it, if they should hear it, if there is a max range in which the event can be received, and so on) and Subsumption keeps track of all this data.
We also completed the first pass on using the Usables/Interactors as navigation links. This unification step was required since Squadron 42 and Star Citizen are not only using the classic navigation links to allow characters to jump, vault, and so on. We also have links to connect the navigation through the usage of items (for example passing from room 1 and room 2 may require the AI to open a door) and these items can also be used by the players, making everything even more complicated. Using the Interactors makes sure that an NPC that opens a door doesn’t require any different code to synchronize the action with other players or other AI characters, making all the code flow much more consistent.
Regarding behaviors, we are currently embedding specific “mental states” to allow the normal NPCs behaviors to cope better with cinematic scenes and in-ship state (piloting a ship, controlling a turret, and so on)
Regarding the ships behavior we are almost done with the first pass to improve the behaviors of the ship assigned to restrict their movement into specific areas. We currently have missions where spaceships need to guard specific environmental elements or where ships cannot leave specific boundaries to avoid being destroyed.
Currently boundaries where always considered as a soft restriction on the ships behavior, but we are now expanding the ships behavior to correctly handle a strong spacial restriction.
This month we also spent time on improving stability and performances of the live game, so that all of you guys can continue to enjoy each release of Star Citizen.
This month the weapon art team finished two new ship weapons and did extensive work on the weapon material library. On top of that we are currently modelling a new ballistic submachine gun and doing the final touches on the Scourge Railgun detailing and texturing. The Railgun is meant to be a visual target for all the new weapons to come, so we’ve taken some extra time to take it to a gold standard level of quality.
We’ve also been joined by a new starter, David, bringing the weapon art team size up to 4 people now.
Design
Level Designers have been working on finalizing the layout for the Outlaw Base, it’s had a first art pass and will come back to them for a mark-up phase before release. This base is also scheduled for a tiered release so there will be a lot of back and forth between art and level designers as areas get released an new ones get added. The guys are also working hard on the Truck Stop base which is a nice place for pilots to stop to refuel, grab a bite to eat, get some supplies before they head out on big journeys. Another area in which level designers are working in is adding landing sites on procedurally generated planets.
The system designers have finalized the Power Distribution system which once implemented should power all our ships from single seaters to capitals and even stations. This system will allow players to configure how power travels within their ships, which components get power, how much do they get and where do they draw it from. At the same time it should allow more nefarious players to sabotage said system. At the same time the Looting, Inner Though and the Usable/Interactor systems are also fully designed now and are heading into production. A lot of work went into ensuring that all our usable props and animation metrics for them are properly standardized so we don’t have to do the work twice and everything will fit together once it’s in game.
On the AI side we are designing a system that can generate archetypes and loadouts quick enough to fill an entire galaxy without us having to manually build each individual NPC. Basically by defining rulesets and tag sets the system will be able to create said archetypes matching their gear to where they came from, what their job is, what the dress code is in the area they are in, what rank they are etc. Besides that, there is also a lot of work going on in designing the tools we will need for the brains and logic of our new Subsumption based AI.
Both system and level designers have been planning out the work for the next year and the upcoming releases to make sure we have a more realistic picture of what can be done with the allotted time.
Engineering
Renderer refactoring: On the Renderer side, we did some housecleaning and optimizations. Based on the refactorings from last month to increase the object count, we started to simplify the data upload to the GPU. Previously the CryeEngine system is based on reflection, so that the code could find out what data was needed on the GPU and only upload this data. While this sounds like a solid idea, finding out what was needed was more expensive than a straight data upload. So we began to remove those reflection code paths in the time critical areas. This also improved the readability of the code, as we can now see what the code does and not the logic to find out what to do. Related to this change, we also ensured to only upload the same data once to GPU. Previously it uploaded a data buffer for each object, and then uploaded the same data again if the code decided to use instancing. This is now fixed.
Data Patcher: On the Data Patcher (the tool which will be responsible to create the data for the engine to use when we switch to incremental patching), we made a little progress by better defining how to store the data. Not much reportable progress here as much work is about infrastructure discussions.
Optimizations: To further optimize the streaming code, we added timeslicing support to it again. This way the cost to update the distance to objects not visible to the player is done less frequent.
Tag System comes into the ZoneSystem: Initial support was written to support storing tags inside the ZoneSystem. A Tag is a small string which we use to give context information to an entity object. For example if we want to know if something is a chair, we can tag it as a chair. This way the AI system can ask all objects and find out if they are chairs. We already have such systems inside the engine but those are lacking spatial information, so they can only answer: is this object a chair, but not “find me all chairs around me”. This lead to some in-efficient solutions as the code had to brute force get many objects and check their type. To overcome this limitation we are moving the support for tags into the ZoneSystem, our spatial position system. This required some changes and new systems:
Storing and comparing a string is not very efficient on a computer (but very convenient for a human, thus we need it), so we implemented a Trie to allow us to very an efficient way to map unique strings to a fixed integer range. (We wanted to get an integer range instead of a hash as a range allows us some better broad phase checks and more efficient data storage)
Since not all data types which we stored inside the ZoneSystem require tags, we made the whole zone system more flexible to allow the client code to specify the properties to store per object type. This also reduced our memory usage in crusader by 50MB.
We implemented a specialized allocator for the tags so they can be efficiently culled by the low level zone system, which is implemented in SIMD, so the tags must follow a certain size and alignment.
And as a last thing, we implemented code to allow filtering tags by a DNF (Disjunctive normal form), which is a fixed format and can be used for efficient checking of arbitrary boolean expressions.
Runtime Skel-Extensions: The character customization system in Star Citizen is internally using an engine feature called “skinned attachments”. With skinned attachments it is possible to replace every deformable item on a character (i.e. cloth, shoes, spaces suits, helmets, etc) and even entire body parts such as faces, hands, or upper and lower body parts. Each skin-attachment has its own set of joints that are automatically animated and deformed by the base skeleton. It is also possible to use skinned attachments that have more joints and different joints then the base skeleton and it is possible to merge all types of skeletons together, even skeletons from totally different characters. That means you can have a minimalistic base skeleton which can be extended by an arbitrarily complex skinning skeleton. In the original CryEngine this was an offline- or loading-time feature, because the entire process was pretty CPU intensive. For Star Citizen we turned this into a runtime-feature that allows us to extend a base-skeleton anytime while the game is running, no matter if the character is alive and playing animations or in a driven- or floppy-ragdoll state. This means that you don’t have to know in advance the type of joints you might need in the base skeleton nor do you have to carry extra joints around just in case you might need them. Instead the system allows you to add new joints at will and whenever they are required.
Full-Body Experience: we also invested a lot of time to improve the full-body experience in first person. Our main goal was to make the head-bobbing customizable. In Star Citizen the head-bobbing is a natural side-effect of the mocap data, because third- and first-person are using the same animation. To make the controls as smooth and precise as possible, we implemented a new IK-solution to eliminate all unwanted effects from the 3rd person body animations on the first person view and weapon handling.
Tech Art
Frankfurt TechArt is always busy with RND and actively supporting any discipline who needs help. This month we were helping with Eye stabilization for FPS , which will stabilize camera movement while playing in FPS, the results so far have been really good. We’re also supporting feature or RND for the itemport IK system for game, it’s moving positively as well.
On our DCC[Maya] pipeline front it is becoming much more stable but still needs a bit more support as we keep updating or expending it. We were also fixing bugs and supporting weapon Assets on all fronts like rigs, updating rendermesh, entity setup, Mannequin setup etc.
Overall TechArt is participating for new features as well as keep supporting daily operations.
VFX
The past month the Frankfurt VFX team has been working on Squadron 42 single player missions. This covers almost all aspects of VFX such as ambient/environment effects, scripted action effects and even some cinematic effects. This also requires a fair deal of collaboration with the individual level designers and artists. Once they are done designing and building a section of the level with props, VFX can then move in and decorate it with the appropriate effects. Everything from fire and explosions to blood and water.
Quality Assurance
This month in QA we’ve been working closely with our in-house Engineering team to test progress on the procedural planets, as seen in the Pupil to Planet trailer. With such a large scale planet you can imagine the number of issues we encountered throughout our testing. Including, but not limited to the buggy insisting on driving on its z-axis, defying all laws of gravity!! We also spent some time checking all characters currently in Star Citizen and Squadron 42 for issues that might be blocking our cinematic developers. As a result, we were able to identify multiple Squadron 42 characters that had definitely seen better days. Sean Tracy, Ali Brown, and Okka Kyaw jumped on board to assist and we were able to resolve the issues quickly, so that our cinematic developers will be able to continue to create amazing cinematic sequences for Star Citizen. Lastly, we spent the remainder of the month assisting Chris Raine and Chris Bolte with gathering profiling and concurrency data for the PTU servers. The community was a great help and rallied together to load as many players onto the PTU servers as possible so that we could collect data with a hi-load server in order to contribute to resolving the framerate drops the public has been experiencing in Crusader. May has by far been our busiest month in QA, but we would not have expected any less as our universe grows larger each day.
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We Aim to Misbehaviour
From supporting Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 to working on some exciting content you’ll be seeing in the coming patches, we had a busy month at BHVR! Here’s the skinny…
Engineering
For the engineering team, this month went by very quickly. A lot of effort was put on getting 2.4 out of the door, working hard on the leftover nitty gritty details.
We mainly polished and debugged features like the shopping system and cry astro.
The good news is that with release 2.4, we are establishing the foundation for really fun features that will be implemented for the next releases.
Design
With no surprise, this month was almost all about shopping in both Port Olisar and Area18, getting features ready for 2.4.0 live release. This means, sorting out the last remaining bugs and working on improvements like for example; adding NPC shopkeepers or fixing some load out issues.
Level Designer Jesse Kalb, helped out re-design and implement the new port modification system for the flair items in the hangars. The game has many flair objects, so we had to work with Turbulent on getting things working right with the new design. Hopefully, players will enjoy placing the flair items and customizing their display cases.
On a different topic, Technical Lead Level Designer François Boucher, led the way for the creation of the CryEngine level structure and its components for the next map we are currently working on, the Pirate Base. With the whitebox map, hot out of the oven, from our friends in Frankfurt, we prepared the map so both Design and Art teams could work on their respective sections. This means, setting up landing pads, airlocks, doors, elevators, player spawning and finding a sweet spot for this base in the Stanton System.
Francois is also busy setting up the ship components shop that is going to open soon on Port Olisar.
Finally, the design team also started working on the shop designs, layouts and whiteboxes that we are going to find on the Pirate base. The mood is going to be different on the Pirate base and so will the shops. More to come, looking forward to further share with you guys!
Art
It was a very exciting month for the BHVR Art Team, because we began production on new maps.
One of them is a new pirate space station, which we mostly concentrated our efforts on the global aspects of the map like: composition, orientation, basic dressing and evaluating the new extra modules that will be required for this map.
Next month, we will move to final dressing pass, color balance, decal placement and polishing.
The second map, is a new ship parts shop that will be available on a future release. This shop has great character, so we have spent a good chunk of time working on the dressing and first pass lighting.
Next month, we are moving on debugging and polishing.
For the props team, we continued supporting the new shopping system. Mainly working on item racks and shelves.
We have also completed several new props that the environment team is extremely happy to be able to use now.
Finally, let’s not forget the improvements and debugging work that was done for the upcoming 2.4 release.
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The Turbulent Power!
Greetings from sunny Montreal where Star Citizen’s web team have been hard at work on everything from Buccaneer surveys to changing how you log in to the game! Here are some specifics on the projects we were working on this past month.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
For those that aren’t familiar, Multi-Factor Authentication, or MFA, is the type of security many people use with modern MMOs and web accounts, where you need to use a special key code or something texted to your cell phone to access an account. It keeps your data more secure by making it much harder for anyone to break in and assume your identity. We’ve had MFA in the works for quite a while, as we know you want to keep your ships and characters safe! We’re in the home stretch now, as we are close to completing the development of it for the RSI website. Once the QA phase starts, we will be working with CIG to test it and then roll out to the community. At the same time, we are continuing to work on MFA support for the game launcher itself, which will be especially important as we move more aspects of Star Citizen from the web to the game world itself.
Communication Platform
You may know this better as ‘Organizations 2.0,’ which we pitched earlier in Star Citizen’s development. Instead of going with a simple update to the current Org system, we’ve opted to develop a purpose-built communications platform that can be adapted for many aspects of the game. Development continues on the new platform, which includes completely new chat and forum systems for the first iteration. We have set up a server for internal testing, but we’re still a few months away from a beta launch. When the time comes, the Evocati group will get the first access to kick the tires!
Game Launcher
3, 2, 1… launch! We have been working with the team at CIG on the new version of the game launcher/patcher. The new version will support multiple environments (e.g. PTU, live) and multiple games (e.g. Star Citizen, Squadron 42), and will allow for background patching. In the first phase, the user interface will look like the current one, but we will be able to add new functionality and design in subsequent phases that the current patcher wouldn’t be able to handle. This is an exciting step for how the game ‘works,’ although we know it’s probably not as thrilling to the community as seeing a new ship or planet.
Sales
I guess you could say, the Bucc stops here! We assisted CIG in launching the next great pirate fighter, and all our metrics say it’s a hit! To support the Buccaneer, we built a ‘Drake customer survey’ site that will determine what bonus weapon everyone who purchases the ship will get. We took inspiration from the classic Ultima series for this, trying to come up with Star Citizen’s version of the fortune teller’s quiz used for character generation. After all, immersion isn’t just for the game! This month was also the month where backers could reap the rewards of our one-off operations: we distributed coupons to all those of you who took part in the April Fools “Big Benny” reveal, all the entrants in the Shubin recruitment programs, and also everyone who joined in for the latest Free Fly promo.
Behind-the-Scenes
In preparation for the release of 2.4.0, we have been working with CIG to test the platform side. For example, if a user makes changes to their inventory on the website, they should be reflected in the game too. There are many different scenarios to test, so it’s been a collaborative effort between us and CIG’s QA team. This is one of those areas backers probably don’t think too much about, but is necessary for the move to a true persistent universe. It’s great seeing your ships in the inventory of the website… but it’s a lot greater having the game track them, their upgrades, their damage status, their location in the world and so on.
Also in May, Turbulent sent a small strikeforce to Austin for a series of face-to-face meetings to discuss various issues, such as server infrastructure, analytics, persistence, and the Issue Council. It is possible that some BBQ was consumed after hours, and we’ve had ongoing discussions with CIG about IT infrastructure, and improving performance. As you would expect, this is a complex subject, but we hope to have implemented some new measures by the end of summer.
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Don’t Forget a Snappy Title, Jared
This train is just about to the station. I won’t hold you up with a long, boring intro, suffice to say, I could write a long, boring intro if I wanted to. I could do it, man. But I won’t. Because I know you’re in a hurry. Uh oh, is this becoming a long, boring intro anyway? I’d better move onto the next section before that happens. Quickly. Let’s go…
Day-to-Day
Each day I come to work with some of my favorite people in the world. And Thomas Hennessy. This month was a struggle with Ben and Alexis gone back east for two weeks on Bereavement Leave, but we pulled through with a newfound appreciation for the amount of work the two of them do each and every month. Between Ben and Alexis being gone, and Sandi going to the UK, it was a rare few days this week when the whole team was together, but my main man Tyler Witkin helped out from the Austin office, calling me on Skype each day to keep me company, and help shoulder the load while folks were out.
Basically, this section is just so I can say how much I like the people I work with. I’m in a mood.
Broadcasts
This month’s 10 for the Developers episodes in lieu of Chris being in the UK covered a wide range of topics and hosts. Sean Tracy, Forrest Stephan, Adam Weiser, Omar Aweidah, Eric Keiron Davis, Gaige Hallman, Mark Abent, Randy Vasquez, Dave Haddock and Ben Lesnick all stepped up to step in for the Chairman this month. We are extremely grateful each and every week for the time and effort our developers put in stepping away from their work to communicate with the community. We quite simply going not do it without them.
Around the Verse continues to diversify it’s offering as we approach the 100th episode on June 30th. We explored the Nexus, Tamsa, and Min systems in Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We interviewed folks like artist Cheyne Hessler and the makers of Voice Attack and HCS Voice Packs. We ventured into the Wonderful World of Star Citizen to highlight the tremendous work fan-organization The Imperial News Network does week in and week out. With Ship Shape, we explored the whitebox design of both the Drake Herald and the Drake Caterpillar. And we sat down with designer Matt Sherman and Concept Artist Jim Martin to for an unprecedented exploration of the Drake Buccaneer concept ship. Things certainly came up Drake in Around the Verse this month.
Reverse the Verse, our weekly informal livestream with the fans survived the absence of Ben and Alexis for two weeks (if only barely) and the May Subscribers Edition saw questions posed to our Design and Tech Art members for a full hour.
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As another month of development passes, so does another month of stories, content videos, and community accomplishments. This is a section we wanted to include to highlight all of the content creators, streamers, and more! For short, YOU!
First and foremost: PTU Testers. We want to take a moment to express our appreciation for all of our PTU testers who were patient and eager enough to write thousands of bugs and feedback posts over the course of May! As many of you know, this was our first time utilizing the focus-test group titled “Evocati”, and it was a smashing success! We look forward to collaborating together on future patches/content! Thank you so much!
Twerk17 continued his early morning streams that not only entertained us, but helped us greatly! The Design and QA team in the UK studio have utilized Twerk17’s early morning schedule to watch/analyze game-play and bugs! Thanks for being awesome Twerk!
While not Star Citizen related, a couple of different families acquired miniature co-pilots! Congratulations to STLYoungblood’s family and NighthawkZale’s family for both adding a +1 to the citizen count!
Streamer/entertainer/developer Geekdomo underwent a successful surgery, and we are all very happy to hear he is doing well!
We could easily write enough to make this section alone longer than the entirety of the monthly report. This community has really grown into something meaningful. We are all connected to each other not just as backers of the same game, but as dreamers of the same universe. Some may be pirates, while others militant UEE soldiers, but we share one goal in common: stepping outside the box of conformity and traditional game publication in order to try and bring a living, breathing universe that we have always wanted to play to life. This community has become a safe-haven for us sci-fi geeks and we love it. We want to give a huge thank you to everyone who has shown their support and patience for the team and this project as we continue progress on making the best damn space sim ever! We sincerely could not do it without you!
The Wrap-Up
Looking Ahead
Building Star Citizen is hard work, but it’s the best job in the world. Every day we work is one day closer to our dream: the massive persistent universe of Star Citizen and an unparalleled single player cinematic experience in Squadron 42. We know there will always be setbacks, difficulties, challenges we didn’t predict… but we’re privileged to fight this battle alongside an incredible development team and an amazing community.
Our next release will be Star Citizen Alpha 2.4, which is being tested as we speak. Alpha 2.4 represents another important step towards our goal, with the introduction of persistence and the first part of the in-game economy. We’re very excited to have players earn credits in the game world instead of buying them through Voyager Direct, which has been a goal for a long time. We’ve already seen what players are doing with the Starfarer, our largest ship launched to date, on the test servers and we can’t wait to see what happens when everybody can start boarding.
We are also heading into ‘convention season,’ with appearances planned at Gamescom, DragonCon and our own CitizenCon. We’ll be sharing more details about these events shortly and how you can interact with the team both in person and remote. There’s a lot we want to talk about and then even more we want to get into your hands. We’ll keep smashing bugs, creating worlds and telling stories… and we’re happy to have you along for the ride!
“The ‘verse keeps getting bigger, but some things never change. Whatever you got, no matter how much or how little, there’s always someone waiting to take it from you. You either let it happen or you fight. Don’t know about you, but I’m damn well gonna fight.”
- Dosh Mallory, famed frontiersman, 2656
Greetings Citizens,
Another Concept Sale, another Question & Answer session. Since Friday, we’ve been collecting questions from the dedicated Q&A post here and today our designers working on the ship will answer 10 questions for the community. Tune back in this Friday to see the answers to 10 more questions.
Drake Interplanetary builds starships for the way you live, and we are pleased to add the Buccaneer to our expanding lineup of craft offered to legitimate businesses in human space. Intended to complement the Cutlass/Caterpillar system, the Buccaneer was developed based on careful examination of actual after-action reports and extensive pilot feedback. What did all of our research tell us? You want a ship that can maneuver and pack a punch without breaking the bank.
Special thanks to Matt Sherman for taking the time to answer these questions for us.
The original blueprint that was released has been updated to the image above due to having some inaccurate information in the chart. Blame Lando for not updating the temp version to the final version.
Question & Answer
How is the Buccaneer expected to perform in combat, compared to other ships?
Built to hit above its weight-class, the Buccaneer brings a notably more potent gun-loadout to lighter ships like the Avenger and the Gladius. Beyond this the Buccaneer would be about the same if not slightly weaker in durability compared to the F7C Hornet. Against something like the F7C-M, the Buccaneer would definitely be less durable, though able to bring a comparable gun-loadout. Matched up against a Sabre, while it would have comparable guns, the Sabre would definitely have the stronger Missile loadout, hull durability, and be emitting notably less signature than a Buccaneer. Compared to something like a 325a, it would be able to deliver a heavier hit, but lacks any of the interior accommodations the 300-series provides.
Is there a bed on board the ship? If not, will we be able to add one eventually using the modular components mechanics?
No, the Buccaneer is not designed for live-in operations and will not have any sort of dedicated bed/sleeping area.
Does the Buccaneer have Quantum Drive? Jump Drive?
It has a Quantum Drive stock, though we’re still undetermined if it will also include the Jump Drive attachment as stock equipment. If it doesn’t, you will absolutely be able to buy/install one to make the Buccaneer fully Jump-Capable.
Are the S1 pylon mounts meant to take guided missiles or dumbfire rockets?
The S1 mounts will be capable of firing full guidance missiles. While the exact count in the launchers may vary from the concept (currently shows 12 total) into the working ship, they will be a part of the Buccaneer’s combat-toolkit.
Does zero actually mean zero in regards to cargo? Or can we still smuggle some small capacity of cargo? Trinkets? Small treasures?
Zero is zero, there is no latent cargo capacity to the Buccaneer. We are actively planning out how we want Smuggling mechanics to work, but those wouldn’t be ship-specific aspects, and any form of storage they would offer will come at a direct trade-off.
Will having this ship (or any Drake ship for that matter) inherit any negative faction points by default due to the manufacturer reputation?
No, overall, Drake is still seen as a reputable manufacturer, regardless of what purposes their clients decided to put their ships into. They won’t be subjected to a back-end systemic bias or penalty just for owning one.
Will there be any bonus/advantage to using this ship in conjunction with other Drake ships? (i.e. easier docking/refueling/etc.)
No, there wouldn’t be any raw statistical advantages to flying the Buccaneer with other Drake ships. While we want the Drake line to work and feel like a family of ships, you should still feel like you can get the most out of your ship without being forced to fly with a specific composition.
Can we replace the bottom turret with any other equipment, possibly for cargo, electronic warfare, or interdiction?
We’re definitely looking into a few other equipment options for the S4 hardpoint, including an Interdiction-specific weapon, but at this time, those are still more at the napkin-idea stage so we’ll need a bit more time to fully develop them out before we can say for certain what options will be available.
Could you explain more about how a turret will function on a single seat fighter? Will you be able to turn it backwards while you fly forward?
Yes, we anticipate this being accomplished through use of the look-behind camera view. If you want to see just how this would play out, the current Hornets and Mustangs can also turn their canard turrets behind them to fire in Look-Behind.
There appears to be a space behind the pilots seat that looks like room for an additional seat or potential space for small cargo. Will there be any function to this space?
There will be a few components the Pilots would be able to access from this space with the most notable being a full size weapon rack available. It won’t be any sort of discrete cargo space, but you will have enough space on the rack for at least 3 standard FPS weapons up to the size of the Sniper Rifle. As for the possibility of an additional seat, the Buccaneer is intended to be a single-seat fighter. We do not anticipate a change to this in the future, or for any potential variants.
What would the loaner ship be for the Buccaneer while we await it to finish development?
As with all single-seat ships in the game at present, we intend to provide an F7C Hornet as the loaner.
“The ‘verse keeps getting bigger, but some things never change. Whatever you got, no matter how much or how little, there’s always someone waiting to take it from you. You either let it happen or you fight. Don’t know about you, but I’m damn well gonna fight.” - Dosh Mallory, famed frontiersman, 2656
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The problem: you’re conducting the mineral survey that’s going to make or break your org, holding in your Caterpillar just off an asteroid belt. Everybody’s counting on this: your crew, your org mates, your families back home. But you aren’t worried: a few more deep scans and you’re going to strike it rich. Suddenly, the screens go red: bogeys all around! Looks like Vanduul want a piece of the action: you.
The solution? The Buccaneer, the latest and greatest utility fighter from Drake Interplanetary. The Buccaneer has been designed from the ground up to fly and fight the way you live. No leather interiors or hyperpillows here: the ‘Bucc is a scrapper designed to maneuver and fight above its weight class. This rough-and-tumble frontier fighter can be maintained in the worst of conditions in order to keep real, working space crews alive.
Drake Interplanetary builds starships for the way you live, and we are pleased to add the Buccaneer to our expanding lineup of craft offered to legitimate businesses in human space. Intended to complement the Cutlass/Caterpillar system, the Buccaneer was developed based on careful examination of actual after-action reports and extensive pilot feedback. What did all of our research tell us? You want a ship that can maneuver and pack a punch without breaking the bank.
The Buccaneer is all of that… and more: it’s a ship with a bite that’s every bit as mean as it’s silhouette implies! Featuring five gun mounts, two missile pylons and countermeasures, this is one fighter that won’t be pushed around! With a Buccaneer in your hangar, you can rest easy knowing your concerns are being protected.
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In the Verse
When Drake Interplanetary set about developing a dedicated fighter, they didn’t do it in a vacuum: they wanted a ship that would work alongside their entire lineup. This newest entry to the Drake catalog is an agile scrapper, something intended to take hits without breaking the bank on repairs and maintenance needs. The Buccaneer also needed to provide ample support to either the Cutlass or Caterpillar while also having the range of travel to safely cover a Herald. To meet these goals, the engineers at Drake opted for a single-seat, maneuverable fighter built expressly for combat, with plenty of capacity to alter its loadout to quickly move between close-range fire support and long-range escort. A purpose-built ship, the Buccaneer is ready to stand toe-to-toe with any other fighter in its size class.
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In the Game
The Drake Buccaneer is intended to offer a civilian alternative to ships like the Hornet and Gladius. It has been developed with an eye towards working alongside the Drake Cutlass, offering pirates (and others!) a sturdy, maneuverable fighter. The Buccaneer will also feature as an NPC aggressor in Star Citizen’s persistent universe and future single player campaigns. While Drake has designed the Buccaneer with an eye towards accompanying Cutlasses and/or Caterpillars on raiding parties, it is also an effective single-user fighter that measures nicely alongside the other models already In service. We intend the Buccaneer to be an agile, hard-hitting ship that’s a joy to fly… with an attack aircraft-inspired face that only a hard-fighting frontiersman could love!
Drake Interplanetary Market Research
Every Drake Buccaneer sold during this concept sale will include a special weapon add-ons package courtesy of Voyager Direct! The bundle (an UEC 10,000+ value) will include a weapon add-on currently available in Star Citizen, which can be used immediately on other ships. This bundle is included free or charge for every Buccaneer sold during its introductory offering.
What’s in the bundle? We can’t tell you… because we don’t know yet! The team at Drake Interplanetary has put together a multi-day Market Research Quiz intended to tell us more about Drake owners’ interests AND to decide which of two packages will be awarded. Stop in every two days to vote, and come back at the end of the sale to learn which package Buccaneer owners will receive!
Please note that the vote is restricted to registered Star Citizen Backers.
The Drake Look and Feel
We had a chance to sit down with Concept Artist Jim Martin, who has not only been with the project since the very beginning (he created the visuals for the Vanduul Scythe) he has also worked on every Drake ship to date. Below you’ll find a personal message from Jim, as well as an interview from this week’s Around the Verse!
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I had the chance to return to the Star Citizen team for another “Drake” design!
The Buccaneer is a small rugged fighter that fits into the Drake design aesthetic. It’s a practical ship with a specific role. Nothing fancy, the Drakes are reliable and solid.
We started the process of design by looking at the style guide for the whole Drake line, and what the core design themes are. I roughed out a sketch pass doing a spread of small thumbnail drawings. The important thing is to get the ideas down on paper and see what jumps out at you. It became apparent that this design was really about engines, a cockpit, and weapons. And the design challenge was about a practical arrangement that stays utility, not too fancy or sleek.
A second drawing pass led to some rough 3D models, and we we were able to get Chris Robert’s thoughts about the design direction of the Buccaneer. He helped us to rethink some of the volumes, style, and the geography of the ship components.
The final phase was to take the design to a detail pass, working out the surfaces, plating and structure, all the things that make the ship come alive. The cockpit was kept “minimal” and thinner for visibility, and of course a framed canopy in keeping with the Drake design. The wings are weapon platforms like a military helicopter, the engines are large and proud like an A10 Warthog, the landing gear is nested underneath but not hidden.
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I really enjoyed designing this little ship. To me it vibes like an underdog that you underestimate until it blows you up!
Jim Martin
Concept sale
About the Sale
The Buccaneer is being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar or to fight in Star Citizen. The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add an Buccaneer poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Buccaneer mini ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Life Time Insurance or these extras.
If you’d like to add one to your fleet, they’re available in the pledge store until June 6th, 2016. You can also view a detail of the Buccaneer in the Holo Viewer in the Tech Overview of the ship page! The bonus weapons package will be revealed on Monday, June 6 and will be awarded to all backers who have purchased or upgraded to a Buccaneer.
As with every Concept Sale, we’ll be doing a Q&A post. For the Drake Buccaneer, we’ll be taking questions here in this thread and posting the answers next week. Look for the Comm-Link Schedule next week to find out when that post will go up!
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
Additionally, please note that the Buccaneer will be entering the ship pipeline now, it will ultimately be released after other concept ships have been completed. All decorative ‘flare’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches.
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I’m Callie C. This is StarWatch. But who cares?!? The only thing that matters to me and probably you too as soon as I tell you, is this juicy junket that is literally just this minute burning off the comms. You’re hearing it here first, watchers: Bo Lynn and Julie Marks as of 15:03 SET have had their baby! Congrats to the happy family!
This is my slam, people. This must be what it would feel like if I had a baby of my own. Like all of you, I have been following this pregnancy closely for what has seemed like forever, but was probably closer to nine months. The highs! The lows! The drama! That slip on the ice patch at the New York Lantern Ball, that whole drell juice incident and who is ever going to forget those weird stretch fur jodhpurs. Seriously. Remember those?
Well, put all of that behind you, because the ride is finally over, folks, and the ’verse is now the proud recipient of a brand new Baby BoJu. Tips are still flooding in about this bouncing bundle of joy, no pictures yet, but word is that she’s healthy, already on her way to signing a modeling contract, and that they have decided to go with the name Rosé … or Salute … or even Talliwager. Come on you tipsters, make up your minds! If you’re just going to send in random names, why not go with the prettiest name ever created and say the lucky babe is going to be called Callie. Which, I might add, is a suggestion I’ve already taken the liberty to comm directly to the new parents themselves.
For those of you who are frantically doing the math out there from today’s date, yes, nine months ago was when Julie was on tour with Voice On High and Bo was on the other side of the Empire filming Death First. Now this may appear at first to lend some credence to all those rumors that were flying around about Julie having a torrid affair with Niko during the tour. Especially when it seemed like Niko forgot how to play ‘Linger Longer,’ a song V.O.H has been performing for 5 years, simply because Julie came on stage to sing with them. The excuses of “having a late night” didn’t do anything to help dodge that flaming ball of awkward.
But as exciting as it is to speculate whether the baby is going to have Niko’s hazel eyes or Bo’s blue, I think that it’s vital that we celeb devotees, or celebotees — Oooo. I like that. Winnie, make a note to make some celebotee tees — So, like I was saying, we celebotees, t-shirts pending, have to make sure that as much as we want to get the scoop that we respect some boundaries. Since the announce I have been seeing the calls for people to acquire DNA scans of the newborn to confirm the rumors one way or another, and this is not cool. I want to ask everyone out there to please, please not do that. There are limits. This is a baby.
Speaking of, let’s move on from the birth of a Human to the birth of possibly a new fashion trend. Without any more ado, Nisco Hobbins! Get your well-dressed butt out here. I am pleased as always to welcome our resident fashion expert back to the show.
Nisco Hobbins: And as always, Calcee, you are lucky to have me.
I love it when you pull the claws out! Let’s start with the usual, Nisco, please put me out of my misery and tell me who you are wearing. It is absolutely crystal. And why do I feel like I want to salute you?
Nisco Hobbins: That would be my new jacket, Calcee. It is the center objet d’art from Derion’s new Gambit collection. Its faceted angles and contoured lines are meant to be reminiscent of a Naval war fleet in flight. Believe it or not, but all the materials are sourced from actual battle sites.
What?!?
Nisco Hobbins: Seriously. The spun-metal is completely made from spent cartridges and all the accent beading is made from real rubble. To have history turned into fashion like this is just groundbreaking.
Stunning. A statement piece in so many ways.
Nisco Hobbins: Show support and all that.
Totally. Now, Nisco, when I got the comm about you coming by, I read the words but my mind couldn’t comprehend them. You’re here to talk about Casaba Outlet?
Nisco Hobbins: Totally.
Did you hear that? That was the sound of a billion StarWatchers suddenly spitting out their drinks all at once. Pray tell, my dear Nisco, why are we talking about Casaba Outlet? It’s not for their latest two-for-one deal, is it?
Nisco Hobbins: I know. I know. Casaba Outlet. Regular clothes for regular people or whatever. Great for not being naked, not much use for anything else. But it seems they want to change that ’cause they’re taking a real stab at making themselves relevant in the world of fashion in sort of an interesting way. It’s all part of their new “Our Clothes, Your Look” campaign.
Okay. Spill.
Nisco Hobbins: A lot of times these companies try to hire a fashion designer to do a special line and you just end up with watered down blah that your grandmother gives to you as a gift on Citizen Day.
I still remember when Olsen Hendrick did that line of “everyday” dresses for Looks4Life. On what day would you ever wear any of those?
Nisco Hobbins: Definitely up there on 30th century tragedies. That’s why I was quite pleased to hear Casaba has gone a completely different route and hired celebrity stylists to start taking pieces from their normal selection of CityLights, Escar Limited, DMC, whatever, and using those to create looks worthy of wearing. They’ve got people like Den Linton who does styling for Asper Renon, Sash Aberdeen, Opal Nill, and Irkma Punjamal who has dressed everyone from your Bo Lynn to every member of Local Diction.
And they just take stuff off the rack? Like regular pants or whatever?
Nisco Hobbins: Exacts. Like a CityLights Rhodes jacket paired with some 78 pants from Escar. Normally a yawn, but it is kinda amazing what these clothes can become in the hands of a professional. Head to toe, they feel completely different. Accessories, how they hang, the hair. All of it comes together to create something pretty brill. The best part is that all the details are right there on the spec, so you can create it for yourself. I, for one, am actually thinking about hopping a shuttle and seeing what I can put together myself. The challenge of it is almost half the fun.
It’ll be quite the coup for Casaba if they can start drawing in the likes of Nisco Hobbins. Count me in.
All right, watchers. We need to take a quick pause and reset. Nisco, stay right there. All of you stay right there. StarWatch will be back in a flash.
Yesterday, we pushed the first iteration of Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 to the Persistent Test Universe, and much of the month of April was spent in service of that endeavor. Alpha 2.4 promises to be one of our biggest patches yet: not only adding new front-facing content like ships and functional stores, but long-awaited “under-the-hood” changes that create the necessary foundation for all the content yet to come.
These monthly reports are one of my favorite things we do here at Cloud Imperium Games. Even with all the internet shows like the 10 For Series, Around the Verse and Reverse the Verse that share information on the development of our games every week, there’s still so much more that the hundreds of people worldwide supporting Star Citizen work on. We may not always be able to share every detail, but I’m confident in both the quantity and quality of that which we share each and every week; and in this case every month.
With that, let’s dive in and see what each studio has been working on in the month of April.
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Made in the Shade
What a month April was! Looking at where we were in March, it is clear this is an epic undertaking and we are making steady progress on this grand adventure called Star Citizen. With another month come and gone, it is that time again where we review what has been accomplished in the CIG Los Angeles office, specifically.
While the Los Angeles office is largely focused on getting 2.4 on to the PTU, each team is focused on multiple facets of its development. So let us take a look at what each team has been up to for the month of April.
Engineering Lead Paul Reindell has been absolutely busy this month with the Los Angeles Engineering team. Last month we mentioned we had hired 2 new Gameplay Engineers, Patrick Mathieu and Chad McKinney. He has been helping bring the new Engineers up to speed, making sure they are well-versed in myriad processes involved at CIG. Furthermore, he has been doing support for 2.4 and several new features that are rolling out, including the Shopping UI, the new ItemSystem 2.0, and one of the biggest aspects, persistence. We are moving closer to having actual persistence in-game and the Engineering team has been making herculean efforts in making that function a reality.
Chad Zamzow has been working on building out the shield management mechanics, working with Tech Design Lead Kirk Tome on allowing player-control over the shield system. With the Shield Generator work being done, for the month of April he spent part of the time working on a Controller Interface for that feature and HUD code for the Shield Emitter.
Mark Abent has been working on the Seat feature, fixing up broken code and cleaning up the Entering Seats function including fixing player interactions, player enter/exit/idle and attachments. By the end of the month, Mark had progressed on to tackling the Phys Controller.
Ariel Xu has continually been working on creating our internal tool, the Port Editor. As mentioned in the past, this tool will allow the Designer greater power over editing the game, which is critical for expediting design and balancing efforts especially with the increasing numbers of assets entering the pipeline. Building game design tools is an incredibly exciting but daunting task. The ultimate goal is to provide designers with the tools they need to create new systems and features with as easy an interface as possible.
Under Paul’s guidance, our two newbie Engineers Chad McKinney & Patrick Mathieu have jumped headfirst into the game. Chad is already hard at work on the Doors system. He is currently working on a signal pipe set up to allow greater modularity within the Door system after he finished working on proxy triggers such as an automatic door opening, audio triggers, and animations. Patrick has been working on developing Controller Managers. These are systems that designate seat-priority, priorities for components, and adding events to components.
Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome has been occupied with a lot of priorities over the month of April. One priority has been discussing and dissecting (alongside his partners across the globe) the new and upcoming ships to be released. He has also supported the Tech Design team’s endeavors regarding the refactor of Coolers and Power Plants along with charting out Shields and Quantum Travel Drives.
Matt Sherman has not only been working on getting the Reliant flight-ready, he is also writing up the design brief for the 85X and the white box setup for the much-lauded Herald. Matt has also been working hand-in-hand with Kirk to chart out the intricacies of Quantum Travel beyond the basic and introductory mechanisms currently available in the baby PU.
Over the past few weeks, we have been showcasing several new mechanics/gameplay features we have been fleshing out. Of these new features, the Salvage functionality is one that Calix Reneau has been looking into and he has made steady progress to prepare this system for its first rollout. Furthermore, Calix has also looked into how terminal stations will function. This refers to the workstations players will use to operate various features such as the Salvage mechanic, what functionalities will be available on the terminal’s screen and so forth.
Narrative
Squadron 42, Squadron 42, Squadron 42…
We have been jamming full-tilt on pouring over the scripts to figure out what pieces we need to write the additional scripts needed to fill in the gaps, reflect revised level flow and general ambiance.
I would love to be able to go into more detail, but I am reenlisting my strict NO SPOILER policy. We will hopefully be able to go into a little more detail when we can come up for air.
In the meantime, we have been juggling needs for the Persistent Universe; everything from taking fiction passes at various locations and working out potential narrative possibilities to generating item descriptions (a task that will probably be pretty consistent for some time), helping with signage and other environmental storytelling and writing a lot of comm/message text.
Good times.
Again, we will be able to go into a bit more detail once these things go public.
Until next time.
The Engineering team is not the only team that has expanded over the month of April. The CIG Los Angeles art family increased with the addition of Byungjin “Jin” Hyun. An incredibly talented artist, Jin has plunged in by working on the interior of the Drake Caterpillar. Grouping up with 3D Art Lead Elwin Bachiller and Daniel Kamentsky who are working on creating the interior habitation sections of the Caterpillar, it is a ship that is turning out to be utterly beautiful.
While the three of them are hard at work in bringing the Caterpillar to life, these assets would not be possible without an amazing team of Concept Artists who produce the aesthetic direction on what to create. Concept Artists Gurmukh Bhasin and Justin Wentz created the concept pieces for the Caterpillar’s exterior and command bridge, respectively.
CG Supervisor Forrest Stephan, after returning from a sojourn to our UK office, has been applying his substantial talents towards creating the Pristine Materials for the Pilot Flight Suit, specifically for the game asset surfacing and supporting the clothing shopping for the PU.
Omar Aweidah completed the high-poly modeling for the light armor while one of our newer artists, Cheyne Hessler, has created the game asset geometry for player jetpacks.
Finally, our own haute couture fashionista, Jeremiah Lee, has bent his skills towards designing costuming/clothing for the PU. After all, one must look good when jaunting through the 30th century.
Global Technical Content
As we have explained in the past, the Tech Content team is unique. While amorphous in form, its functions and directives are very clear under the leadership of Sean Tracy. Sean has been composing the design docs for how the Character Customization tech will function while Senior Technical Artist Mark McCall has tackled the task of R&D. This is to become the system that will allow players to customize their in-game characters. It makes you wonder whose character’s face will be immortalized in Star Citizen? Will yours go down in infamy as a vicious pirate who disrupts trade lanes in their never-ending quest for loot? Or will it be a benevolent face of a loved politician? Perhaps an epic beard will give you a dashing, roguish look that can charm the masses. These are the things we imagine as we think about where Star Citizen will take us all.
Associate Technical Artist Patrick Salerno’s work on LOD’s have given new polish on various Components such as the Landing Gear, Escape Pods, Main Thrusters, Seats, and Weapon Mounts just to name a few items from his comprehensive list. Senior Technical Artist Matt Intrieri has also addressed an audio issue where Gladiator pilot seat enter and exit animations were causing the associated audio effect to trigger elsewhere instead of being centered on the geometry. In addition to the audio issue, Matt also resolved multiple bugs ranging from enter/exit animations to retrofitting Legacy Ships such as the Anvil Hornet.
On the rigging side of the Tech Content team, after completing the Undersuit Armor game asset rigging, Senior Rigger John Riggs is in progress of creating pipeline scripts for Maya. Associate Rigger Gaige Hallman resolved clothing volume clipping on characters along with several massive clothing fixes to prepare for the upcoming shopping experience.
Quality Assurance
LA-QA’s focus has been on the upcoming 2.4 release, testing new features and ensuring stability and performance across all builds. In particular, the team concentrated on:
2.4 Persistence Features
New Shopping Implementation
Persistent Universe Clothing
Starfarer Flight Performance
The team also got an added treat of taking a first look at large scale solar systems with the hopes of implementing the procedural planets functionality in the coming months.
Speaking of amorphous, this is a descriptor often used to describe what it actually is that Producers do. Senior Producer Eric Kieron Davis not only manages the CIG LA Production team, he has also overseen most of the ongoing construction and beautification of our new office. Although we moved into the building back in November, we have begun flourishing the final touches in order to make this office feel like home. This includes overseeing the art pieces hung up on the meeting room walls, contracting individuals to create and mount images from Star Citizen on our commissary walls, and also our really awesome faux-airlock doors that lead from the lobby into the heart of the building. Office comfort makes a big difference during crunch times, and the immersive environment sustains energy and creativity more than many truly appreciate.
Associate Producers Mark Hong and Randy Vazquez have been tireless dervishes of energy in keeping the LA teams focused on getting 2.4 on to the PTU and then out to the official release. Randy is responsible for setting up regular internal, office-wide playtest sessions to keep everyone familiar and fluent with our game content while maintaining schedules of in-progress as well as future upcoming tasks for the Tech Design and Engineering teams, while Mark Hong supports the Tech Content and Art teams. These tasks are not just for 2.4 but also looking ahead at features coming down the pipeline. Production Assistant Darian Vorlick for the past month has been helping the Community team by temporarily taking over social network update responsibilities on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as supporting the Production staff where needed.
Conclusion
Like any previous month at CIG, there is not a single moment where the office is not humming with activity. With our focus largely on finishing 2.4, April was definitely not shy of new content either. We also introduced the updated MISC Prospector and in celebration of its launch, we included a Concept Sale along with quality elements to accompany it such as details on Mining, a “job application” for mining operations at Shubin Interstellar, and our regular weekly programs like “Around the Verse,” the “10 for the Chairman/Developers” series, and “Bugsmashers.”
The month of May is looking to be no less exciting and intense. Your support and enthusiasm along with Chris Roberts’ vision, inspires us to no end. We hope you enjoy what we have accomplished this month and we look forward to sharing new content in the near and distant future. Thank you for being a Star Citizen on this journey.
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Persistent Testing
This month has been all about persistence and testing 2.4. All teams have been working hard to test and fix various items that are coming in to the live version of the game. 2.4 is shaping up to be a monumental update to the game which will bring online many systems which have been in development for some time, and set the stage for many more features to come online in upcoming publishes. Kudos to everyone in Austin for their hard work. Here are detailed reports from each team!
The primary focus of the ATX Development Team this month has been working towards the first release of Shopping and Persistence. Rob Reininger and our Design Team here in Austin with support from BHVR have been busy setting up the shops to function on Port Olisar in addition to what already exists in Area18. We’ve got Casaba Outlet and Cubby Blast open for business, and we’ll aim to sell clothing, armor, and weapons in our first release. It has required a lot of work from several different folks to make sure that the clothing and weapon items are properly spawned in on the store shelves and racks, getting the mannequin props set up so that clothing and armor can be properly purchased and equipped from it, and setting up all the data so that it properly appears in the Purchase UI. Pete Mackay has been spending his time balancing the pricing in the game and creating a new formula that will help determine pricing for everything from clothing to ships.
We’ve also spent some time nailing down the short and long-term design requirements for what we’re calling “Try On/Inspect Mode”. This mode will switch on when selecting the appropriate “Use Verb” within the Shop UI and it will allow you to view a potential purchase on your character before actually buying it. We’ve got an initial implementation in place and are scheduling out the rest of the features for future releases.
We’re turning our focus now to getting Dumper’s Depot online so that you can shop for ship components and weapons in-game as well. Rob Reininger is drafting up a Game Design Document for “Purchasing via Terminal”, which will be utilized in shops that have an inventory too large to fit on all of the shelves. Ship components/weapons and ships in general are a great example of where this feature would be used.
In other news, the work on the first deployment of the Persistence backend is now complete! Jason Ely, Tom Sawyer, and Jeff Zhu worked diligently this month to finally make our services persistent. We’ve provided our programmers and designers the ability to hook into this now so that we can start fully persisting things like player health, ship damage, hostility level, item purchases, ammo count, and much more. We’ve also implemented a new currency tentatively called Alpha UEC which will be used primarily to test shopping and other services. This new currency will help with balancing the pricing and overall economy and is subject to wipe at any time in order to implement new fixes. We’re turning our attention now to scheduling out a roadmap for getting actual Persistent UEC in the game.
Another major feature we’ve been working is Port Modification. We’ve been working with the UI Team in the UK to implement a new app in the mobiGlas that will allow you guys to customize your hangars and eventually much more. We’ve ported our hangars and flair objects over to using the new Item System 2.0 so that now you can access specific “ports” around your hangar and place things wherever you like! Eventually this will allow for customization of ship loadouts as well. We’ve gotten the ball rolling in fleshing out a design for using this app in other locations as well, like the Crusader map.
Our Ship Team here in Austin continues their work from last month. Chris Smith is working on the new-and-improved Hornet F7A model for Squadron 42, currently in greybox phase. Josh Coons is trucking along on the Drake Herald, also in greybox phase. These ships are coming along nicely and it is exciting to see ships both old and new get the extreme attention to detail that these guys provide with all the experience and resources that we’ve cultivated as we’ve grown.
The Animation Team in Austin has been supporting in various areas of the project, per usual. Our Ship Animation Team has had their hands in ships of all shapes and sizes, including bug fixing for the Starfarer, reviews on the Hornet F7A, Herald, Caterpillar, and Dragonfly, and support for the Idris. They’ve also created some new animations for entering/exiting the Freelancer ladder and put in place the combat enter/exits for the Aurora and Avenger. The PU Animation Team, meanwhile, has actually wrapped up their work on the Spaceship Showroom and Nightclub scene animations and are turning their attention to helping out on Squadron 42. They will be creating background animations for the performance capture scenes as well as implementing locomotion sets for various characters in the game.
Lastly, lighting artist Emre Switzer has nearly finished his final tweaks on the Levski landing zone. The market area is properly lit and appropriately dingy. Overall Levski is a fantastic environment and we can’t wait to get it y’all’s hands!
Quality Assurance
April has been almost entirely devoted to 2.4.0 testing. With Persistence coming online, a slew of new features have been added that need to be documented and tested. Our Persistent Universe Specialist, Todd Raffray, has been working closely with the design team to document all the new features that have been coming online for 2.4.0 and keeping the rest of the QA team updated on their expected behavior. Jeff Daily has been working on expanding our internal check-lists to accommodate all of the new features, as well as improving some of our older check-lists. Shopping alone adds many new test cases to our regular check-lists; here’s just a handful of tests that need to be performed for shopping alone:
Does the shopping interface open and properly progress through each screen?
Is all the information on the shopping interface displaying correctly?
Are there typos?
Are the correct clothing brand names and descriptions displayed?
Are there localization identifiers being displayed?
Is the transaction being processed by the server?
Is the aUEC properly deducted from the player’s account?
Is the purchased item granted to the player’s account?
Does mobiGlas update the player’s aUEC after the purchase has been completed?
Do the items appear correct on the character?
Do they clip the character in any unexpected ways?
Are there shader issues with the new clothing materials?
Are they deforming properly during animations?
Do the items appear correct on the shelves/clothes racks?
Do the items display their Augmented Reality interface when viewing them on the clothes rack and is the information displayed correct?
When using the “Try On” option, do the items get removed from the clothes rack while the character is wearing them, and are they returned once the character exits the “Try On” interface?
Do your new clothes appear when other players are viewing your character?
Does the character behave appropriately when activating the airlock while wearing civilian clothes?
Persistence doesn’t just add new functionality, such as in-game shopping, but also changes existing features like hangar customization. In 2.4.0, players will now be able to choose what flair items they display and where they display them. As a result, Robert Gaither has been working closely with our Persistent Universe Designer, Rob Reininger, on setting up item ports throughout all the hangars in order to allow you to decide how you want to customize them.
With any new major release comes new ships! 2.4.0 will see the Reliant reach Hangar-Ready status, and the Starfarer has now been made Flight-Ready so we’ve been doing our passes on both ships to ensure they’re performing as expected. As an added bonus, weapon projectiles will now properly transition across/inside local physics grids! That’s right, you can now shoot from outside to inside of a ship (or vice-versa) and hit players who just uhhh… happen to be in the way. So feel free to start practicing your boarding tactics and engage in some fps firefights in the Starfarer (and any other ship with a large enough interior) when 2.4.0 hits!
Andrew Rexroth and Katarzyna Mierostawska have been continuing Squadron 42 testing along with their UK counterparts, and have been documenting all the test cases necessary for when the time comes for the rest of the QA Team to jump into the fray in full force.
Our QA Information Specialist, Marissa Meissner, has recently been promoted to QA Lead, and has had her hands full training our latest new QA members: Jesse Mark (Jesse-CIG), Don Allen (Tunahead-CIG), Scott McCrea (Spectral-CIG), Bryce Benton (Underscore-CIG) and Brandon Crocker (Neverender-CIG). Please feel free to welcome them appropriately (weapons hot) if you run across them in game!
And finally, it has been 0 days since a member of QA has died to the airlock.
Game Support
April was a super month for Game Support! We wrapped up work on 2.3.1 at the first part of the month, then focused heavily on catching up on our ticket work.
Most significantly, we collaborated with Toast to establish the process for our brand new Evocati Test Flight volunteer test program. This group, 1/3rd of which is from our top Issue Council contributors and 2/3rd from our most active PTU testers, will act as a “pre-PTU” group, playtesting builds to make sure they are stable before the build goes out to a wider audience.
We’ll be very excited to unleash this group on 2.4.0 playtesting early in May!
For those wanting to participate in Evocati or PTU, it’s still possible! The best way to do this is to be an active member of the Issue Council reporting and contributing on bugs. There’s a lot of competition for a few spots, but we will look to update our ranks later this summer, so get on those bugs!
The cure for slow is to make it fast. The IT department spends much of its time identifying performance bottlenecks and often finds new and creative ways to alleviate them. This month was no different. With every fix, there’s usually something behind it.
In our never ending quest to continue to further reduce turnaround times on our builds we’ve identified and tackled the latest choke point – memory. At this point we monitor everything down to the smallest details. Having recently improving network and storage performance we realized that we’re spending a good deal of time on disk starving for memory. This was due to a recent code change that came from our engine team in order to improve build performance under certain conditions which actually resulted in higher RAM consumption than we were expecting because their performance gains are coming from caching more in to RAM. In order to account for this we’ve increased RAM to those build machines by 4x and performance jumped accordingly. Of course this means we’ll be increasing physical RAM across the entire build stack as a result and aggressively pursuing the next performance gain we can find.
IT has also been busy in London setting up for a quick mocap shoot. This was a ground up project starting with empty rooms and setting up everything necessary in short order. In addition to the mocap equipment itself we deploy multiple support teams which all need to be connected via an internal network as well as linked back in to the home network in Manchester. Monitoring systems, local storage, firewalls, backup systems, wifi, laptops all must be built out to support any shoot, large or small. We have found that the key to success goes beyond planning and organization. For any remote project to be successful we must build the network out as an extension of our internal network so team members can get straight to work without having to worry about anything.
LiveOps/DevOps
With fewer publishes this month, we’ve taken the time to perform some necessary house cleaning. Ahmed has rewritten significant portions of the deployment process. The goals of this work are twofold. The advances in persistence bring significant changes to the deployment process adding considerable complexity to the mix as compared to previous publishes. We have also taken this opportunity to improve efficiencies where possible as well as improving error handling conditions which all go to making the work Ahmed and his team are doing behind the scenes that much better. While there will always be room for improvement, most people would never know it based on the outstanding work being done in this area. With each advancement in the publishing tool set we reduce the amount of manual work involved in publishing Star Citizen.
We’re all very happy to welcome two new engineers to our team this month. Both Andy and Nate are joining us as DevOps engineers and they have already hit the ground running. Andy is investigating new systems which he will use to enhance our big data reporting systems on the server side and Nate is already working on a series of prototypes that we will use to more fully automate our server side publishing systems for the QA, PTU, and Live environments. While these are fairly large projects these guys are already moving at our pace so we’re anxious to see what else they come up with in their first month.
Thanks to our new test build system we’re seeing much more stable build progress this month as expected. We’ve also extended this to incorporate a test build step for risky code changes which helps to further stabilize the build pipeline as well as keeping builds moving more steadily to QA. By working closely with IT we did identify some more areas where we could improve overall build performance. We’re getting to the point where a gain in speed doesn’t feel as big as it used to but when every hour counts we will continue to find every possible performance gain we can.
Some changes are coming to Port Olisar. We gone through and fitted some shopping locations within the struts which helps gives the facility some more personality and is a great testbed for the shopping mechanic. We are starting with a small number of locations initially, but in the future we will be rolling out more locations as more buyable items come online. These updates will be coming in for the next release so we’re looking forward to getting it out to you guys.
Nyx is in the final stages of polish and optimization, we’re drilling down to hit our budgets in each area to make sure we deliver a smooth experience. Once the procedural tech is ready for prime time we will be integrating the location into the terrain ready for release.
The hard work is also continuing on the Sq42 campaign, the vertical slice level is continuing with its final art production phase and part of the weekly company playtests.
That’s all for this month folks, happy shopping in 2.4 and enjoy the vitamin D sunbath…
F42 AD
There are months where it’s hard to keep up, the rate of flow and change sometimes is amazing! I have to admit, the Prospector, we really did wrestle that ship and it took a lot of work on both Gavin’s and my front to get it where Chris was happy – all being said, the results came out pretty good and it might not be too long before it gets made!
Concept work is also continuing on the new corvette, a small personal vehicle and a new small ship. We’ve also tackled some Behring ship weapons (Size 5,4,3) and a boatload of components, not forgetting the Klaus and Werner weapon family guide with a hope to updating and unifying the weapons. There’s has also been a good amount of fettling of the Vertical slice level and prop designs – we all know the standard we want to achieve, there are just no shortcuts and it takes time.
For characters, a lot of work has been going on with the Vanduul, with Chris being in the studio on a more regular basis it making it a lot easier to fine tune the creature design. Also work started on medical staff costumes and also UEE staff.
VFX
This month the VFX team have been busy working on the Starfarer. Specifically, implementing its flight-ready effects – including damage, interior states, thrusters and weapons. The interior effects in particular have been time-consuming because of the sheer quantity of room and corridors. As always, we have worked closely with the ship team to ensure our effects sync up beautifully with the lighting.
We have also created effects for two new ship weapons, added effects to the new Crusader areas, and revisited our “high tech” effects category to bring it in line with the VFX style guide.
Away from the “fun” stuff (i.e.: blowing up massive spaceships!) we have also spent time cleaning up our pipeline documentation. Primarily this is for the other disciplines’ benefit so they can more clearly see how far along the VFX artists are on any given task – essential when a small team is involved in so many tasks at any one time.
Graphics
As well as fixing some stability issues the graphics team have been working on a variety of new features for the artists this month, the first of which is improvements to the layered shader we use for characters, weapons and props. This shader allows us to define the appearance of an object as the combination of more ‘layers’ such as cloth, steel, plastic etc. The new changes allow us to define how each of these layers will wear/erode over time, improve the overall performance of the shader, and allow it to be used on both small props and very large weapons.
We’ve also been finalizing our work on the ‘light linking system’ which allows light sources and glowing light-fittings to be linked together so that the brightness of the light fittings accurately reflects the realistic intensity of the bulb. This is crucial in getting the full benefit of the new HDR flare & bloom tech which we’re hoping to enable for the next release. The latest changes have refactored this to allow it work with the upcoming Object Container system.
After seeing a great presentation from GDC 2016 on improving the performance of tiled-lighting, we’ve been working on integrating this technique into our pipeline so that we can transition to tiled-lighting as opposed to the current deferred-lighting solution (should potentially be faster).
Work has officially started on implementing a new method of handling the ordering of the large number of transparent objects that Star Citizen requires (e.g. cockpit glass, visor, UI and particles etc). This will also involve integration transparent objects better with the post effects such as motion blur, depth of field and anti-aliasing, however this process requires deep engine work so will take quite a while to complete, but should fix issues such the cockpit glass and ship UI rendering in the wrong order when viewed from outside the cockpit.
Finally we have been finalizing a new profiling system that breaks down performance costs per art team to help us profile and optimize the huge amount of content in our game.
Engineering
The big feature development we’ve been helping out working on this month is the persistence, or basically the game remembering stuff between sessions. This is a very big deal as it’s the groundwork that so much of the game will be built upon. The underlying system has been implemented over in the US studios, but we’ve been then building on top of that so you can start seeing and enjoying the results of their hard work.
One of the big things that we now persist is the new AUEC (our alpha credits) so in Crusader we’ve started looking at ways in which we can reward the player with these credits depending on what you accomplish. David’s been working with the designers on implementing some of this gameplay. Now when you complete a mission you will get rewarded. Spotted somebody with a wanted level? Take them out and you’ll get a bounty. Find something interesting on a disused space station? Could make you some money.
Of course we’re implementing ways of spending this newly gotten cash. So we’ve updated the repair stations so that they’re no longer free and you have to pay an amount to fix up your ship. Fuel and ammo also now come with a cost. And of course shopping is being implemented! We’ve now got working shops in both Crusader and ArcCorp where you can go and buy clothes and weapons. On the clothing side Jamie has been working on a new try on mode where you can select a the piece of clothing you’re interested in and your able to view it on your character before deciding to buy, or with weapons being able to pick them up and inspect them before putting down some credits.
Another big aspect of the persistence is how we now store your hangar and the loadout of your ships. Rather than selecting which ships are in your hangar, or which flair items you can see from the website, we can now do it all in-game. This actually brings together several new pieces of tech from the Interaction Point system to the ‘inner thought’ UI which the UI guys here have been working on. Both Simon and Bone have been getting this UI working so you can see these interaction points, go up to one of them, select how you want to interact with it, and depending on what select in this case it’ll bring up a menu of what items can go on that spot. It’s a very flexible system so if it’ll allow you to place what ships you want in your hangar to changing the loadout of the ship itself.
Otherwise as usual we’ve been working in the background on all the ongoing mechanics required for S42. Nothing too much to update on but Craig is making good progress on the new landing system and getting landing working on a moving carrier ship, Rob has been improving the conversation system with it working with subsumption, Romulo has been doing some underlying conversion work on the weapons and implementing grenades, Gordon is progressing nicely with ledge grabs as well and vaulting and mantling.
Quality Assurance
It’s been a very busy month in QA here at Foundry 42. We worked tirelessly with the Dev team and you the community to get 2.3.1 out with the hopes of clearing up some of the nasty frame rate issues and the server stability crashes and while work on that is still ongoing, 2.3.1 brought about some much needed improvements.
With that out the door we began working on the big one, 2.4.0 is probably one of the biggest releases we have worked on since Crusader was created. But boy is it an exciting patch. Persistence. Everything persists now, and testing it has been a rollercoaster of emotions, QA’s main hurdle has been stability. In its first iteration, persistence made the game very unstable, with versions completely failing to build and a lot of time spent on frustrating tests. But we got through the hard times and have been ploughing on, testing the changes to the Hostility system, the Missions system and the Cry Astro Stations. We’re really eager to push this to you guys and gather up your feedback.
But persistence isn’t the only exciting thing we have been working on. Stocked shops (In Both ArcCorp and Port Olisar) & Alpha UEC, A new flight ready ship, a new hangar ready ship and a completely overhauled Hangar system (The Port Modification App). A few fun bugs have showed up in this testing time, such as ships bouncing around the hangar, Eldritch horror style floating eyeballs and so much more.
Right now we are working very hard to find and bug up all the major issues so this can get pushed to the PTU and you guys can get to see all the fantastic changes that have gone in.
See you in the ‘verse!
Audio
April for audio was, as ever, busy! The S42 work and the 2.4 release have been our main points of focus this month, but alongside that a big wedge of music production was undertaken. But we’ll start with the individual updates.
Sam Hall has been hard at it with ship computer work, looking to reengineer and refactor this so we can have it behave more intelligently in-game. This has involved syncing up with those in systems design as well as moving it across to the subsumption system. As well as this he’s been working on resolving 2.4 bugs, optimizing an audio plug-in for Dataforge, and adding triggers for airlock transitions (e.g. for when the player enters space without the prerequisite protective helmet).
As well as his work on the music production (see below), Ross Tregenza has been iterating on the music logic system and is still holding up the fort in being the overall point man for Squadron 42.
Luke Hatton handily bullet-pointed his general tasks! So bullet-point away, Luke:
Tweaks to maneuvering audio for the Aurora and fixed missing audio on the primary thruster for the Aurora LN
Mix tweaks to the tutorial hangar, more ambiance details now audible
Fixed broken enter and exit sounds on the Gladiator
Now using general health parameter in Wwise for ships, so we can alter any sound based on the amount of damage a ship has taken easily
Added distant explosion sound variants
Darren Lambourne, apart from his mastering mission in Munich, has been polishing up the Starfarer and working on audio for the Argo MPUV cargo vehicle.
Matteo Cerquone has also bullet-pointed things:
Added audio for Devastator Energy Shotgun dry fire
Added sounds for interactive elements such as alarm systems, elevators and doors for S42
Old Foley clean up
Bug fixing
Bob Rissolo and Phil Smallwood have both been deep on the dialogue side, preparing for future dialogue/p-cap sessions and implementing/processing material for current usage by the design department. Phil’s also been working on social module tasks, esp. re. shopping and general locations.
Simon Price is still very much engaged in dialogue pipeline tools that will be required for S42 as well as the live release.
Graham Phillipson – he’s also been on 2.4 bugs etc. but otherwise:
Stefan Rutherford has been re-organizing some large aspects of the Wwise project structure to underpin the mix pipeline, which is a joint design/engineering effort by Lee Banyard (me), Jason Cobb, Stefan Rutherford and Graham Philipson currently – this will feed into S42’s linear-styling which require a more ‘filmic’ mix workflow, as well as the more systematic mix workflow that the persistent universe requires. Otherwise he’s been working on new content for our auto-footstep system, restructuring and redesigning the guns. He also headed up another gun recording session that took place in early April at Copehill Down with the company ‘Audiobeast’ (aka Steve Whetman). Hopefully some photos will be along for the ride with this monthly report, if not I’ll post some to the ‘Ask A Dev’ audio forum, hopefully we’ll wrangle some video too.
Jason Cobb has, as ever, been providing technical back-up in various aspects of the audio build pipeline, and is setting up mix states/snapshots across the game as part of the wider mix foundational work.
As mentioned previously, we pushed through a lot of music production work this month. We had another session at the start of the month in Bratislava with the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra, to upgrade a lot of the themes and incidental pieces for Star Citizen. Partly this is material for the special edition soundtrack CD, but this material will also make its way into the game as well to improve upon what’s already present.
Then, with that material in the bag, Pedro Macedo Camacho, Ross Tregenza and I went down to Real World Studios, and met up with our mix engineer Peter Fuchs and assistant engineer Patrick Phillips. As well as being a talented and experienced recording engineer for our orchestral sessions, Peter has an extensive CV of mixing orchestral scores for film and games – you can check out his CV on IMDB if interested: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0297273/
We spent five solid days in the studio shaping and sculpting the rather lovely source material into more finalized tracks. If you’re interested in the facility, you can find pictures of it at http://realworldstudios.com/recording-studios/the-big-room/ – we were in what’s aptly named ‘The Big Room’ (hint – it’s big). While there’s an expansive mixing console there, much of the work of mixing by Peter was done ‘in the box’ – that is, within Pro Tools itself rather than routing everything through the SSL console. When working with many pre-recorded tracks this is often a quicker process due to the amount of setting up it would take between one piece of music and the next to assign everything to the desk, and his workflow is better suited to working this way. But mixing desks look impressive, of course!
Once we were done with the mixing process, that material was taken on a step further at CS Mastering – which is a mastering studio in Munich headed up by Christoph Stickel. (If curious, you can see some images at http://www.csmastering.de/) Darren Lambourne was in attendance with Christoph and Peter Fuchs, and the process of putting together a finalized CD master was undertaken here. This involves working with the stereo tracks only, rather than Pro Tools sessions; but refining them yet further so they form a more cohesive ‘whole’, with a mixture of very high end analogue and digital audio processing equipment to hand.
All of this was a workflow that we’d wanted to get locked down for some time and I have to thank everyone for making it possible, we went from performance to a final master in really good time and I hope everyone will enjoy the results, whether in-game or on the soundtrack CD itself. It’s wonderful to hear Pedro’s work polished to this level of sonic shine, I think we all learned a lot from the experience and it will help refine the process for music production across Star Citizen as well as Squadron 42.
And I think that’s all for this month from CIG Audio. As always, thanks for listening!
Animation
Continued on with railgun animation sets
Fixing cover bugs
Turn animations worked on for 180 degrees and 360 degrees
Testing and feedback on tools
Further work to start / stop / step locomotion
New FPS weapon look dev and feedback with the art team
Recruitment – new animator starting next month
Props
The ship components continue to be a big focus this month for the props team, we are wrapping up the full set of small coolers and we have started work on power plants and quantum drives.
We have been supporting the new persistence feature by supplying the designers with a hand full of assets to support their new mission mechanics, this initial bunch was a quick pass to get something in to prove out the gameplay and will hopefully just be the start that we can add to in the future.
Another bit of exciting news is that we have now had our additional tech requests added in to the layer blend material and can now use it across the board for prop production. We were waiting on a few tweaks and adjustments to the way the shader worked and that has now been delivered. This is a big step forward for us as it allows us to almost half the number of draw calls on each prop so should really help to make our pops nice and cheap in terms of performance and we plan to use it in anger over the next few months.
Finally we have been supporting the shopping and clothing feature with a new auto valet locker system so allow for quick and easy changing of clothes and a bit of work has been done looking on our workflow for creating hanging and folded variants of all the clothing you can purchase.
Next month, more ship components and back to squadron 42 props.
Spaceships
Interior production of the Idris is coming to a close, this has enabled the team to start look dev and prototyping of the crashed / damaged asset and start to establish a real key beat within the story arc of Squadron 42. From this research the team should then be able to establish a grounded look and feel for damaged cap ships including the Javelin and Bengal.
Production on the Javelin exterior has moved forward, sharing procedures and techniques found during the development of the Idris, this has also fed into the Bengal production, all ships now sharing a very specific Squadron 42 Livery.
Design
We had a very busy April in the UK Design department.
Firstly, we are back in Ealing shooting pickup scenes at Imaginarium, this has kept a lot of designers busy in terms of finalizing the play spaces and putting in stability fixes. It’s always really rewarding for the guys who are working hard on the Squadron 42 levels to see the level of polish that the actor’s performances give to the player experience.
The Live Release team have been very busy this month with the introduction of our first stage of persistence. Crusaders expanding economy now includes new missions and bonuses, as well as new scavengeables. Cry-Astro now charge for their services and players will now find that respawning has a cost attached. As well as the numerous additions to the play space, we have been starting the work on the solar system scale map which will be coming soon. All in all a very interesting and productive month for the Live Release team that you will soon get to experience and feedback to us on.
The Technical team have continued to setup the various ships that are currently slated for release, and the full component refactor that will make such a difference to functionality and versatility of these craft is nearing completion. It’s nice to finally see an upgradability system that works beginning to roll out into the live builds soon.
Obviously the component system will have a huge impact on the new Balancing Team and that is getting a lot of focus right now so that when it hits we can be in the best possible shape to release something that works.
Overall it’s been another good month for Squadron 42 development and continued building for the persistent universe.
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German Precision
April was a solid productive month for us in Frankfurt in regards to both progress and planning. We had Chris out to the studio for a few days for face to face meetings with various departments. Since the last update we have 5 new people working in the office across multiple areas, with each discipline starting to round out a bit more. We’ve all been busy, as we say every month, but every day the team is constantly pushing things forward. The tech update for this month will read shorter than normal, because a good amount of the engine team are working on the procedural tech, and we’d prefer to keep some of the details internal for now and give you the full breakdown when the time comes for you guys to experience it for yourselves. This month we’ve also had a few groups come through the office and hang out with the team, as I always say, the support from you guys is much appreciated and helps push us on a daily basis.
Weapons
The weapon art team finished texturing two new ship weapons and are currently working on the various LOD’s (level of details) and getting them integrated into the game. The Apocalypse Arms Scourge Railgun has been given some additional polish and is in its final stages of art production and is being animated in parallel. We’ve also blocked out a prototype for one new FPS weapon and have a bunch more in the concept stage. We’ll hopefully have some images to share of the new work next month.
Engine
The core engine team focused on various areas of code to improve. First we continued our support to increase the number of render-able objects. To support massive counts of 50.000 and more (think asteroids or planet vegetation/rocks) we implemented a very fast instancing rendering path. This allows us to make the whole scenery more populated and interesting by showing more objects than we previously could. While implementing this rendering path, we also took some time to clean up parts of the rendering pipeline, unifying a few areas where we could.
Another focused area was the JobManager, which we improved the month before to be more flexible; people can new work on different batches, specify which batches have priorities and so on. As most of this was written as lock-less code for performance reasons, we missed some bugs. And since this was low level multithreading code, we now had the fun of finding out why certain operations succeed over 1 million times to suddenly fail. Good news is that we are confident that we ironed out those issues (we managed to run 12 instances of the editor in parallel without any threading issues, which should trigger all kinds of unusual thread timings).
The third area we looked into was to further improve the streaming code. Streaming can be very computation intensive as the code must touch all objects around the player, not just the fully visible objects. Since our game uses a very large view distance, this resulted in a very large number of objects needing an update. We could massively reduce this number by implementing a broad phase object distance culling. In the ZoneSystem, we already group objects together by spatial properties, now we combine the maximum view distance of all objects in such groups. If the whole group is further away than this combined distance, we can immediately ignore the whole group.
Lastly we spent a little time on our vsync implementation, as we noticed that we couldn’t get a stable 60 fps even if we had over 70 fps when vsync was disabled. It turned out that this was a thread synchronization issue which is now fixed. During this investigation, we also had to investigate the details about how windowed rendering works in Windows 7 and later. In short, it is complex For our vsync fixes, this unfortunately means that we can only ensure correct vsync in fullscreen mode. Because of this we added some experimental vsync modes.
Use the Windows Composite Manager to vsync (r_Vsync 2). This mode has a certain performance cost.
Implement our own vsyncing (r_Vsync 3). Works, but can result in some tearing as we can’t control when windows draw the data on the screen.
Disable the Composite Manager (r_Vsync 4). Works only on windows 7 (It is no longer possible to disable vsync on newer windows versions).
Of course mode 0 (no vsync) and mode 1 (regular vsync) are still in the game and should be the ones used. But it could be worth to try out the other modes for the brave ones.
Build System
Short and simple update from our Senior Build Engineer.
Trybuild bug fixing and balancing for game-dev and 2.4.
CopyBuild automation.
Tools for VFX artists.
Feature testing for game-dev (WIP).
Cinematics
This month the cinematic team continued to push forward on all fronts, blocking out of scenes, working with engineers on workflow and tools, as well as improving the overall look of body and facial animations. A good amount of time was also spent on preparing for a PCap (Performance Capture) shoot starting in early May. A few members of the team went to the UK office for a few days to go over scripts and sort out blocking of new scenes with the writers and Level Designers.
Quality Assurance
Art testing was the major theme in April for CIG-DE QA. Chris Speak and Melissa Estrada have been busy enhancing the Artist testing pipeline to ensure Editor tools are in top working order with the addition of new checklists and an Art specific sanity checklist that caters to an Artist’s specific needs. QA has seen the benefits of these discipline specific sanity tests and will be working toward creating additional checklists on a per discipline basis. QA will also be assisting with the revamp of our in-house tool used to grab builds, to make it easier for developers to obtain information on whether a build is usable for development or not. Chris has also been collaborating with Carsten Wenzel on time demo creation and Francesco Di Mizio with FeatureTests, so that we can start client-side automation tests for both current and future features and in-game systems. Melissa was buried deep in code with Ivo Herzeg to get to the bottom of a crash issue that prevented QA and development from entering the tutorial for testing and debugging. The crash occurred as the player loaded into the level, and it turned out that the cause was related to the character’s limbs essentially exploding to astronomical values! She also spent time testing potential Vertical Sync fixes from Christopher Bolte that should bring significant improvements to overall game-play in future releases. It’s been a very busy month for CIG-DE QA, but we are already starting to prep full force for May and whatever challenges it may bring.
AI: Artificial Intelligence
This month the AI team has been mostly focusing on making progress on the development of Subsumption.
First of all we have been making progresses on the implementation of the Interactors for AI. Currently each Interactor can be setup by the design team to contain the required information an NPC needs to interact with it: position of the alignment to start the interaction, the animation the NPC needs to play, and the action he needs to perform. The NPC will then search for objects in the world that serve specific purpose and he can interact with them and perform actions on them.
Subsumption uses the following hierarchy for creating behaviors:
Activities > Subactivities > Tasks
This month we also introduced a lot of new tasks (the basic building blocks designers will use to create behaviors ) and we made a pass on the basic functionalities for debugging on screen useful information regarding the system. We also made the basic pass on the Action Areas, those are the elements in the world that allow designers to mark areas with specific information: a multicrew space ship, for example, might have an engine room, a hangar, a control room, and so on. Action Areas allow the NPCs to reason about the environment to fulfill their tasks.
We also spent some time unifying the movement speeds between NPCs and Players, so we now have full control of 5 different pseudospeeds on the AI side: Walk Slow, Walk Fast, Run Slow, Run Fast, and Sprint.
We’ve also been refactoring the spawning system to allow designers to have a more reliable and stable system to populate the world. The new AI Spawning Manager is going to be the system used by both scripted logic and the mission system to populate the universe. Currently the main goal of the new system is to simplify the spawning mechanics and make it more robust, for example we introduced a proper special validation to analyse the space that will be occupied by the ship we want to spawn.
Last but not least we dedicated some time to bug fixing and stability improvements as we regularly do, it’s worth mentioning we have fixed several crashes and we have removed the main cause of the 5 seconds stall that was happening on some i5 core machines.
VFX
Over the past few months the Frankfurt VFX team has been working on some new tech for our particles. What this allows us to do is record the optical flow of motion between the frames in our animated textures and then distort or morph one frame into the next instead of doing a simple cross fade between frames. Not only does this drastically smooth out the animation of the textures, but it also has the added benefit of allowing us to reduce the amount of frames in the animation, thereby increasing the resolution of each individual frame without increasing the overall texture resolution.
We have also been working on fleshing out the effects for the high-tech tech style. Image example can be seen in our DE header image.
Tech Art
We are helping animation programmers for R and D on itemport animation which will help us to easily pick and swap any prop, weapon, or its attachments. We’ve been supporting and making progressing with numerous weapons from the weapons team. We’ve also been moving forward our DCC pipeline with scene manager, which helps artists to easily assemble a complete animation scene in Maya.
Design
The Level Designers have been focusing on iterating through the layout of the Hurston landing zone as well as that of the lawless base mentioned last month. Hurston is seeing some revisions to its layout to improve its scale, as we are still figuring out best practices for combining the scale of ships and hangars, of grandiose vistas and buildings, with the scale of functional (and fairly realistic) playable spaces. Getting to the best of both worlds is an ongoing challenge that we’re iterating our way through, which means that designing those first few locations of different types and sizes naturally takes a lot longer while we learn what level design rules best apply to PU locations. The lawless base is soon getting into ‘concepting’ phase, during which the assortment of un-textured volumes that it’s made of so far will be painted over by concept artists, to give guidance to the art team on how to build and beautify it.
We are also doing the groundwork for the next batch of locations that have to be built when both of those are out of our hands: figuring out what makes those new locations special, and how to allow the levels, technology and game mechanics to join hands in an effort to move the game forward as fast and efficiently as possible. That involves aligning with different departments to dig into critical designs such as spawning, parking, shopping/trading, etc. to see what features are coming up in the short term and how best to showcase them through the locations we build (instead of just adding extra places to visit.)
Finally, we’re still going through the recruitment process to fill up our ranks with more level designers, to help us work through those tasks and develop the foundation of our level design philosophy for the PU.
On the System Design side we’ve continued to work on our AI as we are switching them from Modular Behavior Trees to fully use Subsumption for in combat and out of combat behaviors. Eventually we’ll end up with all our AI being built in a single unified tool.
We are also continuing the Inner Thought implementation and its integration in other systems like the Useables, Interactors and Looting. This system will help us get a unified interface for interacting with objects that have more than one simple use case, making dialogue choices and even giving your wingmen commands in the heat of battle.
Work also continues on the Power Distribution and Reputation systems as these have received an overhaul and will soon be entering production. Another system that was in need, and is receiving a major rework is the FPS Suit because of the changes to FPS defenses and this one will still be ongoing for the next month.
More on the production side of design we’ve been busy setting the goals for the May-July period, breaking down systems and setting priorities for all of them in regards to each career. This has enabled us to have a better overview of what is actually critical in getting those careers up and running on the live servers as soon as possible.
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On Our Best Behaviour
At BHVR, we create much of the art for Star Citizen and make sure the quality of every graphic element reaches a level of quality never seen before.
Engineering
This month was a long sprint to get 2.4 features out of the door and into the hands of QA testers, PTU users and eventually yours, our dear players.
A good proportion of this was related to shopping features: lots of work on AR and mobiGlas, but especially doing proper networked transactions and shop actions replication.
Lots of goodies that we’re all excited to see you try.
We reworked Cry-Astro services, to make sure the new service request flow works well with multicrew ships. This was a big pay off, now any member of your crew can use their mobiGlas to request individual services while preventing different people paying for the same service (maybe in shadier service area, but NOT at Cry-Astro, the Empire’s repair, restock and refuel one stop solution!). Also you will only pay for services as they are executed, so if you’re being shot or have to leave in a hurry, you don’t need be afraid of not getting your money’s worth.
Design
This month, the Bhvr design team was very busy with shopping and next release features. We continued setting up shops, both on Area 18 and Port Olisar. It’s funny how it is more work and complicated than it just looks on the outside. The guys did a great job making this work cleanly and efficiently.
We also did some work on the Revel and York Hangar to support the new abilities of the Port modification system. We also updated all the flair items and hangar decorations to support that new system. Looking forward to see what the players think.
Next month should see the construction of a new environment and plenty of level design for the team. We are also eager to continue iterating on the shopping system and expanding the features around it.
Art
On the Art side, we had a lot of fun making additions to Port Olisar, which you will be able to experience very soon. Mostly work related to shops, additional dressing and adding a larger landing pad.
We have also opened new areas to make them ready for later releases.
Moreover, we supported the shopping mechanics with custom props, to better showcase the items sold in the stores.
On Levski, we continued our optimizations on all fronts, meshes, textures, materials and lighting, but we are close to finish the optimizations.
Finally, we worked on new props and finish next month`s flair object.
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Cloudy with a Chance of Platform
Greetings from cloudy Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month.
Ship Stats
Design is complete for the new ship reference matrix, and we have already started development. This new matrix will allow users to more easily view all of Star Citizen’s expanding catalog of ships and give the ability to compare multiple stats. We also have designs for a mobile version, which are being reviewed internally.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Our development of multi-factor authentication continues, and we are adding a mobile authenticator app. As part of a three-pronged attack, we will also be updating the game launcher to include MFA.
We have presented a rough prototype of our new communication platform to CIG, and reviews were positive. We are working on the chat module for the time being, and then we will start developing the forum module. We’re still a few months away from a beta launch, but we’re confident you will love it.
Ship Happens
April was a very exciting month for ships. It kicked off with a Star Citizen April Fools’ joke, in the form of the Big Benny inspired Reliant and your reaction to this goofy delivery vehicle was overwhelming to say the least! Later in the month, there was a Free Fly for anyone who wanted to try out Star Citizen. This was also accompanied by a Tax Day Sale putting the Super Hornet, Gladiator and the Retaliator Bomber up for sale for a week. Finally, to cap off the month, there was a concept sale of the Prospector a specialized mining vessel. This sale featured a Shubin recruitment page, where citizens were encouraged to apply to the company. The best 5 submissions will be rewarded with an Orion!
Sales
There were also a couple of merchandise sales this month: they included a track jacket bundled with the Star Citizen deck of cards for a reduced price; there were also some new Anvil Aerospace mouse pads that were on sale earlier this month. And finally, to round out April, a new set of fabric patches representing some of the manufacturers on the Star Citizen universe were released for sale.
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Home Alone
Oh my gosh. We’re at the end. Ben and Ali are out of town this week so I get to write whatever I want and nobody can stop me. Well, Chris still has to read this and approve it. He can definitely stop me…
Anyway, it’s been a hell of a month. Lots of ups and downs and twists and turns, but no matter what happens each month, it always seems to go by too fast. That’s what happens when you work with this community: you make the time fly. April 2015 was when I started “officially” as your Community Manager, and the last year has been one for the books. I hope you’ve enjoyed the changes and improvements to our community output over the last year. It’s truly been a team effort, with any given endeavor being an absurd idea from Ben we make reality, or an equally absurd idea from me that Ben is wise enough to let me get away with, and either of those being impossible to pull off without the support of Alexis, Thomas, Justin, Toast, and especially Sandi.
With that, let’s look at our output this month.
April Fools!
WE GOT YOU!
WE SO GOT YOU GOOD!
It’s time for full disclosure: On March 29th we had nothing. Nada. Zilch. We were ready to call in the towel on April Fools this year. Just too busy, and we never want to do something that doesn’t move the needle for us, y’know? Then at about 3pm in the afternoon I had what I knew was a terrible idea that had come too late for us to do anything with, so I walked into Ben’s office intending for him to talk me out of it.
“Hey Ben, you know how everyone is always asking for those profession deep dives?”
“Talk to Tony Zurovec.”
“No, no… I had a terrible idea that I want you to talk me out of. Let’s do a fake profession post about food delivery. We can use the Big Bennys assets that Jeremiah and Elwin and Gaige have been putting together in their spare time for that other thing and use them here.”
This… THIS is where he was supposed to give me that look I get sometimes. The look that says: “Every decision involved in the process of hiring you was a mistake.”
It’s the same look I get from Chris when I show him that Jar Jar Tongue Sucker from 1999 I have on my desk.
But he didn’t give me that look. He said the words that often mean I won’t be sleeping for the next three days, “Let’s do it!”
And with that, we rallied Jeremiah Lee, Gaige Hallman, and Elwin Bachillier to finish up the “fun side projects” they’d been fooling around with in their spare time while Ben wrote up the copy and our friends at Turbulent coded new tech for the website that would allow us to simulate opening and reading a menu (that same tech we’d re-purpose later this same month for the Starfarer sale.)
And after late nights with Gaige animating our Delivery Dancer, speedy work by Elwin to skin the Reliant, and Jeremiah cranking out variant Bennys emotes, we had the ingredients needed to “move the needle.”
And that’s how you make a terrible idea a reality in only 3 days.
Usually I like to go through and discuss the videos we put out in sequential order, highlighting and discussing the various peaks of content. Not this time. We’re skipping straight to dessert! Did you watch RtV last Friday?! Lando’s dad, or more commonly known as Dad Lando made his starring debut, capturing our hearts with his passion and perspective on the Star Citizen universe. Seriously, this guy rocks. His ability to embarass Lando definitely boosts his likeability.
Around the Verse and the 10 For series continued its regular schedule this month while Lando’s “Wonderful World of Star Citizen” introduced us to the always entertaining Captain Richard and his history on live streaming, and the creative talent of Mr. Combustible and his detailed workflow when 3D printing Star Citizen ships.
Reverse the Verse achieved a new apogee this month after Composer Pedro Camacho and Senior Sound Designer Ross Tregenza joined us for some exclusive new music reveals and an abundance of detailed information. We are extremely fortunate to have these talented gentlemen on our team.
If you checked out the Turbulent section of our Monthly Report, you can already see some of the work-in-progress at overhauling and improving our web experience. That “communication platform” they’re developing is so exciting I can hardly contain myself, and will impact every aspect of your interaction with our website.
In addition to that, one of the many things being worked on is an update to the old Ship Status page. A dedicated landing page instead of a series of forum posts, this will eventually allow Citizens to quickly glance at the continuing development of our ships as they move through the pipeline, and play your own “at-home” version of, “Where’s My Spaceship?”
Those two, combined with the new Ship Reference Matrix, and our continuing efforts to improve on all aspects of our presentation make this a fun time to be working with our partners at Turbulent. I’m continually grateful for their dedication and support when we come up with crazy ideas at the last possible moments. They’re always game to try something new, and push the boundaries of what a game website can be. Benoit, Benjamin, Scott, Ken… even Felix. =oP
It has been an awesome month for our Star Citizen streamers! Starting the month off, Farasalt and Captain_Richard stepped up their game for one of the funniest April Fools gags I’v seen. It was seemingly just another Friday night on Captain_Richard’s channel.. Everyone sat awaiting for the intro music to stop and the man himself to appear. When the curtains arose, Farasalt appeared, decked out in thick makeup and a Captain_Richard’s shirt. What ensued was over an hour of hilarity as Farasalt NAILED a Captain_Richard impression. All the mannerisms were on point! Definitely check this out. Well done gentlemen.
Deejay Knight is now officially a Twitch Partner! This was a well-deserved promotion that came to no one’s surprise. Deejay continues to rouse his audiences with his upbeat performances and is an absolute pleasure to watch. Huge congratulations!
Capturing our attention with his sweet dance moves and positive vibes, SGT_Gamble has become a household name in the Star Citizen community. Gamble has been rallying entire servers together to participate in exciting and emergent game-play that we just can’t get enough of. Awesome stuff sir!
Lastly, April was one of the toughest months to date when it came to choosing MVP’s. The amount of content flowing in from our community is absolutely astounding! Check out these well deserved winners!
The Wrap-Up
Looking Ahead
That was some month we had. Every month we move closer and closer to realizing the vision and scope of both Star Citizen and Squadron 42. In our four studios around the world and our partner studios in Canada and elsewhere, people work tirelessly to fulfill the promise of this unprecedented project. Whether they’re artists, programmers, designers, engineers, writers, directors, producers, and more, they’re all gamers who want to share this experience with everyone reading these each and every month.
In the months ahead, you’ll see us continue to build on the foundation of persistence Alpha 2.4 provides. As the teams in each studio continue to expand, you’ll see our pace of production continue to pick up as it already has since late 2015. The knowledge and experience we gain with each new ship built, each new character brought to life, each new landing zone realized, and each new game system coming online will inform the next one after that, meaning that not only will the quantity of our output increase, so will the quality continue to improve.
Whether it’s website you visit, the broadcasts that inform you, the game you play, or the platform that supports it, we’re continuing to iterate on every aspect of Star Citizen and Squadron 42’s continuing development, a truly unique experience for everyone involved because you’re here for the ride with us.
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Galactic Guide: Chronos System
Synthworld
In the outer reaches of the UEE sits the Chronos System, which, since its discovery in 2863, has been shrouded in government secrecy and political controversy. Official government documentation list the Navy’s 18th Battle Fleet, then stationed in the Kellog System, as the first to make the journey into Chronos upon discovery of the jump point during a routine scan patrol. However, it is worth noting that a recent court case, Contraly vs the UEE, lays a counter claim that it was Contraly’s great-grandfather who discovered the system and reported it to the 18th, but was denied proper credit due to complications involving an outstanding warrant for poaching Orms on Xis. Expert historians have chimed in on both sides of the debate, and it as yet remains in the court’s hands to decide.
Either way, at the time of discovery, the system consisted of a G-type main sequence star, two uninhabitable planets huddled near the sun and nothing else. With its remote location and lack of resources and habitable locations, few thought the UEE would have any interest in the system, so observers were shocked when the UEE quickly claimed Chronos to be restricted for government use and development. When military ships started to frequently enter an empty system, curious members of the public questioned what was really going on in Chronos.
For years, theories ranged from the unimaginative (doomsday device) to the inspired (invisible space station). One dedicated conspiracy theorist supposedly even went so far as to stow away on a military vessel bound for the system. When she later claimed that there was nothing hidden there, her inability to uncover anything scandalous infuriated her fellow theorists and only fueled the fire of speculation. The claim was that the only
way she would have found absolutely nothing is if there was something to hide and the government had again silenced the truth. Those who believed in the cover-up were even more certain that there had to be a reason the UEE wanted Chronos to themselves.
It wasn’t until 2872 that Imperator Corbyn Salehi stepped forward to formally announce what the government had been working on. Chronos would become the home of Project Archangel, commonly called “Synthworld,” a massive UEE initiative to build a planet. After centuries of rewriting planets with terraforming technology, Humanity now set its sights on creating one.
PROJECT ARCHANGEL
Many things about the Chronos System made it an ideal location for this ambitious project. The star’s similarity to Sol’s sun made it optimal for human habitation. Its two planets were desolate rocks, meaning that the massive undertaking would not inconvenience any inhabitants, nor would the decades of construction and experiments endanger anyone not associated with the project. The lack of planets outside of Bruder and Schwester allowed the Synthworld to be placed at the ideal orbital distance from the star. It had the added benefit of being a relatively remote system, which minimized the chances of unwanted visitors and prying eyes.
When the project was announced, it symbolized a future where Humanity could create habitable worlds without the risk of harming other species. Haulers made the long trek to take resources into the system even if profits margins were higher elsewhere. Scholars expounded at length what the success of Archangel could mean to the Empire’s future. And civilians in every system excitedly waited for a new world to be born.
Yet as the decades passed, the promise of the Synthworld seemed to wane along with the public’s interest. Despite billions of hours and credits spent, the planet seemed no closer to completion. The project became tainted with corruption scandals and cost overruns, leading some progressive Transitionalist to call it a “financial vampire” that was draining money and resources from more important projects. The Synthworld no longer symbolized the future; it was putting it in jeopardy.
Today, Chronos sees a minimal amount of traffic. Haulers still offload supplies at Archangel Station and some traverse the system along the designated travel lanes to access the Branaugh System. Past that, there are few other reason for people to find themselves in the Chronos System.
TRAVEL WARNING
Though the Synthworld is in unrestricted space, all Synthworld business must go through Archangel Station. Anyone attempting to access the Synthworld directly will be met by members of 18th Battle Group and asked to divert course or face dire consequences.
Sitting in a tight orbit around Chrono’s sun, Bruder experiences scalding surface temperatures. Metallic ores are present in the planet’s crust, but the intense heat has kept the UEE from mining the minerals for use in the Synthworld.
CHRONOS II (Schwester)
Schwester is known for its role in one of the most infamous political scandals in UEE history. In 2925, a Senate attache was tasked with creating a progress report for an
independent auditing committee. She discovered that the harvesting and refining facilities that were supposed to have been built to collect the greenhouse gasses trapped
by Schwester’s dense atmosphere had in fact never been constructed. It seemed a senior foreman on the project, Ellie Kanis, had been skimming from the vast project fund undetected for years.
Public outrage over the Kanis Caper only intensified as publications, like the Terra Gazette, quantified the amount taken in graphs splashed across the front page. For the first time, many in the public grasped exactly how much money the Synthworld construction cost the Empire. The Synthworld’s sluggish construction pace and the ballooning government deficit drove many within the Empire to question whether the project was still worth it.
CHRONOS III (Synthworld)
The defining feature of the Chronos System, Synthworld, also known as Project Archangel, is Humanity’s attempt to construct a planet from scratch. This ambitious idea originated with the Clarke Committee, a government task force assigned to envision a “more perfect future for Humanity” in light of the massacre of Garron II. If the Empire could build its own worlds, there would no longer be a need for the risk of destroying fledging life that terraforming presented.
In the second half of the 29th century, the UEE was looking to redefine its status in the universe. The Messer regime had been overthrown almost a century earlier, but greed and corruption still festered within the government. Amidst this uncertainty, Corbyn Salehi rode a wave of reform into the Imperator’s office, campaigning on a platform of open, honest and ambitious government. Proving himself to be a man of action, not just words, Salehi latched onto the Clarke Committee’s most fantastic proposal – a man-made planet. He believed if Humanity rallied around an ambitious goal it could progress past the petty differences holding it back.
Salehi’s optimism was infectious, allowing him to garner the necessary public and political support. For decades, even after he no longer held the office of Imperator, Salehi and his vision sustained people’s faith in the project. Unfortunately, Salehi died in 2922 from unexpected complications with his artificial pancreas. Without his guiding force, the Synthworld effort has fallen on hard times.
Today, construction on the Synthworld continues. Updates on the project have become less frequently, but government scientists and engineers claim to be making progress. Many still hold hope that the bold face of Humanity’s future will yet emerge from Chronos. Whether Synthworld becomes one of Humanity’s greatest successes or failures is still to be decided.
ARCHANGEL STATION
This orbital station is the nerve center for Synthworld construction. Home to the project’s scientists and engineers, it is also the port of entry for supplies and resources needed to build the planet and keep the crew content.
With a steady amount of cargo moving through this sector, added to the sensitive nature of the project, the Navy’s 18th Battle Fleet calls Archangel Station home when not on patrol. Included in the 18th Battle Fleet is the 999th Test Squadron. Known as “The Wreckless,” this elite squadron is famous for testing experimental ships and components. The vast expanse beyond Archangel Station, with limited engagements there, has proven to be an ideal testing ground for potential tech the Navy hopes to incorporate into its arsenal. It seems fitting that the Navy’s most forward looking squadron calls the Empire’s most forward looking system home.
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< Transmission Begins >
ALAN NUEVO: Hello and welcome back to Election Night coverage on the Empire Report, I’m Alan Nuevo.
BECK RUSSUM: And I’m Beck Russum. We’re joined by Ben Warden, a political strategist and author of Steps for Humanity: A Study of Political Discourse.
BEN WARDEN: Thanks for having me. I have to say, this has been quite a day.
ALAN NUEVO: It really has.
BECK RUSSUM: And we’re just getting started. We’re continually receiving comms from our sources around the Empire as planets continue to tabulate votes for the 2946 Senatorial Race.
ALAN NUEVO: That’s right, Beck. We’ve just received an update from Borea, with 87% of the votes finalized, longtime incumbent and current Speaker Marshall Madrigal seems to have secured another term. Which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Madrigal has become one of those political institutions over the years.
BECK RUSSUM: It is surprising, actually. Earlier this year, political insiders claimed that he was contemplating retirement at the end of this term.
BEN WARDEN: I heard the same, but watching Madrigal the past few months, I have to say I’m glad he reconsidered. After the tragedy of Vega II, he’s become the Madrigal of old. It feels like he’s been woken up. Found purpose. That’s the thing that’s very interesting when looking at multi-term politicians. After a while, they fall into a routine, where they slog through the machinations of legislation until they need to begin campaigning again and then repeat. Some almost refuse to commit to pushing a political agenda for fear of alienating potential voters, which, if I may be blunt, leads to the bureaucratic stagnation that we suffered under for so long.
ALAN NUEVO: Sorry to interrupt you, Ben, but we just got an update from Croshaw. Angeli just announced their results. Windel Aurelia and Yann Isher secured their seats for another term.
BEN WARDEN: I think I know where this is heading.
ALAN NUEVO: Kyle Polo lost his seat to Sean Debinavi, a Universalist from Quinton.
BEN WARDEN: Wow.
BECK RUSSUM: Although a political unknown outside of Angeli, Debinavi has been a fixture of local politics for decades and ran a near perfect campaign. He outmaneuvered Polo at nearly every debate.
BEN WARDEN: Polo’s popularity plummeted after Vega II and Debinavi kept him on the defensive the entire campaign. Stoddard Polls indicated that voters never let him get out from underneath the weight of the Polo Initiative, which, in my opinion, was a little unfair. Not many people remember, but Polo was asked to draft the bill by Witness Cavendish to address the growing spending crisis within the government.
BECK RUSSUM: It was still his idea.
BEN WARDEN: Yes, but he was trying to offer a solution to a very real problem. The Vanduul attack simply reminded people that there were threats at our borders.
ALAN NUEVO: Debinavi’s theme for his campaign was “Foundation,” where he ran on a platform of getting back to solid, dependable government.
BEN WARDEN: He was pushing a very classic pro-military, pro-security strategy, which fed right into all of the issues people had with Polo. The people wanted a change and Debinavi represented everything they disliked about Polo.
BECK RUSSUM: We’ve got more election coverage coming up for you, but now we’d like to go to Emily Havilan who was on hand for the closing mark of a voting station in midtown New York.
[ B-Roll footage of citizens lining up to cast their votes, proudly displaying their preferred Senate candidates for the vids ]
EMILY HAVILAN: Thanks Beck. Nestled on east 68th Street, in the shadow of the Senate itself, Citizens came from far and wide to this voting station to exercise their right to help decide the next wave of senators. We spoke with Carol Esposito, chief organizer for this station, about the turnout.
CAROL ESPOSITO: Well, I always prep our volunteers to expect a heavy turnout, but every election, it seems to always be considerably less than we’d hope. Today, it was more. Much more. We had a line outside an hour before the polls opened and were slammed all day. We’re still receiving remote votes from central distribution.
EMILY HAVILAN: Do you think the events of the past few months have contributed to an increase in political awareness?
CAROL ESPOSITO: Oh yes. Most definitely. The people I talked to today wanted to get involved. They felt empowered to be involved. It was very exciting. So exciting, I nearly forgot to vote myself.
EMILY HAVILAN: As you can see, it’s an excitement that’s palpable even now after the voting terminals have been powered down and the results sent for processing. Carol and her fifteen volunteers will close up this station and report to the central office to work through the night to assist with finalization of any lingering elections, so they’re just getting started. But, if you ask them, it’s the most exciting part of the job, knowing that they’re helping make a difference tonight in the direction Humanity takes tomorrow. Beck.
BECK RUSSUM: Thanks, Emily. We’ll be streaming in reports from around the Empire throughout the night. We’ve just received word about another election turnout that’s close to finalization. This campaign has been one of the stand-outs and could potentially be a historic moment in Human politics. The results for Jalan in Elysium have come in.
ALAN NUEVO: That’s exciting.
BECK RUSSUM: Suj Kossi, the first Tevarin to run for Senate …
BEN WARDEN: You’re killing me.
BECK RUSSUM: Suj Kossi is now the first Tevarin to win a Senate seat with Gabrielle Gracián coming in second.
BEN WARDEN: That’s incredible. Congratulations to Senator-elect Kossi, first of all.
BECK RUSSUM: Candidate Gracián has released a concession statement. Let’s take a listen.
GABRIELLE GRACIÁN: I would like to thank all my supporters, both near and far, as well as my staff who worked tirelessly to keep me going. I would also like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to Senator Kossi. While we didn’t see eye to eye, he was a gracious and honorable opponent and I’m thrilled to have him represent me in the Senate.
BEN WARDEN: I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ll see of Gabrielle. She’s proven herself to be a really dynamic candidate and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before her name appears on another ballot.
BECK RUSSUM: So it’s official, the first Tevarin has been elected to the Senate. We’re going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we’ll go out to the Kossi campaign headquarters, which I’m sure are absolutely euphoric.
ALAN NUEVO: Absolutely. We’ll also have an exclusive interview with Callum Robb, star of the hit show Lost Squad, who also moonlights as a volunteer for a Senatorial candidate. Which one? We’ll tell you after the break. This is Empire Report.
Ship Shape returns with a look at the Drake Herald, Which Glitch has fun with game development, and we look at proposed AR updates to EVA in this week’s Fast Forward.
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Greetings, fellow drifters! Welcome to my little spot on the Spectrum. For those tracking my travels, Shana and I just exited atmo above Asura. Got lucky and left when pollution levels were low, which gave me a good look planetside while burning into open space. Got to really see all the scars inflicted on Asura from centuries of mining. It’s strangely beautiful, actually. Too bad those mines left the world in such terrible shape otherwise.
Stifling pollution in the skies, and on the ground, criminals around every corner. Ok, that may be a bit of a stretch, but let’s just say Tram’s no place to get caught out alone at night. In fact, I planned my planetside excursion so I could get my business done and be off-world before nightfall.
For those of you wondering what business was worth all the trouble, well, this trip was more about civic duty than creds. As I’m sure some of you know, Asura is so unsafe because of the planetwide police strike. Now, part of the reason these hard-working, honest folks walked off the job is because the police don’t have enough firepower to keep the criminals in check.
So Kastak Arms has been stepping up where the local and UEE governments have fallen down. They’ve been donating weapons to law enforcement in the hopes that updated armaments will encourage the good guys to return to work. That means every once in a while Kastak is looking for haulers to do pro bono deliveries to the system. Now, I’d done the run once before, and figured I was due for another one to help these folks out.
Sometimes it’s important to remind yourself there are more problems out there than your own. But I’ve learned that knowing about a problem is only half the battle; you also have to do something about it. That’s why every few months I like to replace the normal goods I haul with the greater good. I’ve taken to calling these little charitable excursions “altourism.” Makes me take stock of what’s going on in the ’verse and figure out a way to make a difference. Even in only a small way.
It’s a little something I started doing around 20 or so years ago. By then I’d been all over the ’verse and seen enough stuff for a few lifetimes. Guess some would call it living hard and fast, but honestly, boredom was what really drove me. It’s why, after I left home, I never settled down. Just drank, drifted and dreamed. Always wondering if that next world would be the perfect one for me.
Guess you could say I was a little slow to realize that there’s no such thing as a perfect place in the ’verse. Everywhere has its own issues, whether it’s hunger in Hyperion or pirate havens in Nexus. The more trouble I saw, and the more I learned about what caused it, the higher I’d climb on my soapbox, complaining about how the government wasn’t doing enough to stop it.
After one rant, an ArcCorp hauler who was sick of hearing about it while he was trying to enjoy his drink finally said, “If only you’d put half of that energy into fixing problems instead of bitchin’ about ’em, then we’d all live in a better world.” Well, I told that guy off good, but after a few hours in the drift, chewing it over, I realized he was right. Here I was beholden to nothing and no one; screaming for a better ’verse but not willing to do anything about it. That was the moment I realized I had to put up or shut up.
Little while after, I did my first charity run, delivering donated replacement pumps to water farms outside Nedila after it was ravaged by a series of particularly nasty sandstorms. I’ll never forget how thankful those folks were for my help. I mean, all I did was deliver the stuff, but for the first time, I felt connected to the wider ’verse.
After doing a few more, I learned that just because an action is small doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. This lonely drifter, who never felt comfortable anywhere, finally felt a part of something bigger than himself. That’s when I read up on the requirements to become a UEE Citizen, because I’d come to realize my voice, my opinion, my influence on the Empire was being lost by not voting.
Now when I was younger, I never saw the sense in voting. It felt like screaming into space. More a reminder of my insignificance than anything else. But my so-called altourism had shown me that if enough people cared enough to scream at the same time, someone was bound to hear.
Finally, I worked up the brin to drop my Citizenship application on my birth planet of Vann. I hadn’t been there in a few years so, of course, the first question asked at my Citizenship hearing was why I wanted to become a Citizen of a planet I don’t live on. Well, I don’t remember my answer, exactly, except that I just shot it to ’em straight. I was born on Vann, and my kin still call it home. Just because I don’t spend every day there doesn’t mean I don’t care about it or want to make it a better place. Guess my answer worked because my application was approved. I’ve proudly voted in every election since.
Shoot … that ramble really took the scenic route to get where I was going. See, the entire reason I swung through Ferron on that run was because I’m now on my way to Croshaw. If I can, every election I cast my vote via Spectrum from my home system. It’s a little thing I do to remind me I’m a part of something bigger, but that this is the place my vote matters most. That maybe, in some small way, my choice will benefit some distant family member or long lost acquaintance on Vann. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the visit gives me a chance to pick up some Angeli-aged whiskey to stow aboard Shana and savor on special occasions.
Guess what I’m trying to say is that I hope all you Citizens listening cast your vote come May 3rd. Come scream into space with me so our voices can be heard.
I’m not here to sell you on a candidate or a political party; only reminding you of the importance of it all. Citizenship is not a right, it’s a privilege. Realize there are plenty of folks out there whose lives will be affected by the results, so the only way your vote would ever be insignificant is when it’s not cast at all.
Well, it’s been a long one, and I’m ready to rest my eyes. Until next time, this is Old Jegger signing off.
“If you’re doing this to strike it rich quick, forget it. Those are fairy tales. You wanna mine credits out of this rock, you better be willing to put blood, sweat and tears into it first.” – Lonnie “Three Hand” Pardino’s Guide to Mining Alone
Greetings Citizens,
Set out to seek your fortune with the MISC Prospector! For years, the Prospector has been the universe’s preferred mining vessel for solo operators. Featuring MISC’s sleek design sensibility and a bevy of upgraded high-tech mining tools, the 2947 Prospector perfectly balances form and functional. Don’t miss out on what many consider to be the best solo mining vessel around! See why the MISC Prospector is one of the most popular, independently operated mining ship in the ’verse, and get yours today.
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This 2947 MISC Prospector features a durable hull and four centrally located side saddle storage containers to provide a compact profile for traveling through precarious areas of space. Anyone who has excavated asteroids knows that maintaining a stable position is essential, so MISC improved the VTOL thrusters with technology from our exclusive Xi’An partnership to make them strong enough to ensure your ship stays exactly where it needs to be when snagging those small chunks of precious rock, but sensitive enough to skillfully navigate through dense clusters.
The improvements don’t just stop there. Underneath the ship, an upgraded scanner offers a wider search area than ever before without having to change position, while the award-winning retractable mining laser has been modified to help you find and extract ores from previously hard to reach places.
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Yet even with these latest upgrades, the Prospector stays true to the ship design that Whitley’s called “streamlined and efficient.” Bottom line, this mining craft only has exactly what it needs: top of the line hull design, high tech scanning and retrieval equipment, four large storage containers, and one seat just waiting for you.
Get a 2947 MISC Prospector today and see what independent miners have been raving about!
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Under the Hood
The MISC Prospector is the way to get started with mining in the ‘Verse! Last year, we developed a number of concept ships around different careers we are developing in Star Citizen. The Orion platform for miners, the Reclaimer for salvage crews, the Starliner for commercial space travel and the like. In these cases, we designed large, multi-crew ships that would let us prototype everything we want to do with a particular career… and now we’re going back and looking at gameplay progression. That is, determining how an individual player might progress from general ‘jack of all trades’ ships like the Aurora or Constellation to ones specialized for a career. The Prospector is the first of these ‘entry level’ career ships, and we’re extremely pleased with the work the team has put into it!
As cool as the Prospector looks, we know what really matters is how it works and what it does. Our designers have volunteered to answer some initial questions about the Prospector today, as we know there are always many things to discuss about a new ship. Do you have a question we haven’t covered? We will be doing two MISC Prospector Q&A posts on Wednesday and Friday next week with the ship’s designers! You can submit questions for consideration on the forums here.
You can also read more about plans for mining careers in Star Citizen here.
What is a ‘small’ mining ship and how does it compare to an industrial-class option such as the Orion?
The Prospector is the jumping off point for miners and is intended for precision mining on a small scale, finding mineral pockets on asteroids or planetside and extracting them. The Orion on the other hand operates on a much bigger scale befitting a large industrial ship. It is able to break up and destroy asteroids and, with the correct variant, process the minerals on board. The Prospector is more of a precision tool for a solo player to target resource pockets directly, whereas the Orion requires a full team to grind their way through an asteroid field.
Planetary mining? What about asteroids and other small space objects?
The Prospector can also land on asteroids and small objects if they are big enough to accommodate it, but the purpose of landing is to allow for mining deeper under the surface, so if the asteroid is only twice the size of the Prospector, it’s likely not worth doing.
Planetside mining will be broken down into the following phases:
Scanning – The first step should be to identify where the mineral pockets are under the surface. This way the miner can search around until they’ve found a spot that’s rich in minerals, or contains the resource they’re specifically searching for.
Landing & Prepping – The next step would be to find a safe, flat place to land that is above the selected mineral pocket. Once touched down, the pilot can then activate the ship’s deep core mining mode, in which the mining laser arm will extend further out and point downwards. In this state more power is able to be pushed to the mining laser as other ship systems are now turned off, so the laser will be visibly more powerful and can mine deeper under the surface.
Mining & Extracting – This would be a slightly more drawn out process than surface mining, as the mining laser has to bore a hole down to where the mineral pocket is. Once a path to the resource is cleared, the tractor beam begins extraction and begins to fill the storage crates.
Selling or Dropping – The Prospector is quite unique in that it can either take a full load of resources back to a station or refinery for selling, or it can drop the cargo on the spot and begin to fill one of the collapsed storage crates it has in reserve. This makes it very good for working in unison with other Prospectors and cargo haulers.
What can you tell me about the Prospector’s sensors? How do they compare to the Orion?
The sensors on the Prospector would operate on a smaller, more detailed scale. It would be able to circle asteroids and scan to find out where exactly the mineral “pools”/pockets are to extract, so it can pick and choose which minerals it wants. The Orion would be scanning on a higher level and at a longer range, scanning multiple asteroids at once to find out their mineral content so they can grind up the most valuable asteroids as a priority.
The biggest benefit the Prospector has over the Orion is that it can scan for and mine minerals planetside (where there may be different minerals depending on planet type) while the Orion is restricted to mining in space.
Do you operate the tools/mine from inside the cockpit or is there an EVA component?
It was intended that everything was handled from the cockpit, as you have to manage your equipment and keep an eye on how deep you are mining. It should be possible to leave it going and get out of your seat/the ship, but your productivity will suffer for it. The only time during a ‘by the book’ mining operation that we expect you to need to get out is if something goes wrong with the laser itself, causing it to require repairs.
Concept sale
About the Sale
The Prospector is being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar or to fight in Arena Commander. The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add an Prospector poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Prospector mini ship model! In the future, the ship price will increase and the offer will not include Life Time Insurance or these extras.
If you’d like to add one to your fleet, they’re available in the pledge store until May 2nd, 2016. You can also view a detail of the Prospector in the Holo Viewer in the Tech Overview of the ship page!
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
Additionally, please note that the Prospector will be entering the ship pipeline now, it will ultimately be released after other concept ships have been completed. All decorative ‘flare’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches.
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Greetings Citizens,
From time to time we like to open Star Citizen up to our fans, and provide access to ships they might not otherwise own. This is not only a great chance for players to try new ships out, but it helps provide additional testing for those ships, too!
In addition, it can be a great way to introduce new players to the growing universe of Star Citizen as well. For the next week until April 25th, we’ve enabled Free Fly access to all accounts in celebration of PAX East. While we won’t be there this year in person, any chance to celebrate Star Citizen sounds like a good idea to us! For the next week, anyone with a Star Citizen account will have access to the Aurora LN, the F7C Hornet, and the Mustang Delta. This Free Fly event gives new players access to three unique parts of the Star Citizen experience:
Star Citizen Alpha 2.3.1 – Also known as Crusader or the “mini-PU,” this is the nucleus of the world we’re building! Featuring multiple space stations and environments, scripted missions, places to explore and more, Alpha 2.3.1 is your first look at a much larger universe!
Arena Commander – Arena Commander is a ‘game within a game’ that we’ve used to develop our flight mechanics and ship combat balance. Take on human opponents or an AI swarm in single seat fighter.
Social Module – Interact with other players while you explore our first landing zone, ArcCorp! The Social Module is intended as a starting point for our world building,
You can register for an account here to get started. If you already have an account from a previous Free Fly, you’re all set! Just log in via the Star Citizen launcher and we’ll see you in the ‘Verse!
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We’ve issued another minor patch for Star Citizen Alpha 2.3 this week, focusing on a set of specific bug fixes identified during testing. Thank you as always to our talented backers who have helped us drill down on and now eliminate these bugs! You can find a complete list of changes here.
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April 15th is TAX DAY in the United States. For some, a time of dread where the government takes their money… for others, a small reprieve! If you’re in the latter group, we’re celebrating tax day UEE-style, with surplus military ship designs. We’ve brought back several limited ships through April 22. All four ships are currently flyable in the Crusader mini-PU. So if you’ve been waiting for a chance to crew a Retaliator or to zip around in a Super Hornet, this is it!
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Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches. Ship types sold during limited sales will be available to earn in the finished game.
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Would you rather pick up something a little more physical? We’re having a limited sale on Star Citizen track jackets! The remaining stock has been discounted AND will ship with a free Star Citizen playing card/notepad bundle. You’ll be the envy of all your friends dealing Star Citizen cards in a handsome jacket. You can find the offer here.
Want to meet the team making the game? Check out the personal Twitter feeds below!
PLEASE NOTE: These are the personal feeds of Cloud Imperium Games’ developers. The statements and opinions expressed do not represent Cloud Imperium Games, and should not be taken as the final word on any element of game design or planning. The following developers are willing to connect with backers and share information about their lives when possible:
Your monthly report is here. But first, a small patch! We’ve just issued Star Citizen Alpha 2.3.1 to the live servers, which includes a variety of bug fixes and balance changes. You can access it via the launcher and you can read the complete patch notes here().
If you’ve played Star Citizen Alpha 2.3, you already know that March was a month for REALLY BIG SHIPS! We launched the hangar-ready Starfarer this month, along with the long-awaited Xi’An scout… and there’s plenty more to follow! Today we will be checking in with all of our studios and outsource partners to see what the team was working on in March… but first, we’d like to share some of the fruits of that labor: some of the work we’ve been doing on seamless EVA transitions that you’ll be seeing in an upcoming patch. Check it out and then read on to find out the work that went into making this a reality!
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Hello everyone!
Can you believe that a quarter of 2016 has already come and gone? But what a quarter it has been, has it not? Just look at what we have accomplished over the past month; the Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al, the Starfarer, and let us not overlook the biggest of them all – Intergalactic Food Delivery. With 2.3 also being released, we introduced a plethora of features and fixes, all of which can be found in our patch notes.
This is a global effort for every branch of Star Citizen but each branch contributes to the whole picture. So let us take a look at what CIG Los Angeles has knocked out of the park this month.
Engineering
The CIG-LA Engineering team was bolstered with reinforcements! We had two new Gameplay Engineers join our ranks; Patrick Mathieu and Chad McKinney. We are very much looking forward to their contributions to Star Citizen!
Work continues on the new interaction system being spearheaded by Allen Chen and Mark Abent which is in the early stages of implementation by being incorporated into the ship seat interactivity. Our newest team member, Chad McKinney, has jumped in head-first by helping Allen on the doors and ramp interactions. While this system is something we have mentioned in the past, it is making steady progress and we can hopefully begin implementing components in a near-future release.
Chad Zamzow has been testing the new Shield Emitter system which is currently in the implementation stage of development. This new feature will add greater dimension to how shields function; especially when it comes to larger capital-class ships which will have multiple shield emitters. This will give ship engineers greater control over how much energy gets routed to a particular shield’s facing in order to maximize protection given a certain situation. Although great progress has been made to move this feature closer to release, there is still quite a bit of work left to do in the future.
But saving the best for last, our Engineering Lead Paul Reindell has been fast at work in bringing persistence into Star Citizen. For those who may be unfamiliar with the term, persistence refers to certain game parameters remaining active even if the player logs off. This includes allowing players to acquire items through the in-game shopping system. Whether you are purchasing snazzy new threads to make your space pirate look more…pirate-y, or you have your eye on a deadly new pistol, the end-goal is to make sure the choices you make in-game will persist and not reset each game session. It may sound like the kind of thing you can just take for granted in gaming, but when your items and inventory are as intricate as they are in Star Citizen, it’s actually no simple matter!
Tech Design
With the last couple patches, aside from tackling bugs it is clear the Tech Design team has been hard at work to bring you the best ships we have ever produced. Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome worked hard on one of the most anticipated ships, the Xi’An Aopoa Khartu-al, now flight-ready and available for you to go forth in alien style. To continue this momentum, Matthew Sherman has been working on getting the MISC Reliant hangar-ready and Calix Reneau has been working diligently on the whitebox of the Drake Caterpillar.
On the component side, you may have seen the new component class added to the Holotable. Power Plants are the latest component we are allowing ship owners to swap out, and as you might expect, power the various systems of your ship. Two new power plants, the AEGIS Regulus and Amon & Reese OverDrive, have been added and can be used to swap out the standard “generic” power plant your ship comes with.
As more components are introduced to the game, we cannot wait to see what customization options you will opt for as you pursue your chosen career path in Star Citizen.
Art
Ships seem to be the hot ticket item this month, and it continues on with the LA Art team. Concept Artist Gurmukh Bhasin is busy concepting the Drake Caterpillar Cargo module while our newest Concept Artist Justin Wentz completed the concept art for the Caterpillar’s crew habitation quarters. The next step is to model the habitation based on Justin’s concept which is currently tasked to Art Lead Elwin Bachiller and Associate Artist Daniel Kamentsky.
On the PU side, our newest character artist is creating the pristine materials for the Navy jumpsuit, Jeremiah Lee is doing a 2nd concept pass on the light armor, and Art Supervisor Forrest Stephan is creating the pristine materials for the flight suit helmet as well as clothing for the Persistent Universe (PU).
Technical Content
The Global Tech Content team is truly a jack of all trades team that has its fingers in everything from Star Citizen to ship development to characters to the PU.
Tech Content Director Sean Tracy has been working on developing the tech for character customization. Just another step on the road to creating an immersive persistent in-game universe. Along with this tech, the artists have been using this to prototype how character customization will function. Associate Rigger Gaige Hallman has also been hard at work on the PU side of the game, creating clothing template layers. What this does is allows each article of clothing to occupy a certain amount of volume. This will ensure that various articles of clothing can co-exist without clipping into each other as long as they are properly fitted to those geo volumes.
To give an idea of the diverse challenges the Tech Content team faces, Senior Tech Artist Mark McCall has created a test level called GearValidator. This level’s sole purpose is to test and ensure the landing gear of our ships will function correctly. After running through a series of tests, a report is provided that lets us know whether or not a particular ship’s landing gear is performing as it should be.
Part of what made the Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al able to be released in 2.3 was Matt Intrieri’s work on getting so many Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al -related bugs fixed in a relatively short amount of time, but we also are aware there is more fixing and tweaking that still needs to be completed before we are absolutely sanguine with the ship. Associate Tech Artist Patrick Salerno continues to review and add LODs to normalize the mesh count on legacy ships; he’s currently progressing through the 300-series.
QA
CIG-LA QA’s primary focus was the push for 2.2 LIVE release and subsequent 2.3 PTU and LIVE Releases. In addition to standard sanity and smoke checks, the team also focused on:
Xi’an Khartu-al flight performance.
Starfarer hangar readiness, and preliminary flight performance.
Early testing of persistence features.
Investigating server stability and performance issues.
Gathering ship feedback, with this month’s subject being the Drake Cutlass.
In addition, Eric Pietro began training for his new role as Animation’s Tools Specialist, with his goal being to ensure that the animations tools are functioning properly, and suitable for all animator needs.
Narrative
Lead Writer Dave Haddock is home from Manchester! Dave spent the month in the UK looking over the whitebox levels with the Designers, allowing him to determine what additional dialogue might need to be included. Since then, Senior Writer Will Weissbaum and Dave have been hard at work putting everything needed together so that we can make sure Squadron 42 really brings you into the world of Star Citizen. Before flying back, Dave also got to sit in on Chris’ final editorial selects session, closing out the last lingering odds-and-ends from the previous performance shoot.
Aside from juggling News Updates, Galactic Guides and Portfolios, Associate Writer Adam Wieser has started naming the massive amounts of components/items/clothing that are being developed, writing the subsequent item descriptions as well as compiling a glossary for some of the more unique terms in an effort to standardize the language within the company. To give an example, if someone says a ship is an ‘interdiction ship,’ we’re all in agreement what qualities or aspects that term.
Aside from continuing her wizardry with organizing the internal wiki, Cherie: Destroyer of Worlds™ has been processing all the incoming scientific data for the various planets and stars and has kicked off the final batch of scientific data to our fantastic science consultants. She has also started compiling an initial list of potential entries for the Galactapedia as well as a chronology of events that have already ‘happened’ in the universe.
We had our alien language specialist, Britton Watkins, down to visit the office. After designing the Vanduul language for our shoot with Andy Serkis, Chris wanted to discuss next steps for Vanduul as well as the other languages. Hopefully, more news about that to come, but should be very exciting.
Until next month…
Production
The Los Angeles Production team has been overseeing the hiring of new staff for the development teams. We have increased the number of artists and engineers, but we are still looking for designers, writers, and more engineers. While ramping up the number of developers in Los Angeles does help provide an increase in available resources, we want to make sure we are being smart about our strategies.
In order to ensure that Production is in sync with the other regional offices, we recently had Global Head of Production, Erin Roberts and Producer Ricky Jutley visiting from the UK office to discuss strategies for the PU with Todd Papy, Tony Zurovec, and Chris Roberts. While generally email or video conferencing are the usual methods for communicating trans-Atlantic, sometimes it is hard to beat face to face communication.
Senior Producer Eric Davis has been not only overseeing the development milestones for 2.3 and 2.4, he has also largely overseen the ongoing construction as we move closer to completing the new office in Los Angeles. Associate Producer Randy Vazquez has been managing the tasks for Tech Design and Engineering while Associate Producer Mark Hong is responsible for managing the tasks for Tech Content and Art as well. While that list is simplified each one of those items contains a mountainous amount of individual tasks, milestones, schedules, reports, and other related responsibilities.
In Conclusion
As you can see, we have not been idle this month (nor have we ever been idle). We are very excited the Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al is being enjoyed. We know how long you have been waiting for it and we are proud of each new ship we release. Although mainly focused on by our compatriots in the UK, the Starfarer’s hangar debut was also another milestone we were excited to complete. As mentioned earlier, we cannot wait until you see what we are doing with the Caterpillar, Herald, Reliant, and more. While we are proud of our accomplishments this month, it also reminds us we still have many more milestones to reach for. See you next month!
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Howdy Citizens,
March was a very exciting month as always. We made lots of publishes to the PTU and deployed Star Citizen Alpha 2.3.0 to the live server! We’ve had a number of visitors, and a number of travelers, and a great deal of cross-studio collaboration at all levels. We also had a blast at the Bar Citizen event at the start of the month, and we look forward to hosting more events like this in the future! Here are detailed updates from each studio lead:
Development
The major focus during the month of March here in Austin has been Shopping! By this I do not mean that we all went to the mall together to pick up the hottest fashion trends, but rather we focused on driving the features to completion that are required to get the shop environments functional for players. Lead Designer Rob Reininger has been driving various subfeatures like the Single-Item Transaction UI and flow and the shop environment item setup. Pete Mackay has been driving the pricing of all the various items that we will be selling in the shops. This has required much coordination between our Design and Community teams in LA and our Design Director Todd Papy and Pete has handled it just swimmingly. We’re now implementing the established prices into DataForge where they will exist statically until we bring our formulaic solution online. The items will be able to be purchased with a new currency we’ve established, internally called Alpha Currency. This currency exists for the sole purpose of testing out these prices and balancing the game, and will exist separately from UEC or REC. At any point we’ll be able to wipe Alpha Currency and start fresh if something goes awry, and this will help us nail down final pricing numbers before we go Live.
Along with the Shopping frontend comes the work being done to support the Shopping backend. The Server Team here in Austin has been setting up the ability to add/subtract Alpha Currency in game and handing it off to the UI and Design teams in the UK to use for the shopping interface and providing alpha currency rewards via completing missions. This work is part of Persistence as a whole, which made significant progress this month. We finally integrated Persistence into our main development stream, which means we can’t go back to the way things were before and Persistence is here to stay. With that comes a lot of issues and bugs that need fixing, and now our Server Team is working hard to fix those up so we can get our main development stream running smoothly again.
One additional feature that we’ve developed this month is the Port Modification View. Jeff Zhu did the programming work to rebuild the hangar code from the ground up, and we are now able to access various “Item Ports” around the hangar to customize the layout of our ships and hangar flair. No longer will the ships be organized in the hangars via the website, but instead you’ll be able to walk up to a bay in the hangar and choose which ships go where in game. This is an exciting new feature and we’ve been having a blast playing around with it. We’ve now passed this off to the UI team to dress it up in a mobiGlas app. Look forward to seeing that feature very soon!
Our Animation team has been supporting in various areas of the project, per usual. Jay Brushwood has been doing a lot of R&D on cockpit comparisons for the male and female characters. We want to make sure we are smart about how we approach this task so that we don’t grow our animation footprint exponentially. The Ship Animation Team has also been providing assets to Programming to help R&D various features such as different enter/exit speeds for the cockpits and allowing for two separate entry points for ships. Our PU Animation Team has been helping with defining metrics for various interactions in the game. From dining at a booth, to standing/sitting at a computer console, to serving champagne on a tray, each new animation requires some thought into how we implement assets to fit with existing metrics. If metrics aren’t established, we have to help create them so the Props Team know what dimensions their assets need to fit. Our Lead Animator, Bryan Brewer, has also been supporting Foundry 42 in implementing locomotion sets for various characters for Squadron 42. He’s making rapid progress and it’s nice to see some more of these characters come to life.
Lastly, our Ship Team here in Austin wrapped up work on the Xi’an Khartu-Al this month and we released that to be flight ready with 2.3.0. It’s a gorgeous, unique ship so major props go out to Chris Smith and Josh Coons for that accomplishment. Those guys have now moved on to the Hornet upgrade and the Drake Herald, respectively. Chris will be bringing the Hornet up to our current standards and optimizing the ship for performance considerations. Josh has been working on the whitebox model for the Drake Herald and will continue that into April.
Live Operations:
QA
Star Citizen QA in Austin has been very busy this past month. With assistance from our other QA teams in LA and UK, the Austin QA successfully completed 18 deployments to our Public Test Universe as well as 5 deployments to the official live environment. The team was very happy to share the new features in Star Citizen Alpha 2.3.
This month we have a few new faces on the Austin QA team. A big welcome to Jesse Mark, Don Allen and Scott McCrea. We are happy to have them aboard. This month has also seen some movement in our ranks. As Senior QA, Tyler Witkin has shown the ability to foster positive interactions with our community. It is only natural that he transition into our Community department. Tyler is now our newest Community Manager! Andrew Hesse has been doing a great job as QA Lead for Austin and we are proud to announce his promotion to QA Manager. Andrew will manage the Austin QA studio as well as assist with QA future planning. Marissa Meissner has been doing an excellent job since she was brought on as our Information Specialist. Marissa has proven her ability to lead and ensure day to day tasks are completed. Marissa has worked on many tasks including fully documenting our processes and workflows, managing the Issue Council, being a liaison to Community and In Game Support and managing our patch notes process to name a few. Marissa will be our newest QA Lead in the Austin Studio where she will ensure our day to day tasks and requests are completed with utmost diligence. Congratulations to Andrew, Marissa and Tyler!
Most of the month of March was occupied by testing the new features that were implemented into 2.3 and 2.3.1 including the hangar ready Starfarer and flyable Khartu-Al or Xi’an Scout. QA also spent time testing the newly added FPS weapons and ship power plant components as well as verifying the many bug fixes included in the update.
Our dedicated Squadron 42 tester Andrew Rexroth has been working closely with his counter-parts Liam Guest and Lee Jones in our UK office testing Squadron 42. Squadron 42 testing is ramping up with Andrew testing 5 separate levels each with many story driven objectives. We are also in the process of moving more testers over to Squadron 42 testing. Katarzyna Mierostawska is currently being trained to assist in this effort and more testers will make the change to Squadron 42 in the very near future.
Todd Raffray has taken on testing the very beginnings of Persistence. Todd is working very closely with engineers Jeff Zhu, Ahmed Shaker, Jason Ely and Tom Sawyer to ensure each aspect of Persistence is understood and properly tested as it is implemented. Todd is also making sure this process is clearly communicated to our other teams so we are all on the same page in terms of testing this very significant feature.
We are incredibly excited for the upcoming release of Star Citizen Alpha 2.4. With our combined efforts across 4 studios, QA will continue to provide the quality testing the upcoming releases will require. Thank you to everyone that have provided feedback and contributing on the Issue Council. Your help goes a long way to ensuring we create the best damn space sim ever. See you next month!
Game Support
March was a great month for Will Leverett and Chris Danks in Game Support, if for no other reason than they got to work onsite together! Will spent two weeks in Manchester with Chris, as well as the Customer Service, Quality Assurance, and Production teams. There was a lot of time and effort put forth into making sure we’re aligned in how we help players, training on new tools, and planning game server admin tools for what we’ll need to help build, test, and support the Persistent Universe.
We saw 2.3.0 testing through PTU all the way to Live, and we’ve coordinated with Ahmed Shaker and Jeffrey Pease in DevOps to test additional versions in order to isolate and identify the causes of AI overspawn. We’re thankful for those playtesters who have been able to dedicate time towards tracking this down, and we’re resolving new issues with each patch because of it.
We’ve begun a process to collect website bugs in addition to client/server/launcher bugs on the Issue Council this month. We were admittedly not sure what results we would get, but the results have been extremely favorable and we have started to get those bugs into the dev cycle.
Game Support has also continued to refine how we utilize the Public Test Universe (PTU). We’ve gotten a heck of a lot of value out of PTU, and it’s now essential to the development of Star Citizen. In addition, we’ll be updating our PTU list of players for 2.4.0, so make sure you’re staying active in PTU and on the Issue Council as that’s how we invite our players!
IT/Operations
In March we’ve seen major progress on the patch reduction size project. This project touches multiple teams including IT, DevOps, and engineering teams in Frankfurt as well as Montreal. We’ve finished the low level changes to how data can be read by the engine and we’ve built out the initial data stores for the project. We have also started the first steps toward modifying the build pipeline so that builds can output to the new data format.
Very early patch testing has proven that our new patching methodology is working with test data so now it’s on to building out the rest of the pipeline and rebuilding the core functionality of the launcher patcher. Because this is such a large re-write, we’re taking this opportunity to build out an entirely new launcher patcher which will be loaded with new and improved functionality and controls when completed.
While we are super excited to advance this project to the players as quickly as possible, we still have much to do and we must do it right. This change will impact the way builds are consumed internally to the dev teams and QA as well so we have more work to refactor internal delivery systems as well. So far though, we’re seeing every indication that all teams are in sync and the project is on track.
LiveOps/DevOps
This month the team has been working as hard as ever on deployments, build system, and performance profiling. We’ve delivered 18 publishes to PTU (up 10 from last month) and we’ve completed 5 Live publishes. Major work was completed on a new test build system which has turned up some stunning results.
The primary goal of our test build system is to provide a functional test bed, even if modest on resources, where major changes or refactoring can occur without impacting the existing build pipeline. This is a tall order considering our production build system is massive consisting of 120 cores (240HT) with 1.5 TB of RAM combined across the stack. Our test build system is much smaller with 36 cores (72HT) and 128 GB RAM. The major difference is that the test build system is running local storage consisting of Intel’s NVMe drives to perform the compilation steps rather than sharing storage with all other systems on the SAN. We expected major improvements in storage performance but what we got was nothing less than amazing.
In some, not all cases, the test build system is performing jobs with 80% reduction in time. It all comes down to storage and I/O rates as we’ve seen in every test we’ve done. Highly I/O dependent operations such as PAK file compilation are demonstrating 4x speed increase. It’s still not feasible to use the test build system as a production build system replacement but when not in use in active testing these impressive results show us that we could use it for special builds and one offs which do come up several times per month.
Special props go out to Ahmed and the rest of the publishing team for keeping up with the larger number of deployments to both our PTU and Live environments while running all the performance profiling multiple times per day. This is important work and we wouldn’t be able to do it without the support of those backers helping us test on the PTU environment. We’ve been gathering a wealth of information which has become invaluable to the engineering team as a whole. Chris Roberts himself has taken a keen interest in the server profiling work so thanks again for everyone who has been helping with this effort.
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Hello Citizens,
We always start these notes saying that it was a busy month… because it’s true! Let’s jump into what happened this past March…
Engineering
On the FPS side, Gordon has finished up most of his work on the cover system, the last piece was procedural cover which allows you to slide and shoot around edges, and has moved onto the vaulting and mantling mechanic. First stages of this are going well, working with the animators so we can do procedural alignment of the animations. We’ve also changed the markup so it’s now a normal entity in the zone system. This then gives us all the advantages of the zone system so vaulting in a moving spaceship will work seamlessly. Jamie has been doing some work on the grenades as well as general bug fixing. Romulo has been carrying on with improvements to the weapons including interrupting the reload and general balance.
Craig’s improvements to the landing are progressing nicely and has completed the 2nd stage of the implementation which is a much simplified way of using the automatic landing. He’s now moving on to the 3rd stage which involves landing inside another ship. The easy first bit of doing the landing once inside is now complete, the slightly harder task of getting the automatic landing to work whilst the ship you’re trying to land is moving is the next job. Dave has started implementing the radar and scanning mechanic, he actually did a lot of work previously getting it working whilst in a ship scanning other ships, but he’s now extended it to also work in FPS mode. A lot of the work actually ends up being on the UI side, so he’s been working closely with Simon and Zane to get the UI working nicely. Rob is working again on the conversation system and integrating it with our Subsumption system, which is what is going to end up driving it going forwards. A conversation can be seen as just another task, so for the obligatory bar tender example, task 1 he can have a conversation about what drink a customer want, task 2 mix the drink, task 3 serve the drink, task 4 have a conversation about how the customer’s day has been, and so on.
Steve’s been continuing work on the Object Containers and we’re nearly at the point where we can use them to set the ships up, we’re using the Retaliator as a bit of a test bed. Unfortunately we have hit a slight snag on the networking synchronisation side which means we need his Spawn Bundle system to make it work correctly, so now he’s moved over and is concentrating on finishing that up.
Graphics
This month, we’ve looked into our facial animation tech, fixing several cases where the wrong detail level would have been selected, and made improvements to the data compilation step, vastly reducing the number of vertices that need to be stored and processed. We’ve also been working on a performance profiling system that unifies all the important data into one screen, with built in filters to let us see what we have too much of, where it is, and which team is responsible for fixing it.
We’ve built a system for linking lights to emissive surfaces, so that the luminance of the surface is automatically calculated from the intensity of the lights that are linked to it – this means that turning a light off can implicitly make the light bulb stop glowing, and gives the new optical effects (mentioned in last month’s report) physically plausible light units to work from.
We’ve done a pass over the particle effect shaders, adding an HDR temperature gradient option to let us have hot fire and dark smoke within a single particle, fixing conservation-of-energy when viewing particles from different angles, and correcting animated particles to warp smoothly from frame to frame.
Work has continued on rendering gas clouds, and we’ve started responding to bugs and feedback from the art and design teams. We’ve also revisited the tiled lighting system, to push past the last few performance hurdles that are stopping us from switching over and deprecating the older system.
Ships
Ship team have been as busy as ever this month. The Starfarer that has been months in the making finally went into players hangars. The team is also happy to have successfully delivered the unique X’ian Khartu-Al, allowing players to fly this.
We have also made incredible progress on the Idris and Javelin. This month we managed to get the Idris bridge, Gravity Room, Armory, Cargo Room and Escape Pods done. On the Javelin we got through the Bridge and the entire Engineering Deck.
Specifically to S42 we are very impressive with how the Bengal is shaping up. Wrapping up our final texture sheets on the exterior and creating the building sets needed for the interior. Bringing the Bengal up to the quality our community has come to expect from Star Citizen is very important to us.
Finally, we are making progress on the Drake Herald and Caterpillar as well as the new Hornet F7A for Squadron 42. All of these are now in full production and we look forward to being able to share more on the progress of these soon!
Environments
This month has seen another big push on SQ42, including one level which is now being moved into Final Art Phase. The whole facility is locked in terms of content and layout which will include terrain based traversal [blending with procedural content], maintenance bays, habitation sections, technical areas etc. It will be a full living, breathing environment by the time we are finished with it which is perfect for a sandbox based experience. Other locations of the campaign are progressing nicely, the guys are Greyboxing out the areas and translating the elements from the concept art into 3D.
Weapons & Levels
A lot of planning the previous month has really been helping get a good flow of work from the concept team, we are tackling both Sq42 content and in the gaps tackling areas for the PU too. Gary has spent a lot of time on the Xi’an Transport ship interior, Jort on Space station interiors and exterior configurations, Dan on components and Javelin hangar, Stu on ship weapons, Sarah on ship components and props, Gavin R on a new small ship, Miles on the second pass of Behring FPS weaponry we need for sq42, integrating a more visually interesting rail system and designing the ‘family’ (sniper, CQB, shotgun etc). We also took a trip down to Lionhead Studios who are sadly closing to see if any of their staff would be interested in the project – fingers crossed for a few more team members!
Character Team
Some of the eagle eyed will have noticed new character outfits in Nathan’s Starfarer video, the quality is really quite excellent! Mike has been working on Bridge crew outfits and Jon on the Vanduul, with having Chris in the studio it makes for much faster iteration, pushing and pulling and really getting this race to where Chris wants it.
QA
As always it’s been a very busy month here in QA at Foundry 42. As soon as we pushed 2.2 to Live we were hard at work on 2.3, making sure the epic Starfarer looked as good as it should and the Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al was as fast and nippy a scout/exploration vehicle as it should be. Time was devoted to missile balancing, bringing those staple implements of dogfighting back into the fray as useful parts of the players arsenal and testing new changes to the EVA system, which I have to say is looking so good now! Our dedicated Squadron 42 testers Liam and Lee have been playing through new chapters as they have been integrated into the builds and put the Devastator-12 shotgun and the Arrowhead Sniper rifle through their paces.
Just around the corner is 2.3.1 which we are beavering away at, checking that infinite loading screens are vanquished whilst trying our hardest to shoo (excess) pirates away from Yela, hopefully making it as smooth an experience for you guys as possible and it should be ready soon™!
With every new PTU push Adam Parker gathered much appreciated feedback from the backers on PTU, which helps us immensely. I’d like to thank all of our backers for the help they provide QA with their feedback and Issue Council reports, especially the guys and gals who put in massive amounts of time and effort on PTU helping us find larger scale issues that are otherwise too cumbersome for internal team to reproduce. Your input is really invaluable, a huge thanks to you all!
We have also had three new additions come into the QA fold, so please welcome Wayne Owen, Michaela Oliver and Ray Warner to the team! All three have industry experience from Sony Computer Entertainment (Wayne & Ray) and Traveller’s Tales (Mici) adding further strength to our already formidable QA force! They have settled in and are quickly becoming part of the family here.
Right now we are testing the last areas of 2.3.1 whilst gearing up for 2.4 which has some very exciting additions that we can’t wait to try and break so you guys don’t have to!
See you in the ‘verse!
VFX
The VFX team have been focusing on Live release priorities this month, including hangar-ready Starfarer (man that thing’s a beast!) which requires lots of subtle interior effects. A lot of this is preparation – putting in the groundwork – for later flight-ready tasks. We’ve also been supporting Caleb in Frankfurt who was tasked with the majority of effects tasks for flight-ready Scout – no doubt you will read all about that in the Frankfurt report!
Away from live release, our new VFX artist Staffan has been getting to grips with weapon effects – we’re working on a couple of new ones and have been tidying up some existing effects too.
We’ve also been working closely with the graphics engineers to finalise several particle lighting improvements. We are really happy with how our particles “behave” now in all lighting conditions (a crucial factor when working on such a complex universe with so many lighting variables). Related to this, we have been testing how our particles hold up with the new bloom and flares settings applied. Hint: they look really lovely; things like sparks, and other “hot” particles look so much more natural now. We’re really looking forwards to showing off these improvements in later live releases.
Design
March was another busy month in the UK design department.
In terms of ships, we have a Starfarer flying around in the game now and what a beast it is! Hopefully we will be seeing a working refuelling system coming online very soon, but there is still work to do there in a number of areas. The Argo is getting very close to finished and the Javelin Destroyer has landed on the tech design table. We have seen some funny Idris landing videos doing the rounds this month as that ships gets closer to release. You would have to be a brave pilot to try to land a Hornet in there without Automatic Landing enabled, especially if it was moving. That said, we made good progress with the Automatic Landing system this month, and it feels great to land vertically on a station now, but we are still tuning the horizontal landing system, and waiting for the new UI to be implemented.
The first pass on the controls refactor is going in for 2.4.0, so you we see a much better unification between the various game modes, FPS, EVA and space combat. We are looking forward to getting any feedback on this.
From system design, we got the mobiGlas refactored design signed off and into production. Also, the Holotable updated design is going into the engineering and UI teams hands for final implementation.
S42 is still getting the bulk of our design resources and the levels now locked down from design/art layout standpoint. The mechanics are filtering in and the NPC AI is getting more robust so we are starting to get a better feel for the play spaces.
Thanks again for the fantastic support as always.
Props
Props, short and sweet this month:
This month has seen a bit of a shift in priorities with ship components getting a few more resources and now we understand the feature better we want to make sure that when it goes live we have plenty of components to play with and customise your ships. There is going to be plenty of choices that should allow you to make your ship really feel yours and fly just how you want it.
Shopping has been the other big focus at the start of the month, we spent a bit of time bug fixing and doing some optimisations after getting some feedback and stats from our tech artist as well as putting the finishing touches on some of the props to make them work with the new tech that is being finalised.
Squadron 42 work is continuing, we made an effort to go through and do a really quick pass on getting placeholders in for any props we were missing so that the environment artists and designers can dress their scenes and we can make sure we aren’t missing anything off our plans.
Next month, a lot more ship components and with our new team members settling in fast a few more props!
Audio
CIG Audio has been busy as ever this month.
CIG Audio has been busy as ever this month.
Hopefully by now most of you will have enjoyed the Starfarer promo, including some beautifully produced music by Pedro Macedo Camacho for that. For the ship’s sound design itself, Darren Lambourne has been busy working on the thrusters and interior soundscapes, still work in progress but hopefully befitting such an impressive ship. Luke Hatton has been giving many ships a review to ensure all is working as it should be and that the audio is ship-shape!
Matteo Cerquone has been supporting the procedural Foley system and content for that, and is also responsible for a large part of the Xi’An Scout’s sound design – quite different to the usual ship schemes I’m sure you’ll agree.
Ross Tregenza has been keeping on top of all things musical as usual, both for the Persistent Universe (while I’m writing this report, I’m listening live to another orchestral session that’s being undertaken to ensure Star Citizen’s music is performed live as much as possible; Ross is attending to that in person as I’ve not been able to this time round); and we’re also getting rolling with music for Squadron 42 too. We’re hoping to get a new level of interactive score into the live release soon, following in the tradition of Chris Roberts’ work in Wing Commander. We’ll be taking a huge mass of material to a studio to mix with a film score mix engineer in the next month which should elevate this material even further.
We had an exterior gun recording session in March, which took place in Copehill Down in the south of England in conjunction with Steve Whetman (aka AudioBeast). We’ve worked with him a number of times now on gun recording sessions and are now getting some lovely outdoor gunshot material through from this latest session – will take some time to edit and process, there’s a lot of channels we captured from multiple perspectives. Stefan Rutherford headed that session up from our side, ably assisted by Matteo Cerquone and Philip Smallwood. We’ll compile some photos and material for your reference and enjoyment, of course.
Phil Smallwood has been training up with Bob Rissolo to assist him with all things dialogue related, puts us in a good place to deal with the Squadron 42 workload, as well as the vocal requirements for the persistent universe.
Jason Cobb’s been busy working on ship explosion debris cloud sweeteners and providing a lot of support for the build process where audio is concerned, and assisting in Wwise tech support wherever possible. Stefan, myself and Jason have been looking at ways to re-structure the Wwise project to benefit procedural and linear-style mixing.
All the audio programming team have been working on various bugs and optimisations, as well as looking to progress the Ship Computer dialogue system (Sam Hall); the in-game VOIP-style system and procedural/automated Foley/footsteps (Graham Phillipson); and we’ve had Simon Price digging ever deeper into dialogue pipeline tools and systems.
Our general aim is to keep improving all things audio, from tools, workflows, pipelines on our side, to the content and overall sound that you hear and appreciate on the player side. Do keep asking questions and providing feedback on the Ask A Dev forum, that’s always hugely valuable to us.
Thanks for listening!
Animation
We’ve been working on the core locomotion – start stops and steps to improve player movement and responsiveness. Additionally, pistol aimpose exploration to strike a balance between first person and third person is working nicely together and the initial implementation of railgun animations has gone in so that we have a functioning weapon. The next stage will be to bring them up to final. There has also been support for ai animation – guys checking vents and reacting to sounds and the like. Finally, testing and feedback of new tool suite that is coming online is continuing!
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Greetings Citizens,
The Frankfurt office is continuing to grow in size and pick up momentum on all fronts. We grew by 4 people this month and have another few additional contracts started. It’s exciting to see the internal progress, from pushing tech boundaries on the Procedural Planets, to the realism on the cinematics and facial tech, etc. We’ve received a few personal letters and gifts from fellow citizens recently, things to help fatten us up. The team honestly appreciates all the support, it’s a constant reminder of how cool the project is and how fortunate we are to be working on it. Here’s a portion of what we’ve been working on over the past month.
Weapons
The weapon art team finished modelling a new ship weapon and is currently finalizing materials, textures and decals for it. Two more new ship weapons and a bunch of new FPS weapon concepts are also in production and should be ready to be shown off soon.
Engine Code
Following up on last month’s mesh data compression for normals and tangent frames we started work on compressed vertex index support for meshes.
We did additional work on atmosphere rendering as well as research into large scale soft terrain shadows for planets.
We worked on a lot of trackview support and feature requests for S42 and did further improvements on the WAF workflow.
EVA – After we got the base functionality of physicalized EVA working, we started to make the transitions between gravity and zero-gravity areas as smooth as possible. One aspect that made this a bit tricky is the extensive use of ragdolls as player characters in EVA. In Star Citizen ragdolls are usually not dead, they are just another way to animate a character. When running on ground a player model is a so-called “LivingCharacter” animated mainly by mocap-data. In EVA it’s a “DrivenRagdoll” with a simulated articulated body. And for all other modes where the player is either unconscious, paralyzed or heavily influenced by physics we blend to a “FloppyRagdoll”. The difference between floppy and driven ragdolls is mainly how we use the artificial muscles to control the joints.
The player can do all kinds of actions all the time (running, jumping walking, floating, aiming, shooting, reloading, etc.) and whenever we transition from animation to physics and back to animation we have to ensure that we preserve the velocity and inertia of every single joint. This works pretty well when leaving the gravity area. It also works when entering the gravity area and the feet point towards the ground plane. But if the player approaches the ground plane in the wrong angle you can expect a lot of spectacular crash landings. In such uncontrolled cases we simply switch to floppy ragdoll, let the player crash to the ground and as soon as the simulation comes to rest he will automatically stand up again. If such a crash landing happens in first person view, then the player will experience everything through the eyes of a simulated ragdoll … and that might look pretty disturbing and painful Because all simulated, mocapped or keyframed animations are shared in first- and third-person view, we were able to use the same system in both view modes. This is the first time we worked with a player model where a large part of its motions are coming from physics and we feel that we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with this kind of physical simulations. This is an ongoing task and we hope to show more improvements in the next months.
Optimizations – We did a good amount of work on optimization this month, to make our universe as large and as interesting as we want we need a good amount of objects in it, therefore we optimized various parts of the 3DEngine to increase our supported object count. We now support hierarchical culling for most of our culling operations in the ZoneSystem. This approach allows us to utilize the spatial structure which we use to speed up our visible culling even more: When we know that the bounding box of a group of objects is fully enclosed inside a camera frustum, we no longer need to check all individual objects against the camera. The same idea can be applied to other checks like box/box overlaps or sphere/distance tests. We then looked into the streaming code. Before it was running in parallel but synced with the MainThread, this means our frame-time is affected by the number of objects around the player (as we need to update those). When we now increase the number of objects, the frame-time obviously gets worse. To help with this issue, we have now decoupled the streaming state update from the actual streaming request. This allows us to update the streaming state (the expensive part of streaming) fully in parallel to the MainThread without affecting the frame-rate. We then looked at our JobManger, which is responsible to distribute all this work over the CPU cores. It turned out that we could massively improve our thread communication and improve our load-balancing. This means we utilize more CPU cores in parallel while reducing the latency of those operations. The next focus is on the rendering side, and we’ll have more details on those next month.
As usual in this stage of development we also worked on various code clean-ups and bug fixes.
Environment Art
This month the Environment Art team focused solely on supporting the new procedural planet tech, doing some R and D on detailing the surface of the planet by procedurally scattering geometry such as boulders, rocks, and pebbles.
QA
April has been a busy month full of Automation testing setups for Chris Speak. Chris has been designing automated tests for AI spawning, death, and ragdolling after being killed by ship weapon fire. These tests also test ship pathing using Kythera Navsplines. When AI are spawned in, the automated test will run to check if the AI spawn in correctly. A ship will also fire shots at the spawned AI to verify weapon damage is being taken and that the AI dies correctly with proper ragdoll physics. The test map is still a work in progress, but will be an asset to the testing process once complete. Melissa Estrada made her final preparations for her transfer to the CIG-DE studio at the end of this month, and will be joining Chris Speak on the QA team as a QA Engine Specialist starting April 1st. She is looking forward to continuing her work on the EditorMonkey, which runs a python scripted automated test of the Editor Sanity checks as well as becoming a 2nd QA point-of-contact for in-house Developers to reach out to when needing specific in-house tests done for new features, and bug fixes.
Tech Art
Tech Art worked on expanding our animation pipeline and focused on the Asset Manager, where we will be populating all our assets. Also supported other departments, finalizing a new rig for the weapons team, bug fixes, etc. And of course we’ve been supporting other teams and fixing bugs is out daily routine.
Cinematics
Cine Environment art built some more close-up geometry for an Admiral to admire on our Skydock scene where a spoileriffic super capital ship is currently being built. For a scene that hearkens back to the days where you had to install a speech pack for your Wing Commander II, Robert our part time cinematic environment artist has created additional set pieces and props that we can’t discuss just yet. We also started up work on Shubin station performance capture scenes that involve Old Man & Graves (who looks awesome!) Those scenes will take a while and will involve lots of blending between pcap and AI locomotion as they traverse big parts of the station on foot. We finalized 1st pass on a part of Chapter 3 scenes and are still working on more of Chapter 03.
We also have 2 new starters in our team which brings us up to almost full staffing. We now have a Cinematic Producer and another Senior Cinematic Animator!
Design
Our Level Designers are hard at work building major landing areas that will be used in the Persistent Universe in the future. Port Olisar is getting a lot of work done and a brand new Shopping District will get added to the existing facilities. This should allow players easy access to NPCs, shops, utilities and will make the place feel a lot more alive than it is right now. We are also adding a pirate/lawless base where players that have been a bit “naughty” can respawn after dying or where they can just dock without getting shot out of the sky by the law enforcement. This area will have its disadvantages when compared to a law abiding station of course, so players who do wrong will have to support the consequences. (Remember that the area around Crusader is UEE space. In an unclaimed or unrepresented system, the opposite might be true!) Another area that is receiving a lot of attention is the Hurston landing zone. This will consist of a large planetary settlement cantered around the Hurston family building and its gigantic strip mining operations. This area right now has gone through its layout phase and is moving towards the first art pass.
System Design has been busy this month with setting up the ground work for a lot of AI features. A lot of code work has come online in AI and we managed to do a lot of behaviour prototyping, focusing mostly on their perception and reactions to seeing and hearing events, aiming precision and out of combat activities. At the same time we pushed designs forward on systems that are adjacent to our AI, especially our interactors which define how our AI interact with objects in the world for everything ranging from sitting on a chair or repairing a computer to opening a door or even turning on an alarm. Since all our interactors will also be usable by the player we are looking into how these will be used and how the player will handle interactions with objects that have multiple ways that they can be used. To cater for this we have decided to use the same Inner Thought system that we also use for dialogue selection as it seems to be a really nice fit. Another system we’ve pushed forward is the Loot Generation which will handle how loot spawns across the world (that’s not to say ships will be spewing out gold like a typical MMO, but there will be salvage and other benefits for scoring kills.) We are trying to build a system that encourages exploration rather than staying in one place and farming resources. We want you to have to search through the vastness of space for the areas that have not yet been discovered as those will most likely provide the most rewarding looting opportunities.
While pushing these new systems, we also spent some time refactoring some old systems that were not quite up to par with our vision of Star Citizen. We’re currently talking about the Quantum Travel which will get a major overhaul to make it a challenging part of gameplay where people who are good at it and know what they are doing will be able to enter QT faster (perhaps before being interdicted; see below) and travel for longer distances in one quantum navigation. At the same time we are introducing the concept of Interdiction to allow players to interrupt others from just leaving in the middle of a battle whenever they feel like it. There will be multiple ways of stopping a ship from entering QT ranging from simply damaging them, all the way to specialized weapons and deployable devices focused on stopping ships dead in their tracks. Another system receiving a bit of love is the Power Distribution. While we have worked on this in the past, the system is being reworked a bit now as we are starting to implement it into our first capital ship, the Idris. This system will handle all of the power and every consumer on board from your big laser cannons to the tiniest light bulb and dictate how power is routed throughout the ship, where it comes from, where it goes to and what happens when there’s not enough of it to go around.
AI
This month we actually progressed on multiple areas, let’s start with the character movement. We developed a functionality to allow level designers to pre-place paths on the level that can be followed by the NPCs. As an example, this is going to be useful for creating patrol paths behaviors!
We enabled the new perception system in the build! After the first use we exposed some properties to correctly customize the events received by the different NPC when hearing different audio stimuli and we also exposed some more properties to designers so that they will be able to correctly customize perception properties directly in the different NPCs archetypes. We introduced some new components to control the weapons in use by the different NPCs. This central component will take care of installing different controller to use different type of weapons. If you think about the case in which a character wants to throw a grenade we will need to predict in a different way the shooting direction compared to the case in which the character is equipping a normal rifle. We also use this component to control the character accuracy so that we can create more or less skilled NPCs.
On the behavior side we introduced three main assignments, Defend Area, Combat Move and Hold Position. Those are basic “high level” commands the level designers can use to create some interesting gameplay situations in their level!
A lot of progress has been made on the Subsumption side. Subsumption currently support the following functionalities
An entity can have an activity associated to it
Each activity can be composed by several subactivities
The selection of subactivity is now correctly following their priorities and relative probabilities
We introduce the basic support for events
We created our internal expression parser to correctly evaluate any mathematical or Boolean expression inside the pre-requisites of an activity or a task
We developed some basic debug draw functionalities
We introduced the following new tasks
Sort Objects
Pop Objects
Communicate
Compute
Compare
Converse
We developed a functionality to reserve an entity to use it or interact with it and allow other NPCs to know that object is reserved
On the ships side we have worked a lot on improving stability and the flying behavior of the ships, we also started the refactor of the ships behavior to allow the support of multiple crew members inside a ship.
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Hello Citizens!
Here’s the latest from what the BHVR team has been doing in Montreal.
Design
This month, the Behaviour design team continued working on shopping and setup Casaba Outlet using the new dynamic spawning system for items. Now, we have items the player can actually wear, as we were working with placeholders before. It required a lot of setting up shelves, spawners and data setup. Now we’ve got a long term solution that we are going to use for more upcoming shop locations. That was a great effort between Bhvr, Austin, LA and UK.
2.3.0 release brought its usual share of hangars and Area18 bugs but nothing we haven’t seen before. We also helped design and setup the extra-large hangar in Revel and York, making sure that new expansion worked with the existing system and the Starfarer spawned correctly when a player owned one. Again, great collaboration between us, Turbulent and the directors.
Finally, we were handed the next hero landing zone whitebox: Hurston in the Stanton system. We are at a stage now, that we clean up the level and connect all the shops to the main paths. We replaced the CryEngine designer meshes for placeholder assets, which respect metrics and setup the level with proper layers and naming conventions. Overall, polishing the level design and getting the map ready for the art team.
Oh yeah, we are also helping and adding new content to Crusader and Port Olisar. It’s great to be able to chip in on every front! Good times!
Engineering
This month, it was all about shopping and figuring out the best way to give you a perfect shopping experience. This feature has many elements that required a cool collaboration between us and the other studios. Which, so far, has been a lot of fun.
We created a new AR-based shopping interface for clothes and personal weapons. Also a Catalog-based shopping system for vehicle components.
With the different types of clothes that you can buy, we had to create a tryout camera to enable the players to preview them on their character.
There was also work on a new shop inventory and layout randomizer.
We updated the CryAstro services UI and flow recode. Finally the most important task is hooking everything to the persistence.
Art
This month we took the time to polish the Market area in Levski, to give it a really nice ambience that we hope you guys will love once is released.
Of course we had to spend time with optimisations and debugging, to ensure a good map performance. With this in mind, there was a lot of work on the tech art side to profile all potential optimisations that can be applied to Levski.
We`ve also polished the shops facades, to make them look unique and to attract the player’s attention as you explore the map.
On the flair side, we began working on the next space plant.
Finally, we spent some time debugging the new Rebel & York bay area for the Starfarer.
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Greetings from sunny-but-windy? Wait, actually snowy… nope sunny! Montreal! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last month:
Ship Stats
We are in the final stages of the design phase for the new ship reference matrix, so we will be able to start development soon. Grouping all the ships by chassis, and switching the layout so that you can see everything on one single page… you’ll be able to select the chassis you want to compare, and view each ship’s production status. This will greatly reduce the left-to-right scrolling, and enable you to easily view all the variants for each chassis. Please also note that, while we are working to improve the ship stats page, different ships are in different stages of development, and some of them have been updated to draw from the new component system and others will not reach that stage until they are further down the pipeline. That means that some of the information may still be temporary or early concept values, and they will definitely need revisions once designers start integrating actual ItemPorts and hardpoints into each respective ship’s in-game assets and collecting information on out what works and what doesn’t. Those values can’t solidify in the ship stats page until that happens, and even then we’ll need to iterate the ships based on feedback from the Live build and Arena Commander testing data. “Subject to change” doesn’t mean we’re changing our minds carelessly or frivolously – it means that during development, they’re going to get multiple balance passes on the road to final launch, which is what it’s really all about.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Our development of multi-factor authentication is ongoing, and we are now in the static integration phase. The first iteration of this feature will include two options for all members: sending the authentication code by email, or by a specifically-designed and -skinned Google Authenticator. In a future release, we will be able to send the code by SMS directly to your phone.
Communication Platform
We have been working on a rough prototype for a new communication platform, which will merge forums and chat systems into a single-page module. Our prototype has already started testing and we’re actively refining its interfaces to make it as easy and intuitive to use as possible. Among other things, we are coming up with novel ways of filtering and organizing conversations and topics. Expect to hear more about it for the next few months!
Ship Happens
This month was very exciting for ships. A new concept ship unveiled, the Esperia Vanduul Blade was announced with a concept sale. This light Vanduul fighter joins the ranks of the Scythe and the Glaive, as Vanduul weapons being used by humans against their creators. March also saw a free-fly week, which included all flyable ships to anyone who created an account, giving new and veteran players a like a chance to try out some new ships. To celebrate this huge free fly, we had a ship sale, putting all flyable limited ships on sale.
To close out the month, when 2.3 went live, the Xi’An Scout and the Starfarer went for sale, for which we developed a dedicated promo page with a few new modules like a browsable magazine-like layout. We’ve since already reused it on the much anticipated Big Benny’s food delivery menu. With 2.3 the Scout is now flight ready and the impressive Starfarer is now in the hangar for the first time!
Sales
March was also very busy for merchandise. First the new customizable Squadron 42 dog tags were put on sale. Next Starmap posters were offered up, giving people a chance to own a very cool poster of the Star Citizen Universe that’s been in the works ever since the Kickstarter campaign! Finally in preparation for this year’s CitizenCon, tickets went on sale for our most anticipated event of the year, this time in Los Angeles.
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Hello Citizens!
I’ll start with a little introduction.
Tyler Witkin here, or better known as Zyloh from the forums, and I am your newest Community Manager reporting in from under the bus in the Austin, TX studio! Yes! Two Community Managers! I am very excited to work closely with my new partner in crime Lando and the rest of the team to continue delivering you all awesome content and information. I am now back in Texas after a very productive and adventurous week of training in the LA studio. Throughout the week I worked closely with the team to better understand my new responsibilities, iron out the new role, and study the tools of the trade. There are some really great things planned in the coming months and I am very excited to dive in!
Can you believe we are already a quarter through 2016?! Let’s take a look at what went down in March!
Videos
We continued to put out our regularly scheduled segments and content (made possible by all the awesome subscribers out there!) and finished strong with a very informative 10 For the Chairman with Global Head of Production and Foundry 42 Studio Director, Erin Roberts.
March brought us the flyable Xi’an Scout and hangar ready Starfarer. We released a comm-link detailing our now largest hangar-ready ship yet, the Starfarer. The page delves into the massive hauler and includes a visually stunning video created by Nathan Dearsley accompanied by new music from the talented Pedro Camacho! Definitely worth checking out!
March also saw the release of a behind-the-curtains look at Squadron 42 with the talented Andy Serkis! We are extremely excited and fortunate to have him on board the cast for Squadron 42!
Website
The MVP section of the Community Hub is now fully up to date with AtV’s MVP winners. Make sure to check out some of the awesome content your fellow citizens are putting out there!
Live Events
While we did not attend any conventions/events in March, we announced details and sold tickets for Citizen Con 2016! Citizen Con marks the original October 2012 announcement of the Star Citizen crowdfunding campaign, and the event has previously been held in Austin, Los Angeles and Manchester. This year, Citizen Con returns to Los Angeles at the Avalon Hollywood on October 9th for an action-packed day that will celebrate the latest and greatest work our developers are putting out.
Perks
Space plants! March Subscriber Flair brought us the Tuserac Plena, aka the Terran Emperor Blossom, and in case you we’re worried about your Emperor Blossom being lonely, the Xi’An Space Plant stretch goal was awarded to all who backed before $49 million.
Additionally the servers were jam packed with new players and veterans alike for our Free Fly promotion that ran March 11th-22nd. It was great getting to see the level of camaraderie (and havoc) that took place whilst some of our experienced players welcomed the new crowd.
Coda
That’s all for March! 2016 is going to be a big year for Star Citizen and as always, we are dedicated and excited to continue communicating, sharing, and exploring this universe with all of you!
Around the Verse: Episode 2.26 - THE PROCEDURAL WORLD OF TODD PAPY
THE PROCEDURAL WORLD OF TODD PAPY
This week, we chat with Design Director Todd Papy, explore the streaming community with Captain Richard, and get an update on the continuing development of procedural planets.
Big Benny's has already established themselves as a foundation of the Star Citizen universe.. and now it's up to you to distribute their menus, make their food and deliver it to the far reaches of the galaxy! Take some time to noodle it over!
“With the gentle tap of a missile, the Vanduul fighter blocking my path shattered into a trillion pieces. I took a brief moment of satisfaction as the once-proud Blade’s atmosphere lit up with a distinctive, instantaneous flash. A bold attacker as any I’d encountered, for sure, and a sentient life cut short. But it was him or me, and I couldn’t stop to grieve over a monster set on pillaging my precious cargo. I punched my throttle, sending my Retaliator bomber ahead full and then glanced at my mission computer: blast damage to all my armor, a rear hull fracture preparing to become a breach, a loose missile on pylon three that needs to be ejected. Damn, they hit me harder than I realized. Then I saw the timer: five minutes, fifteen seconds. This was going to be a rough one: if I couldn’t make the drop on time, the pizza would be free.”
-Captain Ronald “Dagger” Gourami, SS Pepperoni Princess
Greetings, Citizens!
One thing we’ve learned in the past three years is that Star Citizen backers have unstoppable hungers. We’re talking about an enduring hunger for space combat, for exploration, for trading, for building their own stories in the universe we’re creating. It’s that hunger that has made the game possible… and now we’re going one step further. Because when you really drill down, there’s one hunger that’s even more important than all of these others put together: a hunger for hunger. That’s why we’re proud to announce that Star Citizen’s next career will be: food.
Of course, that makes perfect sense, you say. But how do we introduce food into a game with a very specific set of existing mechanics, most of which are based on the far less interesting experiences of visceral space combat action and futuristic sci-fi adventure? The answer is that we need to change the status quo, and to do that we have invested significant time and energy into rebuilding how Star Citizen integrates food on the most base level. The result of this system is a magnificent new core mechanic: GRUBBY HANDS. Grubby Hands is a complete, immersive technology system that accounts for meal development, preparation, delivery and more. What’s more, Grubby Hands functions alongside our existing physics grid tech, meaning that the game has the ability to do everything from flip pancakes at zero G to broil a steak at the center of a neutron star.
As many of you know, the stock CryEngine includes only limited built-in options for sandwich customization. And for an ordinary game, that’s fine. Titles like RISE: Son of Rome rarely need to render a sandwhich or a burger with more than four layers (a primary meat item, or PMI, a standard topping (ST) and two mirrored bread items (in game development parlance, Exterior Bakeslots.) For Star Citizen, however, we want to give players the immersive freedom to immerse themselves in limitless sandwich possibilities. Imagine a game in which you can build a hamburger with double the meat, an egg salad sandwich with two kinds of cheese or even roll your own wrap. Thanks to the efforts of our procedural technology team, it’s all possible.
What allows this immersive system to function is a highly complex (and very immersive) system of taste-nodes. No longer must a sandwich be built around a single PMI, or limited to inside a pair of Exterior Bakeslot containers. Instead, individual nodes featuring 64-bit precision will allow almost infinite combinations. Individual sub-items are given node markers and are then passed to the client to render on the fly; where previous games would have seen a sudden framerate drop trying to render, say, a slice of eggplant, Star Citizen shines. Thanks to an in-game mobiglas app tie-in, these infinite components can be classified, organized and positioned (with maximum immersion.)
And looking forward (and not to blow your mind all at once) we’re happy to say that this technology is NOT limited to sandwiches. Pizza toppings, fry frying, pancake mixing and even the French Toast Process (FTP) can be accurately simulated to within 1/100th of an immersion unit.
IMPORTANT NOTE: corn is not and will not be supported.
Delivery Career
Designing your own sandwiches is great, we know… but like the saying goes, a sandwich is meaningless until you do something with it. Star Citizen is a game about space travel, so it would not do to simply make you some sort of sandwich gardener. Space food must tie directly to the game’s overall economy system, and we must give our many culinary-minded players an endgame. To that point, we have created an immersive career concept that we believe will carry all of our work to the next level. The system, developed by our top designers over the course of months of debate and discussion to try and create the most immersive possible food career, is as follows:
You put the food in your spaceship.
You take the food somewhere and give it to someone.
Balance Updates
In order to best support the immersive new Grubby Hands mechanics and our general change of direction, the following changes will be made to Star Citizen’s concepts:
The MISC Starfarer can now carry up to 50,000 STU (Standard Tasty Units) of marinara.
Squadron 42 is henceforth renamed Squadron 57, as a nod to the many varieties of sauces available to the player during the campaign.
The Drake Herald’s internal computer core has been replaced with a traveling oven capable of keeping pizzas hot and fresh in the deepest space (except stuffed crust, which gets weird when you reheat it.)
The M50 is now the Mmmmmm50, and we’re lovin’ it.
The Vanduul Blade, Scythe and Glaive are just three parts of an extraordinary nine-piece Vanduul Cutlery Set, available for a limited time for just three monthly installments of $59.99, plus shipping and handling. At that price, are we insane? Stocks are limited and operators are standing by!
The Shubin Mining Station is now a Shubin-N-Out Burger restaurant.
Something funny with the Gladiator, I guess.
The Carrack is now a kind of salad.
A fresh slice ham counts as a pet.
Players will have the option of collecting all five of the Banu Mother Sauces, which can be harvested from the distinctive sauce-glands of a Banu hive mother.
The Retaliator remains unchanged, with the exception of being renamed the RetalEATor.
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Discover a day in the life of a Starfarer Captain
MISC is proud to present an inside look at what it's like to sail the stars aboard a Starfarer, and how from Captain to crew, everybody has an important job to do when living and working on a tanker.
This may appear to be a story about the men and women who crew our tankers, but don’t let that fool you. Aboard Clydesdale, a working MISC Starfarer, everyday is a new adventure as her crew undertakes their charge, to carry fuel and cargo to the darkest depths of space.
Outfitted and equipped with cutting-edge technology, the Starfarer is an important backbone of interstellar commerce. Yet to focus on the grandeur of the ship alone would miss the true beating heart of this tale, the men and women who operate these stout ships and their exhilarating lives on the drift.
06:13 SET.: Chronos System.
Chief Jack Conroy, Clydesdale’s First Officer, receives his morning briefing from the Boatswain. Don’t let their easy interplay come off as laziness or inattention: these are experienced spacemen with thousands of voyages between them, always keenly aware of their responsibilities and the constant dangers they face.
Meanwhile, in his personal quarters, the tanker’s captain, awakens from four hours of union-mandated rest after overseeing midwatch during the transit in-system. Jarvan MacGravy, or ‘Little Mac’ as he’s affectionately known by his crew, is now again ready to take the reigns. His quarters are an oasis, the lone respite on a crowded ship.
Old spacehands have a saying: never trust a ship that doesn’t break down. Repairs are a constant aboard a complex spacecraft like Clydesdale. With hundreds of systems working at any given time, those repairs require expertise in a variety of disciplines, including welding, electronics repair, programming, repainting and a thousand other tasks. The crew performs this work with a knowing smile: their pride in their ship’s efficiency is telling.
Deeper in Clydesdale’s innards, Chief Engineer Clayton Fitz monitors the massive reactor that powers the transport. As with any power plant, there is constant danger of everything from meltdown to system failure, but the truly great engineers won’t settle for baseline performance. Instead, they actively man stations such as this to maximize energy output, constantly trying to improve engine efficiency as little as one micron at a time.
It isn’t all sweat and toil! In Clydesdale’s shared crew quarters, the off-shift personnel prepare to bunk down. It’s spartan, but more than enough for those accustomed to traveling the stars. The Captain discourages talking politics and sataball allegiances here: games of Trigger, easy camaraderie and tall tales of adventure are the order of the day when off duty.
The klaxon sounds! Long range scanners have detected a slow-moving blip on a potential intercept course. Such incidents are, more often than not, false alarms. The last alarm was the passing of an errant comet. Yet even the most experienced of hearts still skip a beat when the shrill call goes off. Could it be pirates seeking a target of opportunity? Vanduul raiders dedicated to nothing but slaughter? Only time will tell as the crew springs to action stations!
Unlike a warship, Clydesdale does not carry a crew of dedicated turret gunners on hand to watch the stars at all time. Instead, engineers and spacemen fill this essential job when crisis arises. Don’t let the lack of military experience fool you, these emergency gunners each have hundreds of hours of experience. Some, like Junior Engineer Janel Cosca, have even passed extensive certification programs. Tense minutes seem like hours to whoever’s ‘in the pods,’ each knowing they may be the only line of defense against an unknown enemy. And then, finally: the all clear. It was an errant Hull C which had drifted off the normal spacelanes.
The ship is docked! Without further incident, Clydesdale arrives at her destination, Archangel Station, and sets down gently in one of the standard hangars. Buggies carrying inspectors and customs officials speed to the landing platform, where they are dwarfed by the massive vessel.
Before she can unload her fuel and cargo, a thorough Customs inspection is in order. Local security scan Clydesdale for contraband while Captain MacGravy outlines the fuel and cargo intended to be traded. The local TDD representative comes out to make a visual inspection and officially receive the cargo.
The stevedores go to work! Starfarers like Clydesdale are more than massive fuel tanks: an extensive cargo bay allows the ship’s quartermaster, Ralph Dion, to engage in all forms of mercantile pursuits. The crew and the groundside personnel continue unloading essential goods ferried here to restock local shelves.
With her cargo holds now a few tons lighter and her crew a few credits richer, Clydesdale is ready to finish her contract and deliver her precious supply of fuel to the station’s waiting storage tanks. Specially built for the task, transferring the contents of the Starfarer’s massive detachable fuel pods is a straightforward affair as Quartermaster Dion ensures that the business at hand is conducted quickly and more importantly, safely.
Deep inside the tanker, Max Bresh (nicknamed ‘Scrub’ much to her dismay) initiates the defueling process. Massive quantities of refined quantum fuel surge from the ship into the storage tanks buried deep within the hangar. A process seemingly as simple as drinking through a straw… but one that can be as dangerous as playing with a live grenade!
Outside the ship, the pneumatics whirr. An Archangel deckhand monitors the defueling process, ready to release the dead man’s switch at a moment’s notice should something go wrong. While the ship’s state of the art containers render the fuel as inert as possible, Clydesdale is equipped with secondary systems to provide an added degree of safety.
The fuel is delivered, and Clydesdale’s crew prepares for takeoff. In the hauling business, time is money. To stay profitable, you have to stay mobile, so Clydesdale has little time for liberties. Mere hours after she arrived at Archangel, the enormous tanker has picked up any critical supplies that are needed and pushed off towards the stars.
And so the day ends as it began! Captain MacGravy briefs Chief Conroy on the day’s events and issues orders for the next shift before heading off to catch some much needed rack time. Conroy’s already begun running the next shift through engine drills and gunner reaction time. As Captain MacGravy heads to his bunk, he smiles: he has a good crew, one he is proud to trust with his life.
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The Starfarer is here! Star Citizen Alpha 2.3 introduces our largest hangar-ready ship yet. The MISC Starfarer is a dedicated tanker and transport… and a home away from home for a crew of seven, featuring turrets, a reactor room, escape pods, barracks, captain’s quarters and more! If you’ve ever dreamed about commanding a motley crew of space heroes, the Starfarer is a great place to start!
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The Starfarer was initially designed as a tanker, and includes equipment for collecting and refining spaceborne hydrogen. There’s also plenty of standard cargo space, plus defensive weaponry that will make any pirate think twice before trying to board you! For the first time, you can explore the Starfarer in-game… and our engineers are currently working on implementing it in flight for an upcoming patch.
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Hangar-ready sale
About the Sale
The Starfarer is being offered as a ‘hangar ready’ sale. This means that the ship’s geometry and graphics have been implemented in the game engine but that it has not been made flight ready yet. Please note that due to changes in the design, the Starfarer’s price has increased since the original concept sale. The price will increase again when it becomes flight-ready.
If you’d like to add one to your fleet, they’re available in the pledge store until April 4th. You can also view a detail of the Starfarer in the Holo Viewer in the Tech Overview of the ship page!
Disclaimer
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper, non-combat oriented features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.
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Star Citizen Alpha 2.3 is now available! Pilots can access the latest patch on the Live server using the Star Citizen launcher. Alpha 2.3 adds the usual assortment of bug fixes and balance updates, as well as making our first capital-sized ship hangar-ready! The MISC Starfarer is now ready for boarding, and by a large margin it’s the biggest ship we’ve released so far. This patch also makes the Xi’An Khartu-al scout ship flight ready, with plenty of last minute balance provided by our intrepid PTU testers. The component conversion also continues with power plants moving into the new system. You can find a full list of changes and additions in the patch notes, and more information on the Starfarer in this special post.
And of course, you can find your 2.3 Patch Notes here.
Ship Update
Scouts Reporting In!
If you missed out on your chance to pick up either the hangar-ready Starfarer or the flight-ready Xi’An Scout, both are now on sale! The Xi’An Scout is a nimble long-range fighter-sized ship, whereas the Starfarer is a massive tanker with multiple decks and crew support for seven people! These ships will be available in the pledge store through Monday, April 4.
Remember: we are offering these pledge ships to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than a particular advantage when the persistent universe launches. Ship types sold during limited sales will be available to earn in the finished game.
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We are happy to announce that Star Citizen Alpha 2.3 includes the new system for power plant components! We’re making two ‘general purpose’ power plants available in the Voyager Direct store today. These components power the systems of your ship. All current ships have ‘generic’ plants that replicate the power generated before the patch, and these two new designs are upgrades which can be mounted on all variants of the Avenger, Aurora, MUstang, 300, Hornet (except Super Hornet), Gladiator, Gladius, M50 and Merlin.
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Remember, while there’s a lot to explore in Alpha 2.3 the game still just a portion of the Star Citizen experience! You can help the team improve future releases by reporting bugs and other issues using the Star Citizen Issue Council. The amazing feedback from Star Citizen backers is what has allowed us to interate on the PTU so quickly, and we’re eager for feedback about the Live release as well. You can access the Issue Council here.
Finally, we would be remiss if we not thank our incredible community of PTU testers for helping make this patch the best it can be! Your dedication is exemplary of the UEE’s finest defenders!
”Massive fleet actions, attempts at global landings to hold Tiber II itself, and even “clean slate” operations designed to simply eliminate the ability of the system to sustain military occupation have all fallen flat. Millions have died in these attempts, and the ever-expanding fields of wreckage are now legendary. Countless civilians, seeing the deadly battlefield debris as potential for profit, have made the same leap with similar fatal results.“
Another Concept Sale, another Question & Answer session. Since Friday, we’ve been collecting questions from the dedicated Q&A post here and today our designers and artists working on the ship will answer 10 questions for the community. Tune back in on this Friday to see the answers to 10 more questions. Let’s jump right in.
Question & Answer
Where do you envision the Blade position compared to others Vanduul ships, we know it’s a light fighter but is it more of a “Gladius” or closer to a “M50”?
It’s a mix of the two, the Blade is lighter armed than the Gladius but makes up for that shortfall by being more agile. A Blade pilot’s best strength is to evade incoming fire and stay on its target’s tail.
My question is about the two different flight modes. Given the two other ships that have multiple flight modes (Reliant and Xi’An Scout) have had those flight modes regulated to landing only, what makes the Blades multiple flight modes different?
This was an error in the website listing, the folded mode is purely for storage/landing like the Scythe/Glaive and harks back to its Vanduul roots where hundreds of Blades would be stored inside larger carriers.
How well will the Blade perform as a racer?
The Vanduul have no interest in any competition that doesn’t see your enemy dead at your feet. That said, the Blade is fast and human pilots should take full advantage of that.
Will the gimbals be able to be taken off and the hardpoint become an S2 fixed, like other ships, or will there be some Vanduul caveat that doesn’t let you alter the weapons? Will it be able to take other human weapons, or will it have Vanduul specific weapons? If Vanduul weapons only, then how are they expected to preform when compared to other s1/s2 weapons?
Long term you’ll be able to mix/match race-specific weaponry provided you have an appropriate cross-species mount. For example you could take your S2 Vanduul weapons and with a appropriate mount attach them to any UEE ship. The specific penalties (if any beyond requiring another mount in your inventory) are still to be decided.
What sort of operational range should we expect from the Blade? It’s referred to as a “Scout.” Is it carried-based like a Super Hornet and Gladiator, or is it capable of longer range engagements.
Operationally, the Blade is short range and is almost unstoppable in a swarm, but without the support of its brothers, the Blade can be exposed and vulnerable. Only expert pilots should think about taking one out too far.
How does the attributes like maneuverability, emissions and armor of the Blade compare to other ships in similar role?
The maneuverability is intended to be beyond anything else out there which makes up for its lacking armor. Emission wise, it’s about the same, no real effort has been made to disguise or optimize it.
The ship is awful small, I’m wondering if it comes with a jump drive? Can one be added if not? Can it quantum travel or is it carrier based type fighter?
The Blade comes with a jump drive, as most non-snub craft traditionally do.
Are the “blades” (wings) rugged enough to be used in combat? Is the Blade suited for ramming, or is the sharpness just Vanduul aesthetic?
No, that would not be advisable. The Vanduul aesthetic for this ship is to strike fear into the minds of their enemies, not their cockpit.
How does the Esperia replica differ from the Vanduul original?
Like their Glaive replica it has been fitted with human-sized control interfaces to allow the naturally shorter humans the ability to control the craft. Some of the internal components have been replaced with more readily available components rather than Vanduul made ones.
Since this is a replica ship would the interface/HUD be more human based, or will it have the Vanduul interface fighting to break out under a hacked on human interface as the other Vanduul ships have had?
One of the many improvements Esperia have brought in since their initial work on the Glaive has been a solid human-centric interface. With the Blade being a replica rather than refurbished, there is no underlying Vanduul computer system trying to break through.
Weapons are continuing both on FPS and ships, working out upgrade paths for all the different sizes of ship guns and how to be efficient with our designs but also give the fans what they’d like. Props and prop dressing has continued, the list of required props is getting longer by the day so we will take on additional resources to fill that gap so that Sq42 can look its best. That’s all for now folks!
For our vsync fixes, this unfortunately means that we can only ensure correct vsync in fullscreen mode. Because of this we added some experimental vsync modes.
IMPORTANT NOTE: corn is not and will not be supported.