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Company History
Founded at the turn of the century, Accelerated Mass Design gained renown as a high-end electronics design and tuning companies. AMD has been responsible for dozens of commonplace (but disparate) technological items used in consumer spaceflight, as well as most recently the development of their own starship variant, the Mustang Omega.
In 2899, Sander Katt and a team of six other engineers left their design positions with Ayre Semisonic to form a new corporation focused on high-level design. In 2901, the company released its first product: the UE-9300 expansion card. Designed for near-absolute-zero operation, the UE-9300 was an immediate high-end replacement for the aging CarthSys Multidock, piquing the collective interests of both luxury and military spacecraft manufacturers.
For the first dozen years of operation, Katt’s team dedicated their time to streamlining and increasing the efficiency of existing technology. By 2908, a specific bureau had been established for taking in other companies’ standard production technologies and tweaking them past their design limitations. AMD-branded versions of everything from escape hatches to laser cannons became a sought-after accessory for ship owners of means.
In 2920, the conglomerate signed a two-decade development deal with Anvil Aerospace, providing high-level circuitry for a number of military spacecraft in exchange for exclusive branding. While initially considered an unusual deal for a company seeking to position itself as a civilian lifestyle brand, the value behind the agreement quickly became apparent as Anvil began to launch civilian-branded variants of their Hornet and Gladiator lines. AMD took in billions in revenue as Anvil ships spread brand awareness and a need for expansion of their technology support chain.
By the late thirties, however, the limitations offered by the Anvil deal had begun to chafe. The demand for F7C Hornets had overshadowed AMD’s capacity to manufacture internal parts, leading Anvil to begin to source outside the company (as allowed by contract). Their brand began to be associated with subpar parts rather than top-of-the-line components, and all projections indicated that their own production could never keep pace with spacecraft demand. Ultimately turning down a massive offer to sign for a third decade, AMD threw caution to the wind once again, serving as a free-agent ship component synthesizer.
Racing Ahead
Seeking to renew their appeal in the youth market (and now free of their exclusive Anvil deal), Accelerated Mass Design teamed with Consolidated Outland in 2940 during the early stages of the Mustang development program. AMD financed a significant, undisclosed portion of Koerner’s spacecraft prototyping, in exchange for exclusive branding rights to create their own dedicated racing variant of the ship.
The corporation embedded a pair of their top designers with Silas Koerner’s Mustang team. Bryce Halliday and Jennifer Aykers, both hired away from MISC’s auspicious spacecraft design bureau, sat with the Mustang team through every step of the spacecraft’s design. Engineers involved report that the duo had a significant uncredited role in the creation of the Mustang lineup, although they were only technically observers. Halliday and Aykers spent four years ‘roughing it’ on the frontier, often finding themselves at odds with Koerner’s demanding personality … but the results of their work speaks for itself.
On its own, the Mustang (which Aykers described in a dispatch as looking like a “battle butterfly”) outpaces the Roberts Space Industries Aurora in over a dozen categories, chief among them speed and maneuverability. The early choice to lock down an exclusive racing version seems to have offered significant recompense: Mustangs are now the de facto choice of young racers, with the Gamma model alone looking to outsell the Origin M50 in its first quarter on the market.
The most notable feature of the AMD-exclusive spacecraft, dubbed the Mustang Omega, was the addition of a ramped-up fuel intake for faster hydrogen recycling. This allows the Mustang to ‘double down’ on the existing boost system, enhancing its overall straight speed. Some critics have claimed that the standard Mustang racer, the Gamma, is simply a ‘cut down’ version of AMD’s Omega. The truth is that the Gamma and the Omega were developed independently, and the existence of the Gamma in the first place likely owes itself to AMD’s desire to be associated with racing. (It is also worth noting that the materials cost of the enhanced boost system equal almost the entire hull of the Mustang Gamma.)
Further aiming to attract the younger, affluent spacecraft-buying audience, Accelerated Mass Design enlisted the efforts of underground artist Sektor8 to design a distinctive “cherry pie” red paint scheme that evokes nothing 32short of the Origin M50, the reigning racing spacecraft. Seeking to brand the AMD logo as a lifestyle icon, the sigil is featured prominently on the spacecraft’s hull. Sektor8 was paid an astounding three million UEC for the job, which he insisted be donated to an aquatic animal rescue organization on Helios.
A limited number of Mustang Omega hulls have been constructed, many of which have been seeded to top racing teams and (after a lengthy search) promising newcomers on the Murray Cup circuit. Both Accelerated Mass Design and Consolidated Outland are hoping that this investment will pay off in 2945, with the powerful new Mustangs poised to place highly in all major competitions. The only reason there isn’t an Omega with a Murray Cup, a company spokesman recently opined, is because this year’s contest hasn’t happened yet.
The Future
The terms of the Consolidated Outland deal are unknown, but given the recent reappearance of AMD-badged missile pylon connectors it is likely they are not as restrictive as the Anvil contract. Industry rumors even claim that the company is strongly considering taking their experience with Consolidated Outland to the next level and designing their own spacecraft. Recent hirings, which have brought engineers away from both Roberts Space Industries and MISC, seem to support this idea. Could Accelerated Mass Design create their own kit spacecraft, or even a dedicated luxury vehicle produced in extremely limited numbers? Perhaps — the sky is the limit!
As some of you may have seen from the recent sneak peek on Around the Verse or the Foundry 42 monthly updates, we’ve been hard at work for some time to improve the damage system on the ships. We’ve already shown in Arena Commander our very powerful and flexible system for controlling the damage on your ships, which combined with some awesome artwork gives some great results. But your ships are such a big part of the Star Citizen universe we felt we had to go several steps further.
So we took a top down look our damage system to review what we could improve, and although there is great satisfaction in peeling off each part of an enemy ship when they take major damage, we felt we could better represent the specific location and type of damage inflicted. Whether it be a projectile weapon, an energy weapon, an explosion or scratching your ship after a dodgy landing, we want you to be able to differentiate them just from looking at your ship. We felt this was going to be especially important in our game as we want each ship to tell a story of what’s is been through.
Two other areas we wanted to improve on were the time it takes our artist to create the numerous damage states for each part of the ship, and the hefty memory cost these meshes come with, which could prove to be a problem as we scale up the game. The reason the damage states are so labour intensive is that each ship has over ten main parts, and each of these requires five damage states to represent the different levels of damage, then each of these requires up to five simplified meshes that we use when they’re further from the camera to save performance. This equates to over 200 meshes per ship!
When you examine the current damage states in Arena Commander you’ll notice that the first two damage states tend to just contain minor dents, some burn damage, and perhaps a few panels that have been blown off exposing some internals. It’s only when you get to the 75% and 100% damage states you start seeing major silhouette changes, however the earlier damage states still carry the same memory cost. So our goal was to try and achieve the minor damage without having to create whole new meshes, saving both memory and artist time. To do this we decided to record the impacts on the ship within an extra set of textures that wrap around the entire ship, and to then use these in the shaders to dynamically add the dents and burn in precisely the location your ship took the damage. However rather than just opting to blend in a simple damaged texture in these areas, we instead chose to model the type of damage much more accurately by recording four different quantities:
Temperature
The current temperature of the hull
Burn
The maximum temperature the hull has been burnt with
Thickness
How much of the outer hull remains. Paint comes off first, then the underlying metal
Deformation
How much physical force the hull has taken to bend and distort it
Using these four damage values we can make the hull glow with heat, make paint burn and bubble, peel paint off to expose the underlying metal, dent and deform the surface, and even cut holes through the hull to expose the internal wiring and mechanics. Rather than the internals of the ship only being modeled in specific locations we now model the internals under the vast majority of the hull. You might expect this would involve a lot of work for the artists, but they’ve come up with several methods of adding these internals very efficiently and the overall damage state setup is now significantly quicker than before.
Your ship’s life story
The really interesting thing about us having access to four different measures of damage is that these can be imprinted on your ship in a pattern and strength that is unique to each weapon, explosive or type of impact. So while lasers will cause your hull to light up for several seconds leaving burnt paint and exposed metal, a powerful ballistic might tear a hole straight through your hull. We’re just scratching the surface of how far we can go with this system, and we plan to soon upgrade the weapon/ammo code to expose more unique and physically realistic damage behaviors.
We’ve trialed this tech on the Gladius, and you’ll see for yourselves in 1.1.0 that the results are great. What you might not see is that the Gladius uses four times less memory than the other ships, and this equates to better performance for the backers. Our artists are happy as this will allow them to make ships more quickly, which ultimately gets this game in your hand sooner! You’ll also be glad to know we’ll be rolling this tech out on every new ship, and also retrofitting the older ships as we go along.
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Additional tech needed to be developed for placing our Particle and Squib Effects to complete the look of our new damage pipeline. When a part such as a Wing detaches from the ship, Squibs and Particles detonate along the edge of the separation. The Squibs, when detonated, specifically cause holes and burn damage to appear on the skin of the ship, revealing the ‘guts’ of the ship underneath so that the piece of the ship looks like it was torn away from the body. Particles also fire off as pieces break off from the ship, adding dramatic smoke, explosions and sparks. A specialized art tool, developed by Matt Intrieri, was created to convert helper objects in 3DSMax into XML code to add the effect in-game. CIG’s Effects Artist, Mike Snowdon, used the tool to add the Particles and Squibs to the ship along the edges of each part of the ship, creating dynamic and realistic effects based on the ship’s systems at each location.
Next Steps
But this isn’t the end of the road for this tech, there’s still several major features we’re working on. One of these is particle effects that are created, simulated and rendered entirely on the GPU, and this gives them two huge advantages. The first is performance, we can spawn 10-100 times more GPU particles than CPU particles for the same cost. The other benefit is that they tie in perfectly with the precise damage you’ve taken, so as the hull burns you’ll get glowing embers falling off, when it takes physical damage you’ll see shards of metal fly off, and when you blow out a large section of the hull you’ll see space littered with the debris. We’re also working on some major optimizations using to the damage system using DirectX 11 features to ensure that it’ll still run fast when there’s twenty fighters attacking a capital ship!
The first thing we did when we got this system working was to have some fun and write our names into a ship with a Gatling gun! Now it’s your turn to have a play and we’re keen to hear what you all think of this new tech so please let us know on the forums.
The Future
With our new damage technology now in place, we continue to strive for even more realistic and efficient methods to push our graphics in all areas. We’ll be adding more effects under the skin of the ship as gaping holes are revealed, adding touches like sparks on damaged equipment under the skin. Several lighting and particle setups are being prototyped to take our ship interiors through Healthy, Damaged, Critical and Flatline states that will inform and immerse our players during battle. Our new state machine being developed called GOST, will determine the healthy (or unhealthy) flow of energy around the ships systems and will have a big impact on our multi-crew interactions and the effect of ship damage on them. Given the complexity of our largest ships, that are really like floating levels, big questions remain about hull breaches and how to portray critical damage in the vacuum of space and how this will affect players inside. And optimizations in all areas will allow us to add more and more players simultaneously to create massive multiplayer battles. We are very pleased and excited to be releasing this first iteration of our newly optimized damage technology and hope the players feel the same.
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Greetings Citizens,
February is a short month, but it was a full one for Star Citizen’s development! As you read this, Arena Commander 1.1 is hitting the PTU, and we expect to make it available on the live server in the very near future. Once we pass that milestone, it’ll be time for the first public release of FPS… so stay tuned, exciting things are coming! But for everything you can play today, there’s a hundred other aspects of the game in other stages of development. Read on to find out how everything from the imminent FPS module to the Persistent Universe is shaping up!
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Greetings Citizens,
As always, we are glad to have you with us as we welcome in the month of March by first reporting on the successes of February. In fact, it may interest some of you to know that not only do we write these reports each month for the community, but we also have internal monthly reports for our teams as well. At the end of each month we review our success against the previous month’s goals for the team and recommit to the next month’s goals. Anyhow, the reason we mention it is because February had a very high completion rate indicative of the focused nature of the team with upcoming large releases.
This month saw our team working heavily on stabilizing the build for the 1.1.0 release. Generally in software development there is what’s referred to as “Main.” This is the primary repository for all the game’s code and data/assets within the content management system, which in our case is Perforce. Inside Main is generally where all developers are working. This also means that it is getting the most changes (commits) every day. While it is great for everyone to be working quickly and committing regularly, it also greatly increases the chances of introducing a new bug into the system. So, as we approach release we create what is called a “branch.” Using the metaphor of a tree, Main would be the trunk and a branch would be, a branch. It is a copy of Main where developers reside – working on changes specifically intended for that release. This greatly reduces the risk of unintended bugs being introduced that could threaten the release; it is also the time at which we generally switch focus from feature development to stabilization and bug fixing. This allows development for things like Squadron 42, new ships, FPS, and persistent universe to continue unabated in Main while Arena Commander gets stabilized in preparation for release in a branch.
So, without further ado let’s review the areas of focus for each department.
Engineering
Throughout February our engineers have been primarily focused on bug fixing and refining their systems for the upcoming releases. Last month we talked a bit about the new item port system. That system was completed this month, including bug fixing, and is going to be included with the soon to be released 1.1.0. As it is a fairly large extension of the system and interacts with several other systems in significant ways, it takes some time not only to finish the implementation of the system but then to also find and fix any bugs and edge cases that are exposed over time. Some of these bugs are memorable. For example, our light marine has a tactical shoulder lamp. After the implementation of the new item port system QA began reporting that the pilot would sometimes randomly die for no reason. After some investigation it was discovered that under certain conditions the tactical light (which is now attached with the new item port system) was colliding suddenly getting a velocity of 0 while the pilot was flying, and would then collide with the pilot at 200+ M/S and kill them. This is just one example of the strange but critical, and sometimes funny, issues that arise while implementing a new system.
On the Graphics Engineering side, our sole graphics engineer in the Santa Monica studio was working with his counterparts in the UK office to finish the first phase implementation of the new ship damage system which debuts on the Gladius. Among the many bug fixes and development work that went into the system this month, one of the interesting improvements to the system was the dynamic modification of normals. When the ship is shot and damaged, the system is now able to modify the normal around the impact area to curve the edges of a hole caused by a physical projectile, creating a realistic looking impact and penetration effect.
Design
The design team has had several areas of focus this month. They’ve been working closely with QA, forum feedback, and internal playtests on the balance of ship health, weapons, and items. This is an important ongoing process and occupies an ongoing focus. Similar to our engineering team, our Tech Designers have been working on resolving issues with the technical setup of ships, weapons, and items by fixing bugs and improving on functionality. Our design team has also been very involved with setting up new ships that are being released soon. Getting a ship set up to appear and work properly in the hangar, especially getting it flight ready, is very involved and requires a lot of time and attention.
The team has also been very busy with the ship pipeline operating at full capacity. Not just with setting up the ships that have been created, but also defining the specifications for new ships that they want to see created and introduced into the game. The design team has created briefs for numerous new spacecraft this month that are being slotted into the pipeline and some have already entered concept.
Our designers also put a big emphasis this month on the metrics for items, weapons, and their manufacturers. One of the most challenging things about creating our ships is the level of realistic engineering principals that go into them. So, our design team spent time this month working out a system of metrics for all the items and all the per item type size ranges that fit onto our spacecraft. Be on the look out for a revised hardpoint classification, weapon size classification, and thruster size classification schema. We will be sharing with the community as soon as it is completed.
Art
Our Art team in Santa Monica is currently focused on new ship development. From our concept artists, to modelers, to our tech artists, everyone is working on their aspect of a new ship. Similar to the other teams, there has been some bug fixing and preparation occurring for the upcoming release of 1.1.0, but a majority of the work has been going toward creating ships that we’ve previously announced.
We’ve also begun concept work on new variations of body armor for UEE forces as well as civilian and outlaw/pirate individuals. The character pipeline led out of the UK office has been moving forward and gathering steam, so much so we’ve expanded our capacity for high quality concept out of the Santa Monica office! Under Star Citizen’s supervising art director Lance Powell, we aim to deliver the best characters possible with current technology.
The art team has been working closely with design this month to collaborate on the metrics and item guidelines that we’ve mentioned above. It was important with the refactor to the system to meet designs needs while also maintaining the ability for artistic creativity and uniqueness. In the end we’ve landed on a system that satisfies the needs of both groups and should provide the best pairing of visual quality and gameplay.
That rounds out the department updates for this month. The team has been working diligently to stabilize and prepare for the 1.1.X series of releases that will be starting soon. We cannot wait to share with the community all that we have in store. It is very exciting for the team to release more content quickly and to start showing off some of the entirely new gameplay that has been in development. As these modules that comprise Star Citizen are starting to come together, we hope that you too enjoy the process of watching our shared dream get built. Thank you as always for your support. None of this would be possible without this awesome community backing us up in the quest to make the BDSSE!
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Hi everyone!
February has absolutely flown by as the Austin team has been hard at work preparing multiple launches to Live and burning the midnight oil in preparation for March and April. We are looking forward to a variety of SXSW events here in Austin this month and spending time with the community who will be attending. Stay tuned for lots of exciting content coming your way in upcoming weeks and months. There are too many things to report in a summary, so here’s some real detail from the team!
Persistent Universe Team:
ART:
The month of February saw the art team in Austin get a lot of love. Our character team was featured on Around the Verse AND Meet the Devs, so everyone got to see just how awesome those guys are. Not only are they awesome people, but they are awesome artists as well! David and Billy have been polishing our characters for the upcoming FPS and Social Module releases while Megan has been working on defining the look and feel of what our NPC’s will look like on Terra Prime. We’ve also got a few new faces you’ll get to meet in the game come March. Look forward to seeing some pretty swanky styles when you land on this truly awesome landing zone.
Speaking of Terra, the legend himself Mark Skelton has been working with Behaviour to provide art direction for the ArcCorp, Terra, and Nyx landing zones. All three of these locations are extremely different from one another and it’s exciting to see the variety of locations taking shape. Mark has also been defining new architectural styles that will add even more diversity and flavor to the Persistent Universe in the future.
We’re all about props this month. With hundreds of props being created by RedHotCG, Virtuos, and our own internal artists, it is amazing to see the difference filling an environment with props makes. With the help of our artists, pretty soon our NPCs will be able to sit in chairs, drink from mugs, move crates, admire sculptures, play shuffleboard, and even mop a floor.
For every prop an NPC requires an animation to go along with it, and our animators have been working hard on implementing animations received from Imaginarium. We’ve got NPCs dancing, chilling against the wall, and chatting it up at the bar, among other things. Our animation team has also been fixing up the ship cockpits, as our recent skeleton improvements have required adjustments to the cockpits to allow for our character to fit properly. We’ve made progress in standardizing our cockpit layouts, bringing the total cockpit types down from 17 to 7! This will help us build ship cockpits more efficiently in the future.
DESIGN:
This month our artists and designers have been working on a major part of the Persistent Universe which many of you are chomping at the bit to try out: MINING! We’ve made major strides in solidifying the design for how mining will work in the PU and Tony Zurovec wrote up an awesome doc on the minutia of the occupation. If you missed the post on the website a while ago, you can find it HERE. Thanks to artwork from Ken Fairclough and Chris Olivia, as well as the concepts for the Orion created by George Hull; we are now able to visualize our first occupation to be developed by the PU team here in Austin.
Our design team has also been setting up NPC activities for the Social Module, fleshing out the shopping experience for Cubby Blast and Astro Armada, and making major updates to the Thruster Calculator, which will make it much easier to – you guessed it – calculate the thrust of our ships going forward. David Ladyman has received some major progress back from our linguists developing the alien languages for Star Citizen and is planning on running the first draft of the Vanduul language by Chris Roberts fairly soon.
ENGINEERING:
It was another great month for the PU programming team. The team braved a few days of freezing weather to ensure they did not miss a beat in working to bring you all one step closer to visiting your friends in our upcoming Social Module. And although they spent Valentine’s Days with their sweeties, many of them have reported that their hearts were elsewhere… infatuated with the awesome Star Citizen Community!
Working with our friends at Wyrmbyte we got an early iteration of our Universe Simulator up and running. Chris Roberts was “wowed” when we shared an early demo with him. The programming team also worked very closely with our DevOps team on our process manager. Never before have team members come together in such a well-oiled manner, and as a result an exciting revamp of our process manager spec is now in hand.
Progress towards the first iteration of multiplayer hangars is also looking swell. Our programmers have been working closely with our pals at Behaviour to get the first iteration of this feature up and running. While this will continue being improved upon and polished, we have reached the point where players can now visit their friends’ hangars! And if that’s not enough, we also have chat and emotes incoming. The boys here in ATX have co-mingled their efforts with Behaviour to get the base chat service in place, which they will continue to work on until we have a solid first iteration to provide to you.
Let’s make sure not forget our amazing programmers working on our AI tool sets. They have been working feverishly to create some of the most stunning AI tools out there, all in order to bring the Persistent Universe to life!
Finally, as an added bonus, the team has been able to get the ball really rolling in putting our plan together for real Player Persistence! The final week of this month we had an engineering “Meeting of the Minds” between our Austin and Santa Monica studios. March will be the month where the explosion of ideas that came out of this historic sync will begin to come to fruition.
Stay tuned for more updates next month, and until then be sure to enjoy the Star Citizen presentations at PAX East and SXSW—brought to you by the one and only Chris Roberts!
Live Operations:
QA :
Star Citizen QA has been keeping very busy this month testing releases 1.0.2 and 1.0.3. We are excited that we we’re able to include so many fixes and updates in these releases. We have also been busy testing the upcoming FPS Module. Glenn Kneale in our Manchester studio and Tyler Witkin in our Austin studio have done a great job ensuring the FPS Module is continually tested by the QA team. At the end of each day, they provide a full report on the state of the FPS Module, report any new issues found and provide relevant feedback.
With help from DevOps, a new process was created to ensure that builds available to development are stable and able to be worked on. This process will help maintain developments’ ability to continue working without being hindered by an unstable build. QA has also been testing new features such as Matthew Delanty who has been working very closely with designer Luke Pressley on a new tutorial mode. Jeffrey Pease, Andrew Hesse and Melissa Estrada continued their tests with the lobby, ships, and the Sandbox Editor respectively while Steven Brennon has continued to gather very valuable feedback from all of you guys. This feedback is incredibly helpful to the team.
We have made an important change in the Austin team: Gerard Manzanares has officially been promoted to QA Lead in the Austin studio. Gerard will be responsible for leading QA operations in Austin as well as maintaining Austin QA coordination with our counterpart QA teams around the globe.
For the month of March, QA is looking forward to PAX East, SXSW, and releasing Arena Commander 1.1.0. Some of us from our Austin studio will be present at the SXSW Gaming Expo. If you happen to see us feel free to stop by and say hi.
IT/Operations:
February marks another awesome month for the IT/Operations team. IT was able to complete a major internet upgrade for our office in Germany. This project was headed up by our UK IT Manager, Hassan with support from members of the Austin, TX IT staff. Upgrades included bringing in a much needed fiber upgrade providing them with increased bandwidth and a major improvement to their firewall and VPN capabilities. Additional work was done to improve the studio’s internal network and server infrastructure.
In Santa Monica, IT Manager, Dennis has been hard at work deploying new hardware and software upgrades to his team while at the same time evaluating and documenting numerous hardware solutions ensuring that all aspects of Star Citizen function correctly on the new technology. Throughout his testing Dennis enjoys going in game and shooting it out with anyone who’s playing in Arena Commander at the time. Keep an eye out for him.
The Austin team continued its relentless pursuit for better performance in the build/development cycle. Storage was expanded again to keep up with the furious pace of the rock star development team and this allowed IT to implement new methods of optimizing storage utilization by the build servers for performance. By poring through stacks of analytics we’re already able to see marked improvements, but, we’re still not finished. Testing of new data layouts and storage formats are showing some very interesting results.
Working in concert with the DevOps team, IT also deployed a completely revamped game delivery system which allows us to get test builds out to all the connected studios in North America and Europe in a fraction of the time it took before. What used to take hours to transfer now takes minutes.
February has been exciting but we can’t wait to get out and meet some of the citizens at PAX East and SXSW in March.
Dev Ops:
This month the Dev Ops team has been setting up the foundations of our operational infrastructure. We are working with the server engineering team to build a provisioning layer that will supply the servers centralized “brain”, a steady stream of information about the health of the services running, and a place for that “brain” (named Process Manager) to request new processes, services, or vms to be created in case some crash or population load grows. In future phases we will start making more logic based decisions on this data and also spin down services, move them around, and gather more information on them. We are also now building out our configuration management tools after spending January evaluating several options.
Dev Ops is also building out all the logging for internal, PTU and production servers so that we can react quickly to issues, and also supply other engineers with details about problems.
Work on the new launcher is progressing, and evaluation of new SSN code for an improved version of patching is also underway. Some of the team is over in our German office working with engineers there to finish rebuilding the build server. They are making excellent progress on that, and it should be ready for development use in March.
On top of all that, we have deployed 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 to PTU and Live.
Finally, we have been working with Google to learn all we can about different technologies we can use to make sure that the Star Citizen architecture is as scalable and dynamic as we possibly can make it. Our goal is to minimize player impact and maximize uptime. The team is looking forward to the extremely busy month of March with PAX and SXSW!
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DESIGN
Another very busy month on Star Citizen and Squadron 42. We are starting to see the S42 campaign coming together well, with lots of focus on the motion capture shoot that is about to happen at Imaginarium Studios. A lot of the work has been focused on the correct prop sizes so the actors can interact with our digital assets in a believable way. You would be amazed at the amount of planning that has to go into make sure everything is set up correctly for the shoot. Chris will be over in the UK to direct the performance capture for our cut-scenes, so we are making every effort to give them all the relevant information needed to make the scenes work well.
As you will all probably know, you begin the S42 campaign flying off the Idris Frigate; we got our grey-box version populated with AI this month to see how it was working as an interstitial HUB and once we added a few extra crew we came up with something that felt really satisfying and believable. Once the conversation system can be implemented we feel it will really be something special. Obviously we made good progress on the rest of the chapters and with involvement from the Frankfurt team, who are now coming online, we are starting craft some of the scenarios into immersive and fun gameplay sections. It’s been really helpful to get a fresh perspective from Todd and his design team.
As for Arena Commander, we are making good progress on the tutorial element, which we hope to release very soon. The leaderboards now have the addition of ‘Rating’, and multiplayer ‘Free-Flight’ is working well. We have focused on improving the ‘holo-table’ usability and functionality, with lots of good suggestions from the community being worked on. Lastly, we created a simple spawning map as a ‘stress-test’ for the Devs to work with.
All in all, another good month in design with good progress being made in all areas. Thanks again for making all this possible!
ENGINEERING
February in the North West of the UK and, not to pander to stereotypes, it’s wet, cold, grey and miserable. So no excuse for not cracking on with Arena Commander and Squadron 42 development then!
With the 1.1.0 release of Arena Commander just around the corner that has been a big focus for us. There are a couple of new modes which we’ve been developing here in the UK. The first is the new tutorial system to help ease the new recruits into playing what can be quite a complicated flight system. This required getting the AI “teacher” pilot to be able to perform the different maneuvers they’re teaching the player very precisely, being able to make sure the player is following correctly, and being able to time events very accurately. It’s can be surprisingly fiddly. The second is the multiplayer free flight, which will allow multiple people to hang out without having to engage in a game. Although in some ways it was quite straightforward to set up – after all we’ve got the other multiplayer modes already – there are some things you can do in freeplay that you can’t in the other modes which gives it some different challenges. It’s also going to be the first time we show off the new take-off and landing system.
Now the levels for Squadron 42 are starting to come together we’re in a position where we’ve started getting the game flow into our single player campaign and make it feel more like a game rather than just a collection of levels. At the basic level you go from one part of the game to the next, like what happens when you select “New Game”, or if you die in a mission, saving your progress, or loading back in again and so forth. The main challenge is the saving and loading systems, especially with a game as complicated as the one we’re creating, and will no doubt create lots and lots of bugs as QA try and break the system! Obviously the CryEngine has a lot of the game saving and loading already implemented on the FPS side, but with all the new functionality (and small things like space combat!) there are a lot of new systems that will need fixing up.
Other than that it’s continued work on all the other mechanics. The conversation system is coming along nicely, along with our StoryForge script writing tool. It’s very much in the iteration stage where we’re coming up with lots of different things to try and make it feel as natural as possible, which is important for the immersion. For example, getting the player to realize somebody wants to talk to you, not with a speech bubble over their head, but by their body language. Getting that right is a challenge. Too subtle and you won’t notice, too much and it’ll just look weird. And starting a conversation maybe by how you then interact with that character, rather than having to press a key, without it feeling clumsy. The hard work is not so much getting the initial system working, but the time and effort it takes to refine it with the combined efforts of the animators, script writers, designers, and engineers to get it to feel just right.
ART
Concept
Its been on all fronts again. Characters, ship interiors, ship exteriors, props, you name it – we seem to have touched it all this month! Hiring? Yes – always, we are staffing up our FPS weapons team
Environment Team – Ian
This month has seen the Shubin Interstellar interior building set hit Greybox complete, which means all the building components have a good amount of mesh detail and are looking lovely. We’ve also been building the PBR master shader library for this set – plastics, metals, glass etc, and applying them to an established beautification corner. This is where we take a corner of a level up to final art so that the Art Director can see a good representation of how the finished set will look. A modular pass has also been done on the exterior of Shubin to enable the design team to create other space station facilities.
Ship Team – Bjorn
This month, the Foundry 42 ship is hard at work finalizing 3 Ships, making them ready for either Hangar or Arena Commander!!
On top of that, we are very excited to release our first pass of our new damage prototype
which will hopefully impress you guys. It’s a completely new approach on how we handle damage for ships, mainly to future proof ourselves, improve memory usage, and give you guys more eye candy to look at when you shoot our ships to smithereens.
This is the first iteration, and is still a work in progress, but the results are already very satisfying!
The Gladius is being prepared for flight ready state. Neil is finalizing the art work, as well as implementing all the needed changes to have it working with the new damage prototype.
Matt has been working hard on the Gladiator, which will also feature the new damage model!
Then we also have the long awaited hangar release of the Retaliator!
I know you guys have been waiting for this one for a while, and you won’t be disappointed!
Nathan, Jay and Phil have been working hard to get this ship ready for you guys, pulling long nights to make sure everything is top notch!
Once we finalized these ships, there is no rest for the ship team at F42. We are jumping straight into cap ship production and the final production of the Starfarer, Idris, and Javelin. This will be a very complex production , so please bear with us on these massive ships!
After that we are going to focus on a full Vanduul Fleet in addition to a revamp of the Bengal Carrier to give you guys what you want.. the best D*mn space sim ever!
Characters:
Character pipeline – it’s a long and complicated road! Sculpting, crafting, chiseling, ripping, photographing, scanning, reworking – and that’s just one for one benchmark character.
VFX:
The VFX team had a great summit. All the team members met here in Manchester to further define the way forward for SC effects, Besides that there have been massive improvements in the damage system, coupled with some tricky techniques developed by the ship guys. The damaged ships are really starting to look cool and be efficient. Arena Commander has also received additional VFX as well as polishing the ones already in place.
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Design
Since we’ve already posted more than enough words on this site this month, such as our mobiGlas Deep Dive, here’s a condensed report for BHVR design team to balance it out.
The design team was implicated in the UI summit. Some answers were found and the attack plan was refined.
Lots of effort was put towards the social module. Shops were populated, maps were refined, elevators were fixed, bar glasses were cleaned.
Even more effort was put towards planetside. Designers were busy with working on paper design, whiteboxing, and general support for more and more locations.
The mobiGlas deep dive article was written and posted. Hope you liked it! If you haven’t seen it I assure you it’s worth your while.
And last but not least, some of us got the chance to participate in our first Star Citizen panel for IGDA Montreal! It was a great experience and we got to meet some of the fans, which is always an honor for us! You can find out more info here!
Art
This is what art was up to this month:
We did a quick optimization pass on Terra to make sure that our work stays clean during the whole creation process. We began working on the paper layout for the additional Terra sectors and polished some of the old shops while optimizing the performance for each.
ArcCorp was revisited to merge new shops, polish some of the visuals, and to make sure that the frame rate is stable.
Nyx’s paper layout and WhiteBox was finished.
Finally, we spent some time dressing a tutorial map.
Concept-wise, we’ve been refining certain key areas of Levsky, the former mining colony based in the Nyx system, such as the Grand Barter, which is the equivalent of the TDD for this location and visually represented as a flea market.
We also worked on a prefab system that QV Planet Services used to use when they were trying to mine the asteroid. It’s composed of platforms that hook up into the rocky tunnels with hydraulic columns to support the heavy ceilings, beams, clamps, etc…
UI
This month Behaviour hosted a UI summit with invitees travelling from Austin, LA, Denver, and UK . What an experience! It was great to finally get everyone in the same room to talk about UI across the entire game. Exciting stuff!
We also continued to work on chat UI, contact list, multiplayer hangar UI, various logo design tasks, decals, and the pause screen also got some love.
Additionally we worked on mock-ups for a new and improved holotable experience, and started work on branding the mobiGlas depending on which shop you are visiting.
Programming
This month we’ve put a lot of effort into solidifying the multiplayer experience. Specifically, we’ve added UI Elements to provide more guidance and feedback to the players regarding the whole “Invite a friend to my Hangar” process. We’ve also greatly improved the stability of the actual multiplayer hangar as well as looking into the multiplayer planetside experience. A good deal of time was also spent on the chat implementation which is starting to look pretty good, and soon will be ready for an eventual release. We’ve also gotten back to working, ever so slightly, on the mobiGlas in order to fine tune the shopping experience that we hope to demo fairly soon.
You should soon be able to get your hands on a few changes to the holotable including control customization. Your favorite interactive gadget should be a bit easier to use with the addition of automatic filtering and sorting. As far as control customization is concerned, you should have more control than ever on controlling continuous inputs with the addition of a new curve editing tool. This tool will allow you to easily remap how the input should affect specific control options.
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How’s it going Citizens? Here at IllFonic we’ve been working feverishly to get the FPS module in a good state for showing at PAX East. This has been quite the challenge as a few new things came online recently which introduced quite a few new bugs that required a slew of items and animations to be reworked. Luckily, we had Mr. Bender from CIG Santa Monica on site to help out on the animation side of things. He has been instrumental in getting all of the new animations squared away with our local team. Beyond that, he came during the worst snow we’ve had in over a year, so… Who knows? He might even become a local!
Engineering
Squashing bugs, bugs, and more bugs. The engineers have also been polishing the zero-g push & pull system, which has been a challenge, but is coming along nicely. A large amount of work has been done on the HUD and UI, including elements to support the FPS game modes. Lastly, programmers have also been supporting the animation team, which has been quite a bit since most of the mechanics are driven by the animation system.
Art
Squashing bugs, bugs, and more bugs. The art team has also been putting the final touches in terms of lighting and performance tweaking on the levels that will be shown at PAX East and release with the module. Final models were done on our new weapons and gadgets, and material work for these models is now under way.
Animation
Boy oh boy have these guys been busy. Over the last month they have been hooking up all of the new animations with the new rig. This literally means that every animation needs to be re-targeted and exported so it’s quite a bit of work. Steve Bender has been here to help out and make sure that everything looks great in both 1st person and 3rd person perspectives. They have also been busy squashing bugs, bugs, and more bugs.
Design
Squashing bugs, bugs, and more bugs. The designers have also been focused on tweaking weapon balance, the aiming model, and play-testing the levels. In addition to the work being done for PAX, progress continues on the new game modes and maps that will be coming after the initial release of the FPS module.
VFX
On the VFX side, new visual effects were created for the grappling device while all other weapon FX were revisited and polished up. Everybody is happy with how they are looking now and we hope all of you Citizens will enjoy them too.
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Greetings Citizens,
It’s been a busy and exciting month for us here in Montreal. It turns out that coding does indeed keep you warm… So here’s a quick look at what we’ve been doing this February.
The Homepage
The end of last year was marked with a rework of the website’s homepage. Like we announced then, this was only the first step of the global rework we’ve undertaken : this month saw the arrival of step “1.5” with the new Fly Now flow, a quick and easy way to start with the project and get going fast. Its success and the recent increase in new backers show just how much newcomers were in need of some guidance, and we’d like to welcome the (over) 10,000 new backers who joined the community this February.
We’ve taken quite some time to rework the homepage itself. RSI is quite unique in the amount of content produced by Cloud Imperium as a whole, and this new version will aim at giving comm-links a better and clearer layout. At the same time we’re working on a better hub for comm-links themselves, with a focus on series and the search engine for comm-links as a whole.
The Community Hub
These steps will be completed by the new Community Hub that went through its design phase in February. As we announced previously, this new Hub’s mission is to give, at a glance, a broad sense of how the Star Citizen Community lives and breathes. It comes with a set of new tools and functionality that will put your involvement to the test: all fans will get a chance to show their own vision of the project through what will essentially be your hub.
New Storefront
Soon, you’ll be able to use credits earned in Arena Commander to try out any ships or ship components you don’t yet have. This is the third storefront we’re giving you (after the Pledge Store and Voyager Direct), and of course many aspects of the website are impacted : you’ll be able to manage your gear and the credits you earn directly in the website from the My Account section, and this is now the second interface we’ve set up that is being fed directly from the game servers (the first being the Leaderboards a few months back).
The Orion Minigame
Most of you have seen the amazing design that is the RSI Orion mining platform. We took this chance to bring you another minigame (the Carrack had seen the first one) which explored space mining in the Star Citizen universe. We plan to have a minigames section in the site very soon if you’d like to replay it.
What’s next
February was heavy on the design side of Turbulent, and now’s the time to implement all that and let you experience it. All while we’re still working on the highly anticipated Starmap. Our current task is to set up a thorough user interface that will do justice to the density and complexity of data we’re plugging into. More on that soon… plus a few surprises along the way.
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February has been quite a heavy planning month for Moon Collider. With the Cloud Imperium Frankfurt studio taking on some new members focused on FPS and AI, we spent quite a bit of time helping them get up to speed with the current state of things, figuring out new processes, and reworking our roadmap for features that we will be delivering for the various modules this year.
A lot of our time gets spent in planning and communication, and as you can imagine, with quite a small team here in Edinburgh that can have quite an impact on the amount of time we have to work on cool features. So the addition of Todd Papy and Francesco Roccucci means more dedicated resources at Cloud Imperium to help with the very difficult job of planning and prioritizing all of the AI features needed by the different Star Citizen modules.
We’re also expecting Francesco and Chris Nolan, both veteran AI behavior designers, to help get our FPS character behaviors up to an awesome level of polish over the coming months. Getting character combat behaviors right can be really time consuming, so we’re thrilled to have such talented people added to the Cloud Imperium team.
So, while we got a bit less engineering work done this month than we normally do, we think these additional AI resources for Star Citizen are going to make a huge difference in the coming months, allowing us to deliver higher quality AI faster, and that’s good news for all of us!
Design
We had a brief AI summit in Manchester this month to get Todd, Francesco and Chris up to speed on the current state of the AI. During that time we also took the opportunity to have discussions with designers for Squadron 42 and Arena Commander to figure out which AI features they’re needing most. It’s always really rewarding to sit down in the same room with designers and play through a level to see what is and isn’t working from their point of view.
Following the summit we had Francesco visit our Edinburgh office for several days for a lot of discussions about our feature roadmap and how best to prioritize across the different modules. This was also an important opportunity to help him get an in-depth understanding of our Kythera AI framework so that he will be able to help providing support to the rest of the Cloud Imperium team.
A lot of specific design discussions happened to look at ways to improve some areas of our AI framework, such as our behavior tree and higher level tasks systems; improvements to our cover system and how to streamline the workflow for level designers when setting up new areas; how to link different parts of a level together to allow AI to navigate with things like ladders or climbing up and jumping down; and a lot more. Expect to hear more about these features as we move from design to implementation over the next few months.
Engineering
Replacing our prototype smart object system with the more fully featured Usables system has been a big focus since the start of the year, and this month we got the first version of the new system into the hands of designers. The feedback so far has been good and you will be seeing the first results of this in the upcoming Social Module. Whenever you see NPCs interacting with objects in the world, that’s the Usables system in action, so keep an eye out for it!
Speaking of the Social Module, we’ve also been doing some work on improving the performance of our AI code to allow huge numbers of characters to be active at once while still retaining a good framerate. We did a bunch of profiling to see where the slowest parts of the code were, and luckily we’ve had a few easy wins so far that gave some pretty nice performance gains. It’s still early days for the persistent universe so we expect to be doing a lot more of this in the future as features progress, but for programmers, it’s always a joy to make a change to the code and see those milliseconds go down rather than up!
We’ve been making various improvements and doing fixes for Arena Commander 1.1, with a particular focus on the upcoming tutorial. Because of the semi-scripted nature of a tutorial, we’ve found designers needing to do things with ships that they haven’t had to do previously, and so we did some work to allow the designers to get the results they were after. For example, you’d think that if you’ve got well tuned AI flight behavior for ship to ship combat, then just making a ship fly slowly inside a hangar would be a piece of cake, right? Well, it turns out that AI tuned for high speed evasive maneuvers doesn’t do so well trying to fly really slow in a confined space, at least not without a bit of persuading.
For the tutorial, we also found that we needed to implement some special attack modes for ships that need to do something very specific in order to teach the player how to perform certain actions. So for example, we created a behavior that makes a ship just sit on the spot and aim at the player’s ship, and another that makes the AI fire a single missile. It’s not something you’d want to see in a frantic session of Vanduul Swarm, but in a tutorial context it’s just what you need.
We’re quite happy with what the ships are now able to do in the AC 1.1 tutorial, and we think the community are really going to enjoy this release.
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Hello everybody! Assistant Community Manager Will here to bring you this month’s Community Report! February has been quite busy for the Communiteam. Based on your feedback we have continued to tweak all of our weekly shows, and have even created an entirely new one! We’ve also introduced new initiatives such as our #HelpTheHerald campaign. We are always listening to your feedback and appreciate it as we continue to try new things.
Shows
Each episode of Around the Verse we aim to try new things to improve the show. This month we changed our News from Around the Verse segment to include each studio discussing their weekly contributions. In addition, we’ve added two new segments titled Sandi Goes to Flight School and Empire Report. We are happy that these have been received well and we plan on making both Empire Report and Sandi Goes to Flight School re-occurring segments.
In our weekly stream, Reverse the Verse, we realized that our discussions focused on the Santa Monica team which wasn’t fair to our other offices. So we’ve now integrated the Austin and UK offices to take turns appearing on the show. This has led to a more diverse set of questions and we are happy to bring a new element to the stream.
Don’t worry, we didn’t forget 10 for the Chairman! We realized that you enjoyed seeing the images during our news segment in Around the Verse, so we’ve integrated that format into Chris’ answers. Additionally, the Sneak Peek segment in Around the Verse is a fan favorite so we’ve doubled our effort and we are proud to say that 10FTC now features a sneak peek as well.
This month we also debuted Wonderful World of Star Citizen. Hosted by the community’s own Disco Lando, this monthly show highlights videos, podcasts, and other amazing creations from the community. Feedback for the first episode has exceeded our expectations and we are certain that you will all enjoy the next episode.
Fan Videos
February has been an amazing month for fan videos. FiendishFeather has begun a new series titled Bulkheads. Inspired from the popular Red vs. Blue series, Bulkheads will feature two hapless citizens as the traverse the verse. While a bit sillier than his popular pirate video Pieces of Eight, we can’t wait to watch this series unfold.
Yearsonehundred, the creator of the original Imagine trailer, has returned and once again blown us away with his new video, The Fighter Pilot. The first entry in his new Star Citizen Career video series, The Fighter Pilot is a collaboration between multiple community members, including our favorite voice actor Trendane and musical guru Pedro Camacho. At less than one and a half minutes, this video is a must see for any Star Citizen out there.
February was quite a busy month for us, but we have much more planned for you all in March. We value your feedback and we continue use it to get better each and every week. Thanks and we’ll see you next month!
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Chris Roberts answers your questions about Star Citizen in the latest edition of Ten for the Chairman! Chris answers ten questions chosen from development subscribers in each show. Want your question considered? Learn more about subscriptions here.
3:09 – Org recruiting NPCs. 5:29 – NPCs using different loadouts. 6:45 – Traveling without the quantum drive. 8:21 – Left helpless in space. 9:22 – Performance changes in engine. 12:10 – Replay Squadron 42 missions. 12:37 – Other handheld weapons. 14:29 – Resources respawn in the PU. 16:13 – NPC & Human scanning. 16:59 – 64-bit transition update.
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Chris Roberts answers your questions about Star Citizen in the latest edition of Ten for the Chairman! Chris answers ten questions chosen from development subscribers in each show. Want your question considered? Learn more about subscriptions here.
3:09 – Org recruiting NPCs. 5:29 – NPCs using different loadouts. 6:45 – Traveling without the quantum drive. 8:21 – Left helpless in space. 9:22 – Performance changes in engine. 12:10 – Replay Squadron 42 missions. 12:37 – Other handheld weapons. 14:29 – Resources respawn in the PU. 16:13 – NPC & Human scanning. 16:59 – 64-bit transition update.
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As Chris mentioned in his last Letter from the Chairman, we’re doubling down on the community content as we get closer and closer to launch. While we understand you might not be able to catch everything the first time, we’ve created a handy cheat sheet of all of the content released throughout the week. All you “completionists” will be able to check back every Saturday for a weekly roundup of everything Star Citizen…
And one last friendly reminder that the Orion is available for sale until Monday, March 2nd. If you want RSI’s premier mining ship, you can check it out HERE.
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As Chris mentioned in his last Letter from the Chairman, we’re doubling down on the community content as we get closer and closer to launch. While we understand you might not be able to catch everything the first time, we’ve created a handy cheat sheet of all of the content released throughout the week. All you “completionists” will be able to check back every Saturday for a weekly roundup of everything Star Citizen…
And one last friendly reminder that the Orion is available for sale until Monday, March 2nd. If you want RSI’s premier mining ship, you can check it out HERE.
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As Chris mentioned in his last Letter from the Chairman, we’re doubling down on the community content as we get closer and closer to launch. While we understand you might not be able to catch everything the first time, we’ve created a handy cheat sheet of all of the content released throughout the week. All you “completionists” will be able to check back every Saturday for a weekly roundup of everything Star Citizen…
And one last friendly reminder that the Orion is available for sale until Monday, March 2nd. If you want RSI’s premier mining ship, you can check it out HERE.
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Greetings Citizens,
It looks like the Orion is a hit! We’ve reviewed feedback from the Orion concept launch last week and have asked concept artist George Hull to update the crew cabin with something that will be easier to ‘fly’ in the ‘verse. The new concepts, created today, are available for review in this post. Do you like this version, or do you prefer the offset cabin? Let us know in the comments!
If you’re interested in pledging for an Orion during the concept sale, you can learn more here. Act fast: the sale ends Monday!
A slight issue has showed up today when I started packing up things for 4.88.1. This issue is mostly due to cloudflare and how that matter was fixed to ensure nobody was kept out.
Long story short, making sure everyone is upgraded properly would be very complicated as we have users that have the game installed but suffer of various issues that have been adressed. The possibilities of things blowing up due to users using the new installer and users still using the old one with upgrading would make it extremely complicated to be efficent in any way.
This is why we will have to release 4.88.1 as a new installer. It will not be released through the patch system. Everyone will have to download the new installer and proceed with a new installation. Thankfully this is the only time we will have to do this, as it is due to extremely specific circumstances.
Please note that 4.88.1 is NOT released yet. We will let you know when it is.
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In my last letter, I announced that we are moving away from the traditional stretch goals in favor of spending more time diving into how Star Citizen will work. The design post on the basic mechanics of mining in Star Citizen is a great example of this. Mining and the reveal of the Orion are the result of Star Citizen’s unique synergy. The ship you see was visualized by George Hull, a Hollywood artist who has worked on everything from The Matrix to Transformers to Chappie… for a role developed in Austin, Texas by Tony Zurovec and the Persistent Universe team. I’ve often spoken about my desire to blend the techniques developed for filmmaking with the best aspects of traditional game design (something that goes back to my Wing Commander days), and you are seeing the result here. I’m pleased with both the system and the ship, and can’t wait to see both working in Star Citizen.
At CitizenCon, we talked about how we would like to double down on community content in 2015. This is something I believe in because it means better connecting backers to the game you’re making possible. In the last twenty four hours, you’ve seen the reveal of the RSI Orion, our design for mining in the persistent universe, a video round table from concept artists in Austin, an extended discussion of REC with Travis and Calix, a poll and first look at the Star Citizen box art and an Inside CIG on the recent mocap shoot at Imaginarium! Later tonight, we’ll have a new edition of Jump Point for our loyal subscribers. Tonight’s edition focuses on much of the planet side work being done in Austin and Montreal… and next month will be the long-awaited Retaliator issue!
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What I would really like to talk about today is what an exciting time this is in Star Citizen’s development. Building our universe is already the most creatively satisfying thing I’ve ever done. But the coming months are going to be something else. Without sharing internal target dates, I will tell you that we are entering into the tightest schedule we’ve ever had for public releases. In short order, you will see Arena Commander 1.1 (now with REC!), the FPS module and the so-called ‘social module,’ our first foray into the persistent universe. We’ve talked a lot about how Star Citizen will come together from disparate pieces over the past year, and we are now entering into when that happens. I can’t express how excited I am. Will there be unforeseen issues, bugs to squash and things to balance? Yes! …but I know that I have an amazing development team AND the best community ever assembled behind me. Stay tuned: it’s going to be big!
I’d also like to take a moment to thank all of the backers who have been helping with Arena Commander’s testing. We have thousands of players brave enough to try PTU releases which has helped the QA team immensely; our public patches are now more stable on release and we are able to focus more effort on balancing. A special credit for those who helped us stress test the servers earlier in the week; we discovered and fixed a bug that we would have otherwise not seen. We’re going to try again this next week, so tune in Monday, February 23rd at 1 PM PST when hopefully you’ll have a better chance of battling members of the dev team!
Backing and playing aren’t the only ways to help determine Star Citizen’s future, though. Your support of the game, your sharing it with others and spreading the word is what’s making this endeavor possible. I’d like to share the latest from years1hundred in this space. You may remember him as the creator of the original Imagine trailer, and his latest work is just as good. We’ve been talking internally about creating a “Career” campaign for Star Citizen when the Persistent Universe launches and we have enough gameplay footage to showcase the various roles you can play as it’s a great way to highlight the promise of Star Citizen’s open universe. Years1hundred (Simon Peña) must have been reading our mind! It’s always a great feeling to see proof that backers understand the possibility behind Star Citizen just like the team and I do.
Speaking of fan videos, a number of backers have been disappointed that we no longer highlight them on Around the Verse. To that end, we’ve asked Jared Huckaby, who you may know as Disco Lando, to put together a sort of ‘Talk Soup’ for Star Citizen fan videos. The pilot of Wonderful World of Star Citizen will run next week; it’s an irreverent look at the Star Citizen community FROM the Star Citizen community, and I’m eager to see it evolve the same way as our other productions. The backers who put so much blood, sweat and tears into supporting the game need a platform, and we’re going to build one. Additionally, the upcoming Community Hub at the RSI site will allow us to highlight fan videos, streams, art, ship designs and more… and you’ll be seeing more information on that soon.
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Let’s talk events! Everyone on the team who attended last month’s Town Hall has expressed how energized they were from being able to interact with backers. We have plenty of upcoming events, including PAX East and the SXSW Interactive closing party. Meeting members of the community and talking to them about their desires and dreams for Star Citizen keeps us going through the toughest bugs and design challenges. I’m happy to announce here that at PAX East in Boston you will get your first chance to play the First Person Shooter’s zero-gravity Battlesphere mode. We’ll have demo machines up and running at the event, so please consider joining us. You can learn more here.
Finally, I know that everyone is expecting me to talk more about Rental Equipment Credits. I took part in the heated discussion over the weekend and one of our priorities this week was clarifying some of the confusion about the system. I don’t have much to add right now, but I do want to stress: we asked for your feedback because we genuinely wanted it. A sincere thank you to everyone who provided that feedback. I’ll stress: we’re going to create a system that’s fun, not one that hurts players. Like everything else in Star Citizen, we will balance and expand our system to that goal once it launches until it meets our vision, and we will not settle for less.
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I will close with the traditional thank you. There’s no million dollar milestone being celebrated, but there doesn’t have to be. The Star Citizen community does things every day that deserve our thanks. From testing the game to supporting the team to rallying for us to succeed (and telling us when we’re wrong!) this game has your DNA through and through. Thank you for making it possible. We have a hard few months ahead of us on the team, but it’s the best work in the world. And after that, we can look forward to a major motion capture shoot at which Squadron 42’s script will finally become a reality! You in the community will be the first to share in all of this.
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The RSI Orion is mankind’s premiere spatial mining platform, fully compatible with all Mark IV Remote Mining Devices, and featuring an onboard refinery and a system of saddlebag-class storage units.
For advanced mining operations, the RSI Orion is second to none. The Orion carries a crew of up to six, responsible for flight operations, engineering and manning both turrets and pre-installed drone interfaces.
Onboard accommodations, while industrial in style, support all crew for extended duration mining runs. A genuine complete mining solution, a single Orion can locate, identify and extract lucrative ores, or it can be paired with explorers and transports to form the centerpiece of a larger-scale mining operation! Get to the core of the matter with the all-new RSI Orion.
Read more about Mining in Star Citizen in an exclusive in-depth design post by Tony Zurovec!
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Known specifications
LENGTH
170m
BEAM
50m
HEIGHT
50m
NULL-CARGO MASS
5,400,000 Kg *
CARGO CAPACITY
600 standard cargo units (SCU)
BULK ORE CAPACITY
16,288 SCU
MAX CREW
6 persons
MAX POWER PLANT
6
FACTORY POWER PLANT
Coming Soon
MAX ENGINE (PRIMARY THRUSTER)
4x TR6
FACTORY ENGINE
Coming Soon
MANEUVERING THRUSTERS
12x TR3
MAX SHIELD
6
SHIELD
Coming Soon
CLASS-4
4 x Size 4 – Tractor Beam
CLASS-4
4 x Size 1 – Flak Guns
CLASS-1
Size 6 Mining Laser
All specifications are subject to change for game balancing.
Unladen. The Orion’s mass will significantly increase when carrying ore. Additionally, please note that mass data for large ships are currently inaccurate in comparison to smaller craft. The Orion’s mass represents our first attempt at a more scientific method for determining mass which will be applied to all large spacecrafts upon review by the design team.
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Ore Rings concept animation
Concept Sale ends March 2nd
The Orion is being offered for the first time as a limited concept sale. This means that the ship design meets our specifications, but it is not yet ready to display in your Hangar or to fight in Arena Commander. The sale includes Lifetime Insurance on the ship hull and a pair of decorative items for your Hangar. A future patch will add a Orion poster and then once the in-game model is finished you will also be given an in-game Orion 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 Monday March 2nd. You can also view a detail of the Orion in the Holo Viewer in the Tech Overview of the ship page!
We have a mini-game related to this concept sale that will be released for everyone to play during the sale. Stay tuned for when it goes live!
Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. All of these ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game. Additionally, 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.
It’s always a great feeling to see proof that backers understand the possibility behind Star Citizen just like the team and I do.