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What exciting new changes will come to Arena Commander later this year? In this episode of Inside Star Citizen, we'll explore what our newly formed Arena Commander Feature team has been working on to give this dogfighting module some much-needed TLC.
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Welcome to January’s PU Monthly Report. Although the upcoming patch is still being tested and tweaked in the Persistent Test Universe (PTU), most teams began the year moving on from their work on Alpha 3.18. From extensive AI updates to new vehicles, locations, and features, read on for everything done in pursuit of 2023’s extensive content schedule.
AI (Features)
The AI Features team started the year enabling AI characters to throw grenades. This involved work in multiple areas, including new logic for when to throw grenades to ensure a challenge without overwhelming the player, parabola collision checking to ensure the grenade lands correctly, and animation so that the AI looks correct when throwing.
January also saw the implementation of ‘attack’ and ‘defend’ areas, which can be assigned to AI characters to direct and control fighting in specific ways. On the most basic level, the defend area limits where NPCs are positioned when fighting, whereas the attack area limits where they target. When assigned either area, NPCs will prepare to fight by equipping their weapons and taking ready stances before moving to the area on high alert (so perception happens quickly and perception reactions are skipped). When defending, AI will move to a cover point inside the area and defensively peek out. When attacking, they will use the existing investigate behavior to search for hostile forces.
“The attack area is great for building pressure on the player, whereas the defend area can provide the player with a tough challenge as AI are hunkered down and ready to fight. The implementation of this feature involved reusing existing systems in new ways - changing the tactical queries (positional and target selection) to take into consideration the attack or defend area that the AI may have.” AI Team
AI (Tech)
Late last year, AI Tech completed the first iteration of NPCs driving ground vehicles. Last month, they fixed several related bugs as more designers began using the feature.
They also progressed with the feature that enables NPCs to use transit systems (like elevators) and move between platforms. This time, they focused on NPCs using trains to move between locations. This required exposing new functionality on the transit manager and more complex behaviors before and during transit. New functionality includes providing more information about the gateways at specific destinations and information about carriages, such as time spent at a destination and time until arrival.
On the locomotion side, the team added further support for ‘soft stops’ and separated them from ‘harsh stops.’ A soft stop means that an NPC will choose the best animation for stopping even if it will overshoot its destination, while a harsh stop will attempt to stop immediately. Locomotion support was also given for bug fixing and alien-creature movement.
For the Subsumption Apollo tool, the team progressed with implementing feedback and bug fixing. They also added new functionality to the Subsumption mastergraph, making it possible to have functions on top of transitions to determine whether a state transition can be done.
The Usable Coordinator was also completed, which allows the designers to specify a selection of usables for NPCs in specific areas and prioritize the order of selection.
The feature that allows NPCs to perceive threats through audio and visual stimuli and react to hostile vehicles was completed. In a related area, further updates were made to the behavior that enables NPCs reacting to stimuli to enter combat.
AI Tech started work on two new features: One allows overrides for navigation mesh generation so that the team can create navigation meshes for specific agents in narrow areas. For example, this will enable NPCs to traverse areas where only a crouched state is possible, such as vents and underfloor areas.
The second feature enables the team to mark areas with increased navigation cost, which will influence the path chosen by NPCs. This will be used to create areas that NPCs should avoid, like areas with fire, or to encourage them to travel on specific areas, like a sidewalk.
They also supported Alpha 3.18 and allocated time to tech debt to update some of the AI system’s functionalities.
AI (Vehicles Features)
The Vehicle Feature team focused on space combat AI improvements in January. The intent is to have combat AI behave in a more dynamic way that encourages players to move and explore the various ship mechanics. This involved breaking the AI into different well-defined trees, which will help players to identify what kind of enemies they’re up against. These improvements also allow the easier integration of more maneuvers to further increase the skill level and interest of higher-level ships.
Similarly, AI Vehicle Features worked on a new behavior logic to deliver improved atmospheric flight combat. This is intended to work with the ‘control surface’ feature being developed by the Vehicle Feature team and will lead to AI ships tailing and chasing players to get behind them, flying more like a plane when appropriate.
Animation
Alongside embedded work for the various feature teams, facial animations were developed for emotes and background characters, such as the female vendor.
Art (Characters)
In January, the Character Art team began production of the ‘frontier environmental wear’ costumes and polished the frontier undersuit.
Character Concept progressed with concept exploration for the Rough and Ready gang, fauna, and the Dusters faction.
Art (Ships)
In the UK, the Art team continued work on the ‘small ship’ mentioned in last month’s report, with certain elements reaching LOD0-complete. They also began exploring ideas for a variant.
The Argo SRV progressed through final art. Final polish is currently underway on the exterior before the LOD and damage passes begin. The interior continued through final art and received a LOD pass.
Development of the Crusader Spirit continued, which passed its whitebox review, with the A1 variant moving into the greybox phase.
“The exterior is shaping up nicely with the key forms all established and all major elements, like landing gear and VTOLs, resolved. The interior is coming along and we’re very pleased with the space so far, though there are a few visual changes we’d like to make to the doorways to emphasize Crusader’s visual language.” Ship Team
A previously unannounced ground vehicle passed its greybox sanity review before the artwork progressed to LOD0. The exterior is almost finalized, only requiring additional detail, while the interior is progressing well.
The US team completed art whitebox for another in-production vehicle, which was then passed to the Systems Design team.
Greybox began on another ship. Half the team focused on the main fuselage geometry, while the other prototyped a new way to enter and exit the ship.
Finally for Ships, an all-new vehicle entered greybox, and a new set of alien paints was created for a future release.
Community also supported the return of the Siege of Orison Dynamic Event with an in-depth guide.
Thoughout January, Community continued to work on the "Events Feature" which is a new section coming to the Community Hub next week. They also worked closely with Turbulent on other exciting additions such as text posts, bug fixes, etc.
They are planning out new Community Events as well, coming to a bar near you.
Also in January, Community welcomed a new bilingual Community Manager to the LA office, and we're excited to introduce them soon.
Engine
In January, the Physics team's schedule was dominated by Alpha 3.18 bug fixing and support. Aside from this, triangle vertex and normal transforms for physics triangle meshes were rewritten to use SSE/AVX, which saves 30% of the cost. Furthermore, the physicalization method for ropes can now be chosen per rope entity.
On the renderer, various optimizations were implemented into Gen12 (partly based on telemetry gathered during Alpha 3.18 PTU). Among other things, this included performance improvements for transient lists recording draw requests, a special submission for scene rendering with reduced thread synchronization, and a reduction of calls into the OS for general multi-threading purposes. Additionally, renderer initialization was refactored to prepare for Vulkan. Last month's Gen12 support for particle refraction now also works as intended.
On the core engine, further improvements were made to the remote shader compiler. Last month's work on adding support for huge pages was rolled out internally. Huge pages are now also used within the low-level memory allocator (JeMalloc). To further reduce the executable size of the Linux DGS, the ‘gold linker’ is now utilized to fold identical functions and various compiler-generated data inside binaries. Page heap is now also supported for entities, which use a special allocator, to make debugging memory corruptions easier. Lastly, more work was done to support v2 of the pk4 files introduced at the end of last year in the internal development tools.
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Features (Arena Commander)
Throughout January, the team focused on polishing the new Arena Commander frontend and racing tracks, including placing the New Horizon Speedway tracks above a new planet, Green III of the Ellis System. Some adjustments were also made to the racetracks themselves to suit the new earth-like atmosphere. The team also experimented with new loadout selection previews on the frontend alongside polishing its style and flow.
Work continued on the Classic Race refactor, with the first version of the new Race Manager and checkpoint setups being tested and feedback addressed. Optimizations and additions, such as splits, qualifying, and new analytic data, were made alongside improvements to time accuracy. The refactors of both the Rounds and Spawning modules continued across Arena Commander and Star Marine. This refactor sees the code drastically improved and brought up to current standards while providing more modularity for new features. It also tackles some of the problem areas that prevented expansion of the old systems, such as separating unintended connections to PU characters, validating loadouts, and adding the ability to change the ship selection while in-game.
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Features (Characters & Weapons)
Last month, the Features team continued to support the upcoming patch release with critical bug fixes, specifically issues relating to the cargo system, tractor beam, and inventory. They fixed several client and server crashes too.
They also worked on the player skills feature. This tracks certain player activities and actions with minimal hooks into the gameplay feature logic and with an emphasis on performance. From the data and events gathered, players can improve certain aspects of their performance. For example, a player with a higher level of fitness may have more stamina or consume stamina at a slower rate.
The team has been working on better support for the player playing animations triggered by environmental interactions, such as a character physically opening a locker door or pressing buttons on a vehicle dashboard. These are either quick or decorative action sequences with a large focus on reusability to scale with the amount of planned content. There’s a lot of balancing to ensure it increases immersion with minimal impact on responsiveness.
Features (Gameplay)
The EU team continued work on the tractor beam, this time focusing on ‘escaping’ mechanics, such as how shields affect the required strength of a tractor beam to secure a ship. A prototype was built to test the potential and help decide whether average shield strength or per-shield-face determines the required strength. Additionally, the team began work on detaching and attaching items with the tractor beam, which is an expansion of the attaching-to-cargo-grid feature.
A clearer direction for the expected ship engineer gameplay was also defined. This involved determining the gameplay beats and planning the possible malfunctions and dangers players will face while maintaining their ships.
Additionally, the ongoing mining balance update progressed well, with small changes that have bigger impacts being added to the system. For Salvage, Gameplay Features helped Missions prepare to use the mechanic in new content.
In the US, Gameplay Features continued with the overall design for loading and unloading physicalized cargo, and designs for missions that leverage the new cargo systems kicked off. These missions will also utilize the boarding actions now available with soft death alongside the retrieval of containers or other objects of interest.
Investigation and preliminary design work started on changes to ship insurance and how it works in conjunction with ship destruction. These changes are necessary to make towing and repairing either at stations or in space a better choice.
Tasks were started for a change to commodities, including the locations they can be bought and sold from. For example, changes to mining locations will impact the location and prices for mined and refined ores at commodity brokers.
Features (Mission)
The majority of the Mission Feature team’s month was spent addressing bugs and balancing for Alpha 3.18. Progress was also made on the design and prototyping of various new missions, including salvage.
“The order we are tackling these missions is based on when we receive the necessary support, so the first missions produced will be the more simplistic salvage ones. These include a lawful contract in which players must pay for the location of salvage, an unlawful timed mission in which players must strip a ship quickly or deal with inbound hostiles, a lawless mission in which multiple players pay for the location of the same large salvage opportunity, and one in which players must restore a ship using nearby wrecks for materials.” Mission Features
A mining mission was also prototyped in which players purchase the location of a valuable prospect. There are currently three variants: lawful, which takes place in a monitored zone and has friendly defenses to protect against hostiles; unlawful, where players seize legally owned mining claims; and lawless, which takes place in unmonitored zones and can be accepted by multiple players.
The team are also developing larger missions set on the Orison platforms. These task players with either preventing the Nine Tails gang from stealing Crusader Industries prototype parts or stealing them for another criminal organization.
A few other missions progressed through the design and work on Bounty Hunting v2 and the Mission Manager update continued.
Finally for Mission Features, designs for defending player ships from intruders and ship-based hostility were worked on. These features are intended to replace the simplistic hostility currently in-game where ships remember the hostility of their last pilot or turn hostile the moment a hostile player steps aboard.
In-Game Branding (Montreal)
Last month, the In-Game Branding team progressed with their work on the Lorville skyline. They then transitioned to Invictus Launch Week, including a refresh of the DefenseCon branding, which will become the main focus for the upcoming weeks. Progress continued on the brand catalog too.
Lighting
Lighting began the year making progress in several key areas, including tidying and bug-fixing Area18 to restore its intended appearance.
Work on Pyro continued, with the team lighting the interiors and exteriors of the colonial outposts and Ruin Station.
They also supported the ongoing rework of Lorville’s skyline, touching up and improving several areas around the city.
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Live Tools (Montreal)
In January, the Live Tools team worked on several improvements to the local development environment tool. They’re currently finalizing the last step of implementing the Entity Graph tool into the Network Operation Center. The roadmap for 2023 projects was also refined, with the addition of new projects that will support Server Meshing.
Locations (EU)
January saw the Locations team continuing work on Pyro’s Ruin Station.
“This is a behemoth task that the team have been diligently working on and it's looking better day on day.” EU Locations 1
EU Locations 2 progressed with thelocal law office mentioned in last month’s report and created new content alongside Mission Features.
The Sandbox teams further developed the colonial outposts and continued exploration and development of the underground facilities.
“Production is starting to ramp up and the team are feeling good about the work being done.” Sandbox team
The Organics team spent the month reworking areas already in the game and progressed with the art benchmark for rocky caves.
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Narrative
Narrative began the new year with a continued push to support the latest patch and progressed with tasks started before the holidays. This included working with the Design teams to start scripting upcoming mining and salvage mission content. They also continued developing stories for the first batch of ‘Investigation’ missions and discussed potential upcoming content.
The Environment and Design teams provided updates on new locations that will start appearing in the game to support Bounty Hunting. Narrative worked closely with them to ensure these areas align with existing lore and gameplay expectations.
Planning was also undertaken for the year ahead. Part of this included building a comprehensive resource listing all the various organizations and NPCs and what mission content they offer. This provides a single source for team members to reference when coming up with new missions. Narrative are also seeking to leverage their dedicated narrative designers to look at the current mission-giver setup as well as prototype simple story-based missions that could be placed around the various landing zones to provide additional content.
“In short, we have scaled back on original fictional content for the website in order to focus on in-game content. The ultimate hope is that we will be able to resurrect these stories and news updates in the game.” Narrative Team
Online Services (Montreal)
In Montreal, Online Services planned the year ahead, discussing Server Meshing with the Networking team. The goal was to achieve technical design consensus and division of responsibilities between the teams in order to deliver the feature. The following week, Online Services further defined the tasks needed to achieve Server Meshing tier 0.
The remainder of the month was spent putting the final touches on Alpha 3.18’s features, including character repair, long-term persistence, insurance, and bug fixing.
Ship Tech Art / Animation
Ship Tech Art and Animation progressed with the Hull C. January saw them working on the animation and state setup for the ship’s expanded cargo mode.
Tech animation and damage support was provided for several ships in the pipleline, and all ships were reviewed alongside QA to ensure that relevant component attachments can take damage.
They also enabled shader damage scraping on various ship attachments and fixed several hull-scraping issues on ship bodies.
UI
The UI Tech team continued to support Alpha 3.18, ironing out any remaining issues with the way the vehicle and character loadout systems interact with Persistent Streaming.
The team also helped with the Squadron 42 Starmap, which will eventually make its way into PU. The current focus is on adding navigation aids, such as grids and coordinates, improving the sizing of planets and markers, and adding visual polish.
VFX
Last month, VFX carried out several CPU-to-GPU particle library conversions, starting with vehicles.
“The sheer number of existing libraries, combined with new content being added all the time, means it can sometimes be tricky for the team to revisit and update the older libraries. We are getting there, though!” VFX Team
Elsewhere, pre-production began on some new locations, including a huge underground facility and rock caves.
The team also continued with the snag list mentioned last month. While some of this was done in the Alpha 3.18 workspace, it was continued in staging-content when Alpha 3.18 was locked down in the build-up to release.
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THE ARK, TAYAC SYSTEM
Welcome to this month’s Galactapedia update roundup. This month, we visit the lost Oretani system and the eerie Tanga system, learn about two terraforming companies that caused major disasters, examine the historic Atlas Platform, check out the Cutter, and meet J. Harris Arnold the founder of Anvil Aerospace, among other subjects. Join the Spectrum thread for any discussion or feedback.
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Happy Monday, everyone!
Or shall we say, Moon Day? Yes, we're mad about moons this week as we celebrate the final days of Red Festival 2953! For those who haven't yet, you can still claim your collectible crowers to adorn your cockpits. Also, if you're feeling confident that your envelope-collecting exploits will eclipse everyone else's, you can show them off in the currently ongoing Moons of Fortune contest, and maybe even snag a cool prize!
Racing enthusiasts that are itching to push the pedal to the metal can look forward to two upcoming community-organized events, the Crux Cup and 2953 System 7. Registrations are still open, so don't forget to head on over to their official sites to sign up and show us your driving skills.
For those in Florida, USA, this weekend, swing by the Tampa BBQ Citizen Expo Party in Clearwater for two days of Star Citizen goodness, starting on Friday, February 3. We hear it's going to be a smashing good time! If you're organizing an event or are simply looking for a get-together near you, check out the community-run Bar Citizen site.
In Alpha 3.18 news, as mentioned in last week's Star Citizen Live: All About Alpha 3.18, the dev team is making some tweaks in preparation for opening up further testing waves in the PTU, so keep your eyes peeled.
Now, let's see what's going on this week:
This Tuesday, the Narrative team brings us the latest monthly Galactapedia update.
Wednesday will see the publish of January's PU Monthly Report Comm-Link, and the Squadron 42 report sent out via email. Stay in the loop with the latest development information by subscribing to the Squadron 42 newsletter.
Thursday's episode of Inside Star Citizen is All About Arena Commander. Meet the newly formed Arena Commander Feature team as they take you through some of the first exciting changes coming online later this year.
On Friday,Star Citizen Live will have members of the Mission Feature team discussing their work on Alpha 3.18 and beyond. Catch it on twitch.tv/starcitizen at 16:00 UTC / 8:00 am Pacific. You'll also receive our weekly RSI Newsletter delivered to your inbox.
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We're constantly amazed at the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it's fan art, a cinematic, YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Every week, we select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it here. The highlighted content creator will be awarded an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don't forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for the chance to see it here!
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This week's MVP, the talented Victura, has us seeing Red Festival (see what we did there?) by bringing the event's zodiac-themed envelopes to life. We don't know how many hours were spent dutifully and beautifully recreating them, but we proclaim this collection truly a work of art!
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and…
Today we're bringing Star Citizen Live back with a variety of guests from development to answer your questions and discuss all the things related to Alpha 3.18.
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and…
We're back! Join us in this first episode of the year as we take a look at what's cooking for Alpha 3.19. We'll explore some new evolutions of the crash derelicts sites and preview the hazy future of an upgraded Lorville, now coming earlier than initially expected.
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This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We’re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to.
TO: SQUADRON 42 RECRUITS
SUBJ: DEVELOPMENT UPDATE 01:18:2023
REF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX,
FAO Squadron 42 Recruits.
Welcome to November and December's Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including crowd control, fire propagation, and alien character development.
Thank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.
Sincerely,
CIG COMMUNICATIONS
AI (Content)
Toward the end of the year, the AI Content team completed a significant number of tasks for chapter 15. This included prototyping animations for crowds and combatants alongside developing several usables and animation sets for dejected characters around the level.
The welding engineer also received a lot of improvements; the team made an extensive pass on the animations and progressed with the technical challenges of getting the welding helmet, Multi-Tool parts, and welding effects working together.
Considerable work was also done to get a basic version of an AI character interacting with a variety of usables found in living spaces. The bridge crew behavior and animations also received further iteration and are now starting to look polished.
Animation supported AI Features with box carrying, which resulted in a number of significant visual improvements.
A large amount of production and organization work was done too, resulting in a comprehensive animation schedule that details all the known work required for SQ42 to be content-complete. As part of this, the team will now implement usables and behaviors into the final game levels earlier in the pipeline.
AI (Features)
Last year, the team implemented AI functionality into manned turrets. Like other objects that NPCs need to be able to use, the turrets have been set up as usables, which describes the logic and animations required to use them. As with the player, animations are synchronized with the turret movement so that the AI grips the turret by its handles while rotating on the spot to aim horizontally and tilts the turret up and down to aim vertically.
The team also worked on implementing a wide range of panic, cower, and surrender behaviors for both unarmed civilians and enemy NPCs that have run out of ammunition and weapons. If an unarmed civilian sees that an enemy has an unholstered weapon, they will notify characters nearby using a wildline and then panic-run to a hidden point of cover. They will continue to run away from the enemy if their cover is compromised. Unarmed characters that hear this information will turn to react to the enemy and then panic themselves. By randomizing the speed at which the NPCs react, the devs can generate a natural-looking range of behaviors from a crowd responding to a threat.
Armed enemies that have run out of ammo and weapons will run to cover while searching for valid ammo and weapons to pick up. Again, if their cover is exposed, they will reevaluate and run to a new position. If the player aims at an armed or unarmed NPC, they will stay on the spot but turn to face the player and move through a sequence of surrender animations whilst communicating with the player.
As part of combat, the team worked on the medic AI behaviors to allow NPCs to find incapacitated peers that need reviving and use med-pens to get them back into the fight. This involved bringing together numerous existing functionalities from various areas, including the usable system (‘use’ channel to revive), consumable items (the med-pen), synchronized animations (between the two NPCs), ragdoll into animations (to allow characters to stand-up from ragdoll), and Subsumption (to script the behavior). The next stage is integrating this behavior with the standard ‘react to presumed-dead bodies’ behavior to generate more complex behaviors.
AI Features also started work on a new non-human character. This involved creating a new core set of animations for the new creature and slotting it into an existing basic framework. From there, they were able to rapidly develop the core functionality, which was passed to the Design team for feedback.
Toward the end of the year, a few areas of work were revisited to tidy up loose ends. The first of these was the Vanduul investigation behavior. During the ‘cat and mouse’ gameplay section, the Vanduul will now investigate the floor vents in the room with different animations for different alertness levels.
After feedback from the Design team, new functionalities were added for the accuracy calculation. This included adding a mercy timer, firing time, and time-since-seen accuracy modifiers: The mercy timer gives the player a fighting chance to escape from heavy fire by making the AI inaccurate for a set period when the player's health has reached a certain threshold. The firing-time accuracy modifier reduces the accuracy over firing periods for similar purposes. The time-since-seen accuracy modifier allows the player a grace period after moving out of cover during which the attackers’ accuracy will be lower. The accuracy distance calculation was also changed to be curve-based for greater control.
AI (Tech)
During the last months of 2022, the AI Tech team progressed with features required for both the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42.
The team continued to iterate on more complex navigation links to extend the capabilities of NPCs and where they’re able to move to, including implementing adapters for airlocks and elevators. Now, NPCs will know that in order to traverse an airlock, they will need to interact with multiple consoles to adjust the pressure and open the door. For Elevators, navigation links were created to connect multiple floors. A navigation link was also created to request a reconnection with the navigation mesh triangles each time an elevator stops at a floor to allow NPCs to transition in and out. Based on navigation link connections, an NPC will now know how to request an elevator to go to a specific floor. New event notifications were also added, sent by the elevator when it arrives at a floor, so that the actor will know to get on or off.
At the end of the year, the base functionality for NPCs driving ground vehicles was completed. NPCs can now move to a vehicle and get into the driver’s seat, find a path suitable for the size of the vehicle, and drive along it. This work involved the creation of a new Subsumption task, a new movement request type, and updating the movement planner to know how to process the request. The team also added new functionality to the navigation systems that marks entities to be ignored during navigation-mesh generation.
NPC perception was another major topic worked on toward the end of the year. The team implemented a new adapter for action areas to specify lightness/darkness, which will influence NPCs' visual perception.
A new extender to propagate engine sounds as stimuli was also created, which will make NPCs aware of vehicles in their proximity. This was the first step toward behaviors that react to ground vehicles and spaceships.
While working on perception improvements, the devs fixed AI visual perception through glass. Now, NPCs will be able to detect targets behind glass and also understand that, in order to shoot at them, they need to move to the other side.
For locomotion, improvements continued on the sharp-turn assets and how they’re triggered for alien characters or at walking speeds. Related to this, work began on ‘following’ tech, which will be used in connection with the buddy AI behavior. For this, the team improved soft stops, collision avoidance with players, and speed handling based on the leader’s change in speed.
For the Apollo Subsumption tool, new functionality was added to create and modify the Subsumption mastergraph. A lot of feedback from the designers was implemented, including the addition of an interface to create roles and sub-roles, find reference functionality, improved interaction with functions and the multigraph tab, and improvements to grid snapping.
AI (Vehicles)
The Vehicle Feature team worked on significant improvements and features for flight AI, including largely completing their work on several sections involving ships attacking actors on the ground.
This work revolves around a redesign of the core combat logic:
“We’re working toward a more varied and interesting ship combat experience than before, so we are planning out and making changes to combat AI and testing them in SQ42 to get the experience we want.” AI Vehicle Team
Animation
The last months of 2022 saw Gameplay Animation working on Vanduul executions, zero-g player movement, and various animation sets for background life. They also added skill-level variation to takedowns alongside new weapons. They then shot mo-cap for a variety of additional scenes and gameplay needs and created facial animation for various story and background characters.
Art (Characters)
The concept artists worked on tattoo and armor variation concepts for the Screaming Galsons to help fill out the faction, and continued work on a key campaign character.
The artists also worked on the Screaming Galsons’ armors along with the navy-pilot flightsuit and a new creature.
Tech Art skinned the main navy jumpsuit and paired assets for the deck crew, engineers, and gunners.
Art (Environment)
Environment Art approached content-complete on several chapter locations, including chapters 7 and 11.
Asset kits are currently in progress to help flesh out space-scaping for the flight-based chapters, while Vanduul ship work continues as the team prepares to hand them over to be set up.
Engine
November and December were busy months for the Physics team. Aside from plenty of bug fixing and supporting Alpha 3.18, they worked on various optimizations. For example, the cost of performing part OBB vs grid cell overlap checks was amortized by performing them in one call for a grid node instead of cell by cell. Also, sub stepping for attached and AI-controlled NPCs on the server was disabled to bring back actor entity step performance. Several internal data structures were compacted and reordered for a smaller memory footprint and better member alignment.
On the renderer, the team enabled the Gen12 pipeline and scene rendering by default (this will be featured in Alpha 3.18), which is a major milestone on the road toward completing the Gen12 transition and providing a Vulkan backend. Following October’s work on particles, further substantial progress was made. Gen12 refraction and half-resolution rendering support for GPU particles was added, the particle stage and GPU handler refactored, and particle shader background compilation was enabled. Furthermore, particles split for each hierarchy level are now updated in a way that ensures UAV resources stay consistent across each pass and don't change. Moreover, debug visualization code for various systems was ported to Gen12, and PSO caching for projectiles and particles was improved.
Regarding atmosphere and volumetric clouds, an initial draft of a new temporal render mode was submitted and will continue to be worked on in the coming months to provide better rendering performance of raymarched volumetric clouds and atmosphere. Furthermore, various options for refined cloud shaping were brainstormed with Tech Art and will hopefully find their way into a release soon.
On core engine, the team completed work on v2 of p4k data file support for the engine, game, and tool side. On that note, the system now also provides an efficient lock mechanism for legacy pak files as well as much faster access to files inside pak files (embedded in the main p4k data file), both of which significantly improve the loading of object containers. Additionally, the mapping of threads on Intel CPUs with P/E cores was rewritten - critical threads such as main, render, and network threads are ensured to always run on performance cores to avoid the otherwise poor performance on affected CPUs. These changes are currently being verified on the PTU. Also, support for page sizes larger than 4kb (aka huge pages) was added to the engine (at the moment on Linux only). It's currently used for stack, text, and data segments, as well as physics allocations. Using huge pages reduces the pressure on the TLB cache, the part of the CPU translating virtual to physical addresses, which should help with performance. With Clang, just moving the text segment to huge pages gave a 7% speedup. Furthermore, the latest version of Bink2 was integrated and a few audio related bugs fixed in video playback (manifesting themselves as random clicks during playback).
Another area that progressed well was the remote shader compile server used to build shader caches, etc. Due to increased usage of the server by development teams and the build process, proper support for fallback agents as well as server throttling was implemented to deal with times of extreme load and to allow for more distributed compilation. At that point, it also made sense to rewrite various parts of the server code to allow for more robustness, better logging, and increased performance. Lastly, shape unification was completed and entity area support was added. A copy/paste bug in the entity aggregate manager that caused a lot of unnecessary memory access was fixed, and vis area loading was refactored to support batch conversion from previous versions of serialized vis area data.
Features (Vehicle)
The last two months of the year saw Vehicle Features largely completing a full rework of quantum travel, which is being integrated into Squadron 42 for testing. This continues from the quantum boost feature mentioned in previous reports and significantly improves the overall feature implementation. They also supported the VFX team in integrating new effects for quantum travel.
They also worked on a ‘recall’ feature available to various military ships in the game. This uses the AI pathfinding tech used in the PU and will allow various SQ42 levels to be completed.
Vehicle Features then completed a significant refactor of the aiming system and are currently working with UI to implement new aiming reticles and pips to go alongside it. This will result in huge improvements in aiming accuracy and reliability. It’s currently being tested to improve the combat experience.
Significant time toward the end of 2022 went into the multi-function display (MFD), heads-up display (HUD), and vehicle UI reworks.
“The base MFD system is making huge strides and we’ve partially implemented most of the core MFD screens for ships using the new Building Blocks system. We’re just starting to build the new HUD, which deeply integrates with the MFD system with configuration options and MFD casting options.” Vehicle Features Team
Control surfaces continued development and, in the last two months, the team improved stalling and transitions. For example, when a ship detects it’s about to stall, it can automatically enable thrusters to stop it from falling. Similarly, when a ship has detected it's going fast enough to sustain control surface flight, it can automatically shut down its maneuvering thrusters and start flying solely with control surfaces. This is greatly improving the atmospheric flight sections of the campaign.
Gameplay Story
Gameplay Story worked on a range of different tasks during November and December, including preparing and shooting mo-cap to update various scenes. Mo-cap from previous shoots was also used. For example, to help characters climb back into ships after speaking with the player.
A scene in chapter 8 was updated to ensure the character could interact with a variety of props instead of just performing visual inspections. The team made sure the character used AI poses to allow them to break out of the scene if needed. The character also interacts well with the Argo MPUV, meaning they can fly into the Idris before starting their scene.
Another area further explored was unholstering and holstering. This time, the team were able to make a character grab the Multi-Tool and datapad from the exact position it attaches to the character and place it back.
A number of updates were also made to characters in chapters 4 and 8. This involved utilizing the latest female walk cycle to enable the AI to seamlessly enter and exit scenes.
A significant update was made to a scene in chapter 13, with the team adjusting animations to work with the final geometry of the level, making it so the character can speak to the player from a better position.
A major review of scenes that had been worked on throughout the past year was done too. This led to increased animation quality, either by reusing the latest mo-cap or fixing what was already in place. Many new animations were created and polish passes were done on animations to further improve scenes alongside general maintenance and bug fixing.
Graphics & VFX Programming
The VFX Programming team began implementing new quantum travel and boost effects. These effects are now in a basic functional state and are triggering at generally the correct time. Work will continue to expose timing controls and implement the functionality for adapting the effects to any size ship.
Work on the fire hazard system is ramping up again, starting with implementing requests for controlling fire and its propagation for design purposes. On the visual side, the team are currently planning out the work required for reaching the visual goals set by VFX Art.
Level Design
The Social team progressed well in the final months of 2022, including continued scene work on their assigned chapters. New onboarding documentation was also created to better support new starters.
Narrative
November and December were busy months for the Narrative team. Firstly, they had a weeklong performance capture shoot in the UK to close out capturing wildlines for one of the enemy factions as well as narrative content scenes for a set piece. They also picked up content to support the new dynamic conversation system that will provide exciting opportunities for NPCs to chat with each other. This opens a lot of opportunities for contextual conversations that can help maintain the illusion of life and storytelling outside of dedicated scripted scenes.
The team continued to hold reviews with the various design teams to develop updated scripts and provide placeholder recordings. This is to ensure lines are not only creating the right dramatic beats but are also clearly indicating what the player is meant to do in order to progress.
Narrative also met with Characters to ensure that all necessary costumes have been requested to support the various chapters that specific NPCs appear in.
“Based on the scope of the script, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are a lot of characters that the players will meet over the course of the game. This list is complicated by the fact that some of the characters will have a schedule that will drive them from work to rest, necessitating a variety of clothing to be available.” Narrative Team
Tech Animation
Tech Animation spent the end of the year focusing on head-asset processing.
“We’ve been taking some long-overdue actors and starting the internal processing procedure to create their likenesses. This includes creating over 78 scans per head asset and processing them to the neutral head asset. Some of these actors were scanned over seven years ago on the main shoot for SQ42, so they look quite different these days!” Tech Animation Team
The team take these complex scans and break them down into individual muscle movements and apply them to the facial rig asset, ultimately including them in the gene pool to give more variety to the heads and faces seen in-game.
VFX
Through November and December, the VFX team progressed with the particle library overhaul. This included creating a custom level showing all available effects, which is useful for other VFX artists to quickly view the effects libraries.
The artists also continued to support the Art and Design teams on key locations and cinematic scenes.
Elsewhere, working alongside the VFX programmers, the new quantum-travel effects were made functional (previously they were in-engine prototypes). Having seen these effects properly working, there is still some tweaking to be done to better match the prototype.
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This portfolio originally appeared in Jump Point 10.1.
Each year, beginning in late January or early February, millions of gilded red envelopes are hidden across the UEE. Those fated to find one will discover a good-luck token or credit intended as a hopeful sign of the year to come. For centuries, giving friends and relatives red envelopes was one way to celebrate the Red Festival. Yet, it wasn’t until the 26th century that hiding the envelopes for anyone to find became part of the tradition after the Banu enthusiastically embraced it as a way to honor Cassa, their Patron of Luck. People took to the new tradition and relished the chance to find a little bit of luck tucked inside a discarded magazine or hiding atop a storage locker at the end of a dark space station hallway.
The Red Festival originated on Earth well before Humanity explored the stars when some early cultures carefully observed the moon and celebrated the start of a new lunar year. The holiday eventually became known as the Red Festival as its reach and influence spiraled further and further away from Earth’s orbit. Still, many of the traditions stayed the same, like wearing red and gold for good luck and exchanging gilded red envelopes. Humanity celebrated these traditions for millennia before colonists took them to Mars when it was settled in the 22nd century. While the Red Festival was celebrated on the red planet, its popularity wouldn’t explode until the early 25th century when an explorer claimed it helped him make history, and many others came to believe that celebrating it would bring luck to their journey.
Today the Red Festival is more popular than ever and widely celebrated across the UEE and Banu Protectorate. So how did a holiday focused on Earth’s lunisolar cycle become so beloved?
LIFT OFFWORLD
The United Nations of Earth (UNE) formed in 2380 to unify all of Earth’s nations under one government. It was a historic moment meant to bring people together and facilitate Humanity’s expansion into the stars. At the time, Earth was in a precarious position. Despite having terraformed Mars and the new system of Croshaw, Humanity’s homeworld was still desperately overcrowded and pristine wilderness increasingly scarce. Pollution choked many major cities and people’s quality of life was in decline. While advances in commercial spacecraft and terraforming tech made living offworld possible, it remained extremely expensive to leave Earth and surprisingly difficult to convince people that life offworld might actually be better. To address the issue, the UNE created the Easten Expansion Program to support navjumpers on their search for new frontiers and encourage people to fill colony ships. The program was met with modest success before being rebranded Project Far Star in 2412. Now considered a key driver of the Human Colonial Expansion Era, Project Far Star opened offices in major cities around Earth to recruit colonists, aid explorers with subsidized ship upgrades, and more.
In late 2429, Wendell Dopse visited the Project Far Star office in Shanghai and submitted an application to purchase a discounted jump drive. The application was approved and Dopse received the component in mid-January of 2430. He rushed to install it then meticulously cleaned his ship so it’d be spotless when the Red Festival began on January 25th. According to legend, Wendell Dopse spent the next two weeks celebrating the Red Festival with his family and reconsidering whether or not to leave them. On the final day of the festival, his family attended a lantern festival where Dopse helped his daughter with a particularly difficult riddle. The two spent hours taking in the impressive lanterns and talking through solutions when the answer suddenly struck him. Dopse looked up and saw a solitary lit red lantern rising through the sky. Away from everything else. Off on its own. Convinced it was a sign, he noted its course. Then he said goodbye to his family, raced to his ship, and flew in the direction the red lantern was headed. Days later Dopse discovered the jump from Sol to Davien, upending contemporary scientific thinking that predicted no additional jump point existed in the Sol system.
SPREAD OF THE RED FESTIVAL
Today, many people wonder if Wendell Dopse’s story about the red lantern might have been embellished. They point to numerous voyages Dopse took into that sector of Sol before receiving his jump drive. On those trips he tested and refined new scanning techniques that, after his discovery of Davien, other explorers adopted and inventors integrated into more advanced jump scanning technology. His success inspired others to try their luck launching on the final day of that year’s Red Festival. The practice became so commonplace that several landing zones were forced to place a cap on launches on that day to reduce congestion. They eventually instituted a lottery system to award launch slots after an investigation by the UNE revealed that some landing zone officials were selling slots to the highest bidder.
Shanghai also became considered a lucky place to launch. People traveled from across the world to leave from that landing zone, and many of them celebrated the Red Festival. For decades, the Project Far Star office in Shanghai recruited and helped send more colonists to live offworld than any other. The colonists’ eagerness to go, combined with their comms about what life was really like on these new worlds, convinced millions more to follow. They did and brought the traditions of the Red Festival with them.
In the 25th century, one of the biggest off-Earth celebrations of the Red Festival occurred in Davien where, in 2438, Humanity first encountered the Banu. Since then, Banu traders became a staple of the system and knew to stock their Merchantmans with red items and gilded envelopes around the Red Festival. While no one knows exactly who hid the first envelope for someone to find, the tradition began in Davien and expanded from there. Hiding and searching for these lucky envelopes became commonplace across the empire by the early 26th century, and as the tradition grew in popularity, so did the Red Festival. All thanks in part to Wendell Dopse’s discovery of Davien, the millions of colonists who celebrated the Red Festival, and the Banu who adopted and evolved its traditions.
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Happy Monday, everyone!
Red Festival is fully underway! Celebrate the coming of the Year of the Rooster in 2953 with contests, new paints, and ways to earn tons of aUEC in the 'verse. Plus, the Nine Tails are back in Crusader space, and the CDF needs your help repelling the Siege of Orison in the return of this dynamic event. For all the details, head over to the Lunar New Year landing page.
This past weekend, the filthiest race in the 'verse kicked off their fourth annual event, the Daymar Rally: the largest in-game community-organized racing event. This year was the biggest one yet, with over 1,000 people taking part, including racers, security teams, refuelers, and support staff. We'll know the results of the race soon, but we wanted to shout out everyone at ATMO esports for putting on the event every year, the amazing commentators, all of the participants, and the thousands of you that tuned in to watch the broadcast.
On the Alpha 3.18 front, our team is laser-focused on getting the PTU open to a wider audience ahead of a live release as quickly as possible. We'll have more updates very soon!
Now, let's see what's going on this week:
Tuesday's Lore Post is titled Portfolio: Rise of the Red Festival. Originally appearing in Jump Point 10.1, this portfolio is a look at how the discovery of the Davien system helped launch a holiday focused on Earth’s lunisolar cycle into the stars.
On Wednesday, we'll be reposting last week's Squadron 42 Monthly Report newsletter as a Comm-Link.
Inside Star Citizen returns this Thursday with the Turbulent Environment folks from our Montreal Studio as we discuss new derelict locations coming to Alpha 3.19, plus a check-in with current progress on the upcoming Lorville landing zone redux, first seen at last year's CitizenCon 2952.
This Friday brings with it the return of Star Citizen Live with special guests, Live Game Director Todd Papy and Development Director Guillaume Voghel to talk All About Alpha 3.18. That show will begin live on Twitch at 9am Pacific, 5pm UTC. We've also opened a question thread on Spectrum for this week's episode, so make sure to get your queries in!
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We're constantly amazed at the contributions made by the Star Citizen community. Whether it's fan art, a cinematic, YouTube guide, or even a 3D print of your favorite ship, we love it all! Every week, we select one piece of content submitted to the Community Hub and highlight it here. The highlighted content creator will be awarded an MVP badge on Spectrum and be immortalized in our MVP section of the Hub.
Don't forget to submit your content to our Community Hub for the chance to see it here!
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We wanted to recognize all the hard work that went into this year's Daymar Rally, so we're giving this week's MVP to the organizers from ATMO esports for putting on such an incredible event. We can't wait for next year's race!
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Launch into the Lunar New Year with a bold new adventure from January 20 through February 6.
To ring in a prosperous Year of the Rabbit here on Earth in 2023, and Year of the Rooster in 2953 Stanton, we’re inviting you to celebrate the Red Festival with us. As is tradition throughout the UEE, red envelopes have been hidden across Stanton, and we're offering a variety of red and gold ship paints to tempt good fortune in the year ahead.
Read on for all the details.
We wish you a prosperous 2023!
新年快樂
새해 복 많이 받으세요
Chúc Mừng Năm Mới
Find Your Luck This Lunar New Year
Red envelopes are appearing around each of Stanton's major hubs and in various corners of the 'verse. Hunt them down and sell them at kiosks to ensure good fortune for the coming year; it might just be your lucky day.
The Red Festival is a celebration of renewal and remembrance with roots in old Earth customs that marked the end of a 'lunisolar year,' an ancient calendar system based on Luna's (Sol 3a) cycles. Celebrants honor the festival with a variety of traditions that differ greatly depending on the system and community participating.
Common activities include wearing red (a color that symbolizes good fortune), honoring friends and relatives by sharing stories, and eating foods long in length, such as calossk tentacles or dyed-red noodles. However, one of the most popular ways to celebrate is with the exchange of gilded red envelopes. On some worlds, these envelopes contain a small token that the receiver is supposed to keep with them for good fortune. On others, it could include a small number of credits to help those you care about have a strong start to the upcoming cycle.
Growing in popularity is the newer tradition of hiding envelopes as a way of spreading good fortune and prosperity to those that fate has deemed in need. The Banu in particular have taken up this tradition, hiding Red Festival envelopes in honor of Cassa, their Patron of Luck.
If you want to find out more about the Red Festival (and all the other holidays in Star Citizen lore), visit the Galactapedia.
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and…
Our biggest Dynamic Event yet, Siege of Orison, returns to Stanton!
Get ready to dive into an action-heavy adventure that has turned the once-idyllic city of Orison into a nightmare. Read on for all the info you need to survive the Nine Tail gang’s campaign of violence, including a mission rundown and tips from the designers themselves.
If this is your first time in the Star Citizen universe, visit our New Player Guide to master the basics before you head into combat.
Siege of Orison kicks off today, January 20th, at 2000 UTC. For the full dynamic event schedule, head over to the announcement thread on Spectrum. And don't forget, if you enjoyed flying heavy military-spec ships throughout the mission, you can check them out below and even add them to your fleet!
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Welcome to November and December’s PU Monthly Report, which combines everything worked on during the last two months of 2022.
Read on for everything done to round out last year, including new tech for Alpha 3.18, updates to narrative content, and the development of all-new vehicles.
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Happy Monday, everyone! The roar of engines, parties in red robes, and a gang of criminals that apparently have not learned their lesson yet – all this and more await you this week in Star Citizen.
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and…
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and…
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Happy Monday, everyone! Welcoming you into 2023 with a quick recap of the end of 2022 and a peek at the start of what is shaping up to be the biggest year yet for Star Citizen.
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and…
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and…
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January is here with this month’s Subscriber offerings. Get ready to race with these all-new paints for some of the fastest vehicles in the ‘verse. Each paint pack features a fresh look for the Tumbril Cyclone, Aopoa Nox, Drake Dragonfly, and Consolidated Outland HoverQuad. (Paints are compatible with each model variant. For example, the Cyclone MT and Nox Kue.)
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and…
Cloud Imperium Games hat einen Ausblick auf das gegeben, was Spieler im Jahr 2023 in Star Citizen erwarten können. So soll es zum Beispiel ein brandneues System mit weiteren Planeten geben. Bei Terminen will man sich aber offenbar noch nicht so ganz…
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Ende 2022 veröffentlichte Chris Roberts Finanzdaten aus 2021 und Spielerdaten aus 2022 - beide zeigen enormes Wachstum. Zudem skizziert er eine Roadmap für 2023.
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and…
